Starting A Vegetable Garden

Choosing a vegetable garden is a great way to increase your food security and reduce the environmental impact of foods that travel far distances before being delivered to stores.

Vegetable gardens can be made in the ground or in raised beds. Regardless of the style chosen, vegetables require sunlight, water, air, soil, and care to thrive.

Now is the time to be thinking about planting a spring vegetable garden. One of the first things you will need to do before you plant is to prepare the garden bed. This will involve cleaning out the bed, cultivating the soil, and ensuring there is plenty of nutrients for your new seedlings.

Cleaning out the garden bed

One of the first steps is to remove the old plant debris if you did not do so at the end of your last growing season. The exception is if you grew legumes (beans or peas), and they remained healthy, it is wise to leave them to decompose on their own. Legumes are a good source of nitrogen and will return it to the soil as it decomposes.

All other plants, especially those with diseases and bugs, should be removed. If you do not remove them and instead leave them in place, or turn them over into the ground, then the disease and bugs will remain in the soil and return later to haunt you.

This is also true of weeds. If you leave the weeds in place, you are also leaving the weed seeds in place, and they will come back during their next growing season. Weeds are best removed with a sharp hoe and larger weeds should be removed completely, roots and all. If you go through your garden on a regular basis to attack the weeds with a hoe, your work will pay off with a cleaner garden.

Weeds are a problem in your garden because they will compete with our vegetable plants for the available water and nutrients in the soil. Under ideal circumstances you do not want your vegetables to have to compete with an undesirable plant. Most chemical weed control is not vegetable-garden friendly and is generally not recommended in a garden where anyone plans to eat the plants afterwards.

Soil borne diseases, such as blight, can be a big problem for tomatoes, potatoes, and peppers. Once established in the soil, blight can kill these plants year after year. Other popular vegetable plants, such as squash, pumpkin, cucumbers, and melons suffer from mildew diseases and squash vine borers. If you leave these plants in the ground to decompose or turn them over in the soil you are giving diseases and bugs a clear path into your soil and to future plants.

All diseased and bug infested plants should be removed from your garden and thrown away. While healthy plant material can be composted, best practices suggest you do not put your diseased or bug infested plants in your compost pile unless you monitor its temperature and are certain it will get hot enough to kill the diseases and bugs.

Cultivating the garden bed

After your garden bed is cleaned, you may wish to till or cultivate the ground where you will plant your vegetables. While used interchangeably, tilling and cultivating are different.

Cultivating involves cutting through the soil with a shallow blade (four or less inches deep) which loosens the soil and improves the penetration of air and water and allows the new plants to access the available nutrients.

Tilling is a form of deep cultivation and penetrates the soil closer to 10 inches deep. Tilling is usually done under one of three conditions. One, when you are creating a new garden bed for the first time, two, if you are incorporating a large amount of organic material (think compost), or three, if you are trying to change the soil acidity by adding limestone or sulfur into an existing bed.

Extension agents recommend gardeners clean up their beds at the end of the growing season by removing all old plants that contain bugs or diseases and weeds. Unless you are doing one of those three steps above, there is no need for deep cultivation through tilling.

Cover crops and elevated beds

It is better to winter over your clean garden with leaves or a cover crop. In Tallahassee, we are fortunate to be able to plant at least twice a year, with both a spring and fall garden, but even if you do put in two crops you should still remove all old plant material at the end of each growing season.

Besides encouraging pests and blight, I found numerous references to the drawbacks to frequent tilling. For example, another drawback, that I have experienced, is just below the tilled area the ground forms hard-pan soil that moisture has a hard time passing through. At my home for the past two years, I have been replacing my 25-year-old raised bed gardens with elevated beds.

Over the 25 years I used my raised beds I would add new soil and compost each year by using a shovel to turn the old soil over and incorporate the new organic material. This is not tilling but is deeper than cultivation. When I was digging out the old soil from the raised beds, the top 10 to 12 inches comes out easy and then I hit the hard-pan soil which I did not even know was there.

The hard-pan soil feels like concrete. Neither water nor roots can penetrate it. That part of the old raised beds, which had become hard-pan soil, I had to dig out with a pick ax. You do not want to do that to your vegetable garden.

In the Tallahassee Museum’s 1880s Garden, Master Gardener Volunteers will clean the garden bed a week before they cultivate and plant. Based on the best home vegetable garden practices I researched, a gardener can cultivate anywhere from a week to the same day as they plant.

Adding nutrients to the soil

If you have some concern about the nutrient quality of the soil in your home garden, remember you can have your soil tested for a nominal fee through the Leon County Extension Office. Our friendly Extension Officer, Mark Tancig, will be happy to talk with you about your soil test results and what you can do to address any deficiency the soil test may find.

For more information on home gardens in Florida, read the North Florida Vegetable Gardening Guide, the Florida Vegetable Gardening Guide, or the Vegetable Gardening in Florida Series.

Want to learn more about vegetable gardening and get free seeds?

Starting Feb. 18, residents of Leon County can “check out” up to five sample seed packets per month with their library card as part of Leon County’s Seed Library Program. The vegetable seeds can be checked out from any of the seven library branch locations.

Brenda Buchan is a Master Gardener Volunteer with UF/IFAS Extension Leon County, an Equal Opportunity Institution. For gardening questions, email the extension office at AskAMasterGardener@ifas.ufl.edu.

Source: tallahassee.com