Vegetable Gardening For Dummies

General Gardening Articles

How to Create a Vegetable Garden the Right Way

After you choose a good sunny spot for your vegetable garden and draw a plan on paper, you need to clean up the area so the soil will be easier to work. You can clear your garden area any time during the year, but the season before planting works best — clear in the fall for spring planting, or clear in the spring for summer or fall planting. You can clear the area the day before you plant, but you may have more weed problems later. Here are the basics of initially clearing your garden spot, which I explain in more detail in the sections that follow:

1. Outline the areas of your garden plot that you want to clear. You outline the areas depending on how you want the plots to be shaped. Follow these guidelines:
   1. To get your edges straight for a square or rectangular vegetable plot, stretch a string between sticks and mark the line with a trickle of ground white limestone, which is available at garden centers.
   2. For a round garden, use a hose or rope to lay out the area, adjusting the position to create a smooth curve.
   3. If you want several individual beds separated by permanent paths, outline each bed independently with string, sticks, and limestone so you don’t waste time improving soil that you’ll never use. But if you think that you may change your garden layout from season to season or year to year, work the entire area within the outline.
2. Clear the surface by first removing plants, weeds, brush, and rock. If necessary, mow the site to cut back the grass and weeds close to the surface of the soil. (See the next section for how to handle weeds.)
3. Dig out the roots of small trees and tough weeds with a hoe, shovel, or pick ax.
4. After the vegetation is manageable, remove any sod. (See the section, “Stripping sod,” later in this article for details on how to do this.)

Properly preparing the soil before planting is an all-important first step toward a bountiful harvest. To learn how to test and adjust the pH of your soil, read "How To Test and Improve Your Soil." Don’t take shortcuts with your soil. You’ll be cheating your plants at their roots, and they won’t like it. You feed your soil, and your soil feeds your plants.

Killing weeds and aggressive grasses

If your garden area contains a lot of perennial weeds — like quack grass, that come back year after year — or if you need to clear an area of a warm-season lawn composed of vigorous grasses (like Bermuda grass), make sure that you first kill these weeds or grasses. You can pull out or heavily mulch over seedlings, but many aggressive weeds and turf spread by underground roots as well as seeds; these underground roots can haunt you forever. If you have an existing garden, you have to be diligent about weeding, or you may need to start all over again with tilling and removing as much of the weed’s root system as you can. You can kill weeds and aggressive grasses two ways:

• Hand dig and sift: For a small garden, dig up the earth and carefully sift the soil, removing sod and root parts that may come back next year as weeds.

• Apply a covering: An easy, chemical-free way to clear your garden is to cover it with clear or black plastic, cardboard, or even old rugs. After a month under these impermeable coverings, existing plants die from the lack of sunlight. You must plan ahead to use this method, and it may not look pretty, but it works like a charm — especially on annual weeds.

  For perennial weeds, you may need to dig out their roots, too, after applying the plastic. You can buy plastic in rolls at hardware stores or home improvement centers; check department stores for old pieces of cardboard. Use the thickest plastic or cardboard you can find — it should be at least 2 millimeters, but 4 millimeters is even better.

Controlling weeds and grasses by applying a covering to your garden area is easy. Just follow these steps:

1. Spread the covering over your entire garden area, securing the edges with spare rocks, bricks, or boards. Let neighboring pieces overlap by several inches so light can’t penetrate. If you’re using old rugs, place them nap side down.
2. After a month, remove the covering and strip off any grass or weeds. Use a shovel to cut off any grass or weeds at the root level (just below the soil surface). If they aren’t too thick, rototill them into the ground.
3. Wet the area and wait about 10 days for weeds to sprout. Leave the covering off; you want weeds to sprout. You should get some growth because you haven’t removed weed seeds.
4. Use a hoe to kill the weeds. Hoeing the weeds down is sufficient to kill annual weeds, but if you have perennial weeds, you need to dig out the roots. Check out the National Gardening Association’s Weed Library for help identifying the weeds in your garden.

Organic approach to killing weeds

For an organic approach to killing weeds while also building your garden soil, try a no-till layered garden technique (see the figure below). It’s like making lasagna:

1. The season before planting, lay down cardboard over the garden area.
2. Water the cardboard generously to keep it in place.
3. Cover the cardboard with a 6-inch-thick layer of hay or straw.
4. Top that with a 1- to 2-inch-thick layer of compost.

