23,594 Garden Web Discussions | Vegetable Gardening

You have alot of excellent advice here. I would simply add that you will do yourself a big favor to read at least one good book that covers all the basics of gardening. Square Foot Gardening was mentioned, and it is very good. I would also highly recommend Growing Vegetables & Herbs by Taunton Press.

I don't see that anyone has recommended mulch. Mulch is the easy answer to weed control. I use pinestraw, but you can use chopped leaves, grass clippings, even newspaper or cardboard too (and other things). Let your soil get warm and then apply a thick layer over the entire bed up to about 3 inches from the base of each plant. Your weed problems will be nominal for the season.

With regard to soil amendments. Soil Conditioner is just finely chipped pine bark. It is tilled into clay soil and helps to loosen and texturize it. It's very effective, but doesn't add a whole lot of nourishment to the soil. I am personally very fond of Composted Manure and Spaghnum Peat Moss. But as digdirt said, you really should have your soil tested. It will save you from adding stuff you don't need. My soil is very high in phosporous and potassium, so I only add nitrogen in the form of Blood Meal or manures. Will your soil be like this? You'll only know if you have it tested. This can be done through your local County Agricultural Extension office. It is only $5 here.

You are off to a good start. We wish you great luck!

> What have you found to be the best ways to prevent/get rid of
> weeds organically? My husband bought a weed claw grabber thingy but
> something more preventative might be nice too.

The claw grabber thingy would be for big weeds that have escaped notice until they're hard to pull. I would also recommend getting a tool designed to cut tiny weed seedlings off when they sprout - the idea is that you cut the weeds off and barely disturb the soil. Possibilities include:

- A "hula hoe"
- A collinear hoe
- A "wire weeder" like the one they have at Johnny's. This is a short-handled tool and might work better for your raised beds than the above two long-handled tools. You have to crouch down, but you get better precision.

A plain old classic "hoe" is not all that good for this job - it's better for chopping out bigger weeds and various soil-arranging tasks.

If I were assigned to manage your garden, I would use the wire weeder to weed around the plants, and hand-pluck weeds that are dangerously close to the plant stems. This is another reason for avoiding the hexagonal spacing - with hexagonally spaced plants, it's harder to weed with a tool without accidentally cutting off the plants.

Weeding-with-a-tool is also a reason for _spaced_ plants rather than scattering seed. For example, if you're willing to kneel down and hand-pluck a lot of weeds, scattering lettuce seed works just fine. If you're going to lose patience with that, as I would (and if you're not quite sure you can distinguish between lettuce and weed seedlings), then you're better off sprinkling your seed in little rows or, most formally, growing seedlings elsewhere or buying seedlings and then placing each lettuce plant in a specific place.

To clarify, I'm not suggesting old-style "row farming" where you might have one row of lettuce and two feet of path that you walk in. (Not that that's necessarily wrong if you have the space - it has non-obvious advantages - but that's not your garden.) I'm just talking about simplifying the spaces between plants so that they're easier to weed.

And you might want to increase the spacing just a little this first year, again to make the weeding easier. This past year, in fact, I grew my beans about six inches apart in the "row", and exactly eighteen inches apart between the "rows", though that was all in a bed and I never ever stepped between the rows. It was much easier to weed between the "rows" when the plants were young, and the plants ended up growing quite large, I think reflecting the larger underground space available to them. Easier work and, I think, not significantly fewer beans. Now, I had all the space I could possibly work, so I'm not really recommending that you use a space as big as eighteen inches, but maybe just a little extra space.

Mulch is dandy, though for some reason it doesn't control weeds well for me - it makes the soil moist and soft and happy, and the weeds as well as the plants love that. So many people swear by mulch for weed control that I'm confident that I'm doing something wrong, but I (1) don't know what that is and (2) have too large a garden last year and this year to be able to thickly mulch it all. So I'm controlling weeds other ways.

This year I'm also trying out biodegradable landscape paper; I don't know yet if I recommend it. The only thing that I know is that it has to be very firmly secured or you'll come back the next day to find it blown to the other end of the garden. :) Maybe biodegradable landscape paper _under_ mulch will be the magic.

> I do not know if I should trust the hardware store brand though. I am
> looking at "Evergreen" brand top soil and manure.

My apologies for asking, but when comparing prices, you are accounting for a cubic yard being twenty-seven cubic feet, not nine cubic feet, right? I just want to make sure; when doing the math fast in the past I did once forget to add that third dimension.