By the next planting season, the layers will have killed the grass and most of the annual and perennial weeds in your garden. You can hand pull any tenacious perennial weeds that survived. Earthworms will have munched up much of the cardboard, turning it into valuable compost. You can plant your seedlings right into the mulched layers, and they’ll grow like weeds (even better).

Stripping sod

If you don’t want to try the techniques in the preceding section, you can immediately remove the lawn grass by stripping the sod (grass and roots) before planting. If your lawn consists of bluegrass and other less-spreading grasses, you can strip the sod without first killing the grass; most lawns in the northern United States consist of these types of grasses. But you should kill weedier grasses, like Bermuda grass, before you strip the sod (see the preceding section for details on killing weedier grass). Stripping sod takes a lot of effort, but it works. Just follow these steps, and have your wheelbarrow or garden cart handy:

1. Water the area that you want to clear for 15 minutes for each of the 2 days prior to digging up your sod. I suggest watering this way because stripping sod is easier when the ground is slightly moist.
2. Starting at one end of your plot, slip a spade under the grass and slide it under the sod. An easier method is to precut the sod into square or rectangular sections and then loosen each section with a spade. Either way, don’t dig too deep; you just want to remove the sod and 1 to 2 inches of roots. You also can use a rented sod stripper to cut the sod into rows that you roll up and remove.
3. Pivot your spade up and let the sod flip off the spade and back onto the ground; use your spade to slice off the sod section, toss the sod into a wheelbarrow or garden cart, and take it to a compost pile. If your sod has healthy grass with few weeds, and you don’t want to compost it, use it to patch bare spots in your lawn. Keep it well watered, and it should root and blend in with the existing grasses.
4. Repeat Steps 2 and 3 until your garden is cleared of sod.

These steps should clear all the grass in your garden. You’ll get new growth only if you have an aggressive grass like Bermuda and don’t kill all the roots.

Vegetables Articles

How to Harvest, Store, & Preserve Your Garden Vegetables

To get all the best flavor and highest nutritional value from your vegetables, you need to pick them at just the right time. Some vegetables taste terrible if you pick them too early; others are tough and stringy if you pick them too late. And after you pick your vegetables, what if you can’t eat them right away? When properly stored, most vegetables last a while without rotting or losing too much flavor (of course, eating them fresh picked is always the best). In fact, you can store some vegetables, like potatoes and winter squash, for months. So in this article, I discuss harvesting and storing your fresh vegetables. You put in too much work not to do the final steps just right.

When are vegetables harvested?

Vegetable harvest times vary, but generally, most should be picked when they’re young and tender. That often means harvesting the plants, roots, or fruits before they reach full size. A 15-inch zucchini is impressive, but it tastes better at 6 to 8 inches. Similarly, during the growing season carrots and beets tend to get woody (tough textured) and bland the longer they stay in the ground. The table below provides specific information on when to harvest a variety of veggies.

For more about harvesting and preserving what you grow, and all the phases of vegetable gardening, including preparing the soil, planting, maintaining, and much more, check out Vegetable Gardening For Dummies, 3rd Edition.

Other plants are continuously harvested to keep them productive. If you keep harvesting vegetables like snap beans, summer squash, snow and snap peas, broccoli, okra, spinach, and lettuce, they’ll continue to produce pods, shoots, or leaves. When to Harvest Vegetables

A good vegetable harvesting rule for many of your early crops is to start picking them when you have enough of a vegetable for a one-meal serving. Spinach, Swiss chard, scallions, radishes, lettuce, and members of the cabbage family certainly fit the bill here. These veggies don’t grow as well in warm weather, so pick these crops in the spring when temperatures are cooler.

After you start harvesting, visit your garden and pick something daily. Take along a good sharp knife and a few containers to hold your produce, such as paper bags, buckets, or baskets. Wire or wood buckets work well because you can easily wash vegetables in them. The vegetable harvest information in the above table is based on picking mature or slightly immature vegetables. But many vegetables can be picked smaller and still have excellent flavor. Pick baby vegetables whenever they reach the size that you want. The following vegetables can be picked small: beets, broccoli, carrots, cauliflower, cucumbers, lettuce and other greens, onions, peas, potatoes, radishes, snap beans, summer squash, Swiss chard, and turnips. In addition, some small varieties of corn and tomatoes fit the baby-vegetable mold. Be sure to avoid harvesting at the following times:

• When plants, especially beans, are wet. Many fungal diseases spread in moist conditions, and if you brush your tools or pants against diseased plants, you can transfer disease organisms to other plants down the row.
• In the heat of the day, because the vegetable’s texture may be limp. For the freshest produce, harvest early in the day when vegetables’ moisture levels are highest and the vegetables are at peak flavor. After harvesting, refrigerate the produce and prepare it later in the day.

In the fall, wait as long as you can to dig up root crops, such as carrots, rutabagas, and beets, if you intend to store them in a root cellar or cold storage room. However, remember that while root crops can withstand frosts, you should harvest them before the ground freezes. They’ll come out of the ground easiest if the soil is still slightly moist. Also, don’t wash crops that are going to the root cellar; instead, just gently brush away soil crumbs. Use any blemished or cut vegetables within a few days.

Putting away your vegetables

You have only two choices when you harvest your crops: Eat the veggies right away, or store them to use later. Specific vegetables need different storage conditions to maintain their freshness, such as:

• Cool and dry: Ideally, temperatures should be between 50 and 60 degrees Fahrenheit (10 to 15.5 degrees Celsius), with 60 percent relative humidity — conditions you usually find in a well-ventilated basement.
• Cold and dry: Temperatures should be between 32 and 40 degrees Fahrenheit (0 to 4.5 degrees Celsius), with 65 percent humidity. You can achieve these conditions in most home refrigerators or in a cold basement or garage.
• Cool and moist: Temperatures should be between 50 and 60 degrees Fahrenheit (10 to 15.5 degrees Celsius) with 90 percent humidity. You can store vegetables in a cool kitchen or basement in perforated plastic bags.
• Cold and moist: Your storage area should be 32 to 40 degrees Fahrenheit (0 to 4.5 degrees Celsius), with 95 percent humidity. You can create these conditions by placing your veggies in perforated bags (vegetables in bags without ventilation are likely to degrade faster) and storing the bags in a fridge.

You also can create cold and moist conditions in a root cellar. An unheated basement works well as a root cellar. However, these days, most homes have heaters or furnaces in the basement, which make the conditions too warm for storing vegetables. But if you don’t have a heater, or if you can section off a portion of your basement and keep temperatures just above freezing, you can store vegetables like root crops and even cabbage for long periods of time.

Make sure your vegetables are well ventilated in the root cellar; you can store onions, potatoes, and other root crops in mesh bags. Shoot for a humidity level that’s as high as you can get. To increase humidity, spread moist wood shavings or sawdust on the floor but keep the vegetables elevated on wooden boxes. In the table below, I provide specifics on how to store your vegetables so that after you pick them, you quickly know what to do with them (that is, if you don’t eat them right away). The table also includes information on whether you can freeze, dry, or can vegetables, topics that I cover later in this article. Storing Fresh Vegetables If you want to store vegetables, make sure you harvest them at their peak ripeness. Also avoid bruising the produce, because bruises hasten rotting. The storage times in the table are only estimates; they can vary widely depending on conditions. Store only the highest quality vegetables for long periods of time; vegetables that are damaged or scarred are likely to rot and spoil everything nearby. If you live in an area where the ground freezes in the winter, you can actually leave some root crops — including carrots, leeks, rutabagas, and turnips — in the ground and harvest all winter long. After a good, hard frost, but before the ground freezes, cover your vegetable bed with a foot or more of dry hay. Cover the hay with heavy plastic (4 to 6 millimeters) and secure the edges with rocks, bricks, or heavy boards. The plastic keeps rain and snow from trickling down through the hay and rotting your vegetables, and it also keeps the soil from freezing solid. You can harvest periodically through winter, but be careful to re-cover the opening after each harvest.

Freezing, drying, and canning veggies

You can preserve vegetables three different ways — by freezing, drying, or canning them — to make your harvest last longer than if you stored your vegetables fresh. (Refer to the table "Storing Fresh Vegetables," above, for information on whether a particular vegetable can be frozen, dried, or canned.) I don’t have room to cover all the details about these different methods, but the following list gives you a thumbnail sketch of each technique:

Freezing

This is probably the easiest way to preserve vegetables. Heck, if you want, just puree up some tomatoes, put them in a container, and throw them in the freezer — they’ll last for months. The mix is great to use in spaghetti sauce or soups. You also can freeze some vegetables, like beans or peas, whole. But usually you have to blanch them first to preserve their color and texture. Blanching is simply the process of dipping the vegetables in boiling water for a minute or two and then placing them in ice water to cool them off. Then you dry the vegetables with a towel and freeze them in labeled plastic freezer bags. Simple.

Drying

This technique can be pretty easy, but it must be done properly to prevent spoilage. Basically, you dehydrate the vegetables by laying them out in the sun to dry, by slow baking them in the oven, or by using a commercial dehydrator, which you can buy online and in many mail-order catalogs (see the appendix). In hot, sunny climates like California, you can dry ‘Roma’ tomatoes by slicing them in half and laying them out in the sun on a screen.

Spoilage is always a concern, so before drying your vegetables, you may need to get some additional information. You usually need to store dried vegetables in airtight containers; lidded jars work well. You can use dried vegetables to make soups and sauces.

Canning

Of all preserved vegetables, I like the taste of canned tomatoes the best. Nothing tastes better in the middle of winter. But canning is a delicate and labor-intensive procedure that can require peeling, sterilizing jars, cooking, boiling, and a lot of other work. I usually set aside a whole weekend to can tomatoes and other veggies. I don’t want to discourage you, but you need some good recipes, some special equipment, and probably some help if you want to can vegetables. For more help with preserving canning and preserving, check out Canning and Preserving For Dummies by Amelia Jeanroy. Your local Cooperative Extension Service office also is a good source of information on preserving vegetables. Finally, the Learning Library at the National Gardening Association’s website has a treasure trove of veggie preserving knowledge.

Vegetables Articles

How to Test and Improve Your Soil

After clearing your garden area in preparation for planting, you need to take a close look at your soil — give it a good squeeze, have it tested, amend it, and then work it out to make sure it’s in shipshape. Good soil gives vegetable roots a balance of all the things they need: moisture, nutrients, and air. And knowing your soil type enables you to counteract problems that you may face when gardening on that piece of land. I explain the basics in the following sections.

Distinguishing different types of soil

Three main types of soil exist, with a lot of variations in between. Hard clay is at one end of the spectrum; soft, sandy soil is at the other end; and loam is in the middle. Being familiar with your soil helps you know what to expect when gardening. Clay soil tends to have a lot of natural fertility but is heavy to work with and doesn’t drain water well. Sandy soil, on the other hand, drains water well (maybe too well) but doesn’t have a lot of natural fertility. Loam, the ideal soil, is somewhere in between the two. Here are general characteristics of the three basic types of soil:

• Sandy soil is composed of mostly large mineral particles. Water moves through this soil quickly, taking nutrients with it. Sandy soil is well aerated, quick to dry out and warm up, and often lacks the nutrients that vegetables need.
• Clay soil consists of mainly small particles that cling tightly together and hold water and nutrients. It’s slow to dry out and warm up, and has poor aeration, but it’s fertile when it can be worked.
• Loam soil is a happy mixture of large and small particles. It’s well aerated and drains properly, but it can still hold water and nutrients. This is the soil to have for a great vegetable garden.

The squeeze test

To find out what type of soil you have, grab a handful of moist soil and squeeze it. Then use these guidelines to determine what type of soil you’re working with:

• Sandy soil falls apart and doesn’t hold together in a ball when you let go. It feels gritty when you rub it between your fingers.
• Clay soil oozes through your fingers as you squeeze it and stays in a slippery wad when you let go. Rubbing clay soil between your fingers feels slippery.
• Loam soil usually stays together after you squeeze it, but it falls apart easily when you poke it with your finger.

If you have sandy or clay soil, don’t despair; you can improve your soil and make it more like loam by adding organic matter, such as compost, sawdust, animal manure, grass clippings, ground bark, and leaf mold. To learn more about this, check out my book Vegetable Gardening For Dummies, 3rd Edition.

Testing your soil's chemistry

Vegetables are kind of picky about soil chemistry. Too much of this nutrient or too little of that nutrient, and you have problems. If you don’t believe me, see what happens when tomatoes grow in soil that’s deficient in calcium; they develop blossom-end rot. Yuck. Sometimes too much of a nutrient, such as nitrogen, causes lots of leaf growth on plants (such as peppers) but few fruits. Getting the levels just right is important for the best harvest. In addition to nutrient levels, soil pH also is an important factor in plant growth. The right pH enables vegetables to use nutrients from the soil. Soil is rated on a pH scale, with a pH of 1 being most acidic and a pH of 14 being most alkaline. If your soil’s pH isn’t within a suitable range, plants can’t take up nutrients — like phosphorus and potassium — even if they’re present in the soil in high amounts. In addition, if the pH is too low, the solubility of certain minerals, such as manganese, may increase to toxic levels.

Most vegetables grow well in a slightly acidic soil with a pH between 6 and 7. Potatoes, including sweet potatoes, prefer a slightly more acidic soil, in the 5 to 6 range. But in general, if you aim for a soil pH between 6 and 7, your vegetables should grow well.

The only way to find out whether your soil will be to your vegetables’ liking is to test it. Don’t worry; analyzing your soil isn’t complicated, and you don’t need a lab coat. Here are two ways that you can test your soil:

• Use a do-it-yourself kit. This basic pH test measures your soil’s acidity and alkalinity and sometimes major nutrient content. Buy a kit at a nursery, follow the instructions, and voilà — you know your soil’s pH. However, the test gives you only a rough picture of the pH and nutrient levels in your soil. You may want to know more about your soil.
• Have a soil lab do a test for you. A complete soil test is a good investment because a soil lab can thoroughly analyze your soil. Here’s what you can find out from a soil lab’s test in addition to the pH level:
  • Your soil’s nutrient content: If you know your soil’s nutrient content, you can determine how much and what kind of fertilizer to use. In fact, many soil tests tell you exactly how much fertilizer to add; see Chapter 15 for more on fertilizer.
  • Soil problems that are specific to your geographic region: A soil test may help you identify local problems. The soil lab should then give you a recommendation for a type and amount of fertilizer to add to your soil. For example, in dry-summer areas, you may have salty soil; the remedy is to add gypsum, a readily available mineral soil additive.

Of course, soil labs charge around $20 to $30 for their basic services. Your local Cooperative Extension Service office or a private soil lab can conduct a complete and reliable soil test. To locate a private lab, search the Internet for soil test labs around the country. You also can ask your Cooperative Extension Service office for recommendations.

Fall is a good time to test soil because labs aren’t as busy. It’s also a good time to add many amendments (materials that improve your soil’s fertility and workability) to your soil because they break down slowly.

To prepare a soil sample to use with a do-it-yourself kit or to send to a soil lab, follow these steps:

1. Fill a cup with soil from the top 4 to 6 inches of soil from your vegetable garden, and then place the soil in a plastic bag.
2. Dig six to eight similar samples from different parts of your plot.
3. Mix all the cups of soil together; place two cups of the combined soil in a plastic bag — that’s your soil sample.

After you’ve collected your sample, consult the instructions from your soil test kit or the testing lab. If you’re testing a soil imbalance — a known problem that you’ve identified in either pH or nutrients — you may want to test your soil every year because changes in pH and most nutrients are gradual. A home testing kit is a good way to test a pH imbalance. For nutrients, you may want to do a yearly test at a lab until the imbalance (high or low levels of a nutrient) is fixed. To maintain balanced soil, test it every three to five years.

Adjusting soil pH

Most garden soils have a pH between 5.5 and 8.0. This number helps you determine when and how to adjust your soil’s pH level. The following guidelines help you interpret this number:

• If the number is below 6, the soil is too acidic, and you need to add ground limestone.
• If the measurement is above 7.5, the soil is too alkaline for most vegetables, and you need to add soil sulfur.

In the following sections, I explain how to figure out how much lime or sulfur you need to add to your soil and how to apply the materials.

Calculating how much lime or sulfur you need

All Cooperative Extension Service offices, any soil lab, many lawn and garden centers, and the National Gardening Association website have charts showing how much lime or sulfur to add to correct a pH imbalance. The charts tell you how many pounds of material to add per 1,000 square feet, so you need to measure the size of your vegetable garden first. Then use Tables 1 and 2 to figure out how much lime or sulfur you need to add to your soil. Pounds of Limestone Needed to Raise pH (per 1,000 square feet) Pounds of Sulfur Needed to Lower pH (per 1,000 square feet) In general, soils in climates with high rainfall — such as east of the Mississippi River (particularly east of the Appalachian Mountains) or in the Pacific Northwest — tend to be acidic. West of the Mississippi, where less rainfall occurs, soils are more alkaline. But regardless of where you live in North America, you should easily be able to find the lime or sulfur that you need at your local garden center.