In any case, this is where I'm not a great deal of help. I don't use raised beds, so most of my soil is just the ground. :) For amending, I most often use Gardner & Bloome products. Their bags say "Organic", but I don't see "certified organic", so does that really mean organic in an organic gardening sense, or just in a dictionary word sense? I don't know. :) Anyway, I use the Farmyard Blend and the Soil Building Compost. But now that we have a bigger garden, I think that I also need to find a trustworthy by-the-partial-truckload source.

I have more than once seen a big blob of soil dumped onto a tarp in front of a neighbor's home, so I think that it's not all that unusual to have it delivered that way and then frantically wheelbarrow it back to your garden. But that assumes that you've found the trustworthy source in the first place.

I suppose some of those really deep boxes will be for your asparagus.

No these front boxes are going to have 3 husky cherry tomatoes and the left side not sure yet. It has to be something atleast 3ft tall.

The asparagus box im building in similar in depth

You can get away with way less box than you have there...

It has a false bottom only about a foot deep. Thought it looked nicer and had better support this way

You guys are scaring me.

Oh, no! You certainly have my sympathies. We're not close to planting yet (still feet of snow on the ground), but last season was terrible here for high winds. I had to tie down the cold frames in the spring and the summer brought hail, nasty winds and full-out tornadoes. My in-laws lost their cattle shelter and grain bins were twisted and scattered all over the countryside. Our garden is protected on most sides, but anything coming from the southwest creams it, which is of course where most of the high winds came from last year. Everything was affected, but the greatest loss was nearly half of all my poor brassicas snapped right off. We were regularly following one of those tornado chaser live feeds last year and that was the storm that had two of them (one from Canada and one from the States) headed straight for us (not good). It passed a few miles from our place, thankfully. But yeah, I totally sympathise with your wind troubles lately. Hope your seedlings survive and do well for you! Onions are tough. :)

I meant in the ground. Too many to carry in and out, up and down the steps. 34 on Weds. night. I just have to wait.
Nilajones, don't they get frosted?

In a normal season where plants aren't lured out to bloom way too early, the time to plant tomatoes is one week after the lilacs bloom or right as the bearded iris are getting ready to bloom. All warm season veggies can be in as the peonies start to bloom.

Thanks lolauren.
Chris, This will sound a little strange.
I received free broccoli raab seeds and planted them last year and this year. Totally different leaves. Grows easily. Thanks,
Bob

This post was edited by bugbite on Sat, Mar 23, 13 at 21:31

Finally concluded these have the same look as brokali. Same leaves and heads.

I would agree with you sjkly except for the name of the variety mentioned by the OP. Some varieties of tomatoes will do ok in a 5 gallon bucket, with lots of extra care, but most will not. So we can't make blanket statements about tomatoes in general. It all depends on the variety and type.

As I mentioned above, Beefsteak, the variety the OP wants to grow, is a huge indeterminant variety. Plus it is a late season variety and in a 5 gallon container it would already be rootbound by the time it came for it to set and ripen fruit.

Dave

I missed the variety, so yeah, I would agree a 5 gallon won't work for that. I grew best boy and early girl, and then did some cherry and grape-the smaller varieties did best for me.

Kathy has good advice.. They say not to add sand to clay unless you have something along the lines of 50-70% sand by volume.. But that is tilling sand into clay soil, i dont see the problem with adding it to a raised bed.

so then maybe 1 part top, 1 part mushroom or compose and 1 part sand would be better...

I read that article it makes perfect sense.. layering will be hard at this point.. since they will just mix at the point of origin and then deliver already mixed up..

My tomatoes have usually been in the ground for a month or more before I mulch them in late June. It takes a while for the soil to get really warm, and bare soil warms up faster. We usually have ample spring rains so dryness isn't an issue. I usually prune off the lowest leaves and mulch at the same time, which together postpone early blight.

I basically do the same as planatus, just a little sooner, being a little souther. Generally if the inevitable tomato volunteers are popping, I figure it is time to think about mulching.

I've mostly grown black beauty (I think) and mine don't start vining until Sept/Oct. Maybe it vines earlier for you because of the heat? You could grow one and still have some corn? I don't grow corn cause it all seems to get ripe at the same time and I really don't like it frozen. Also, it's so cheap during the summer! Nancy PS sometimes I just steal from the neighbor ;). He doesn't mind.

I once grew Eight Ball round zucchini, and to my surprise it stayed a bush.

Thanks a bunch Dave, this was very helpful info. I will start germinating them in June according to transplanting them in mid-late July.

-Mr Beno

In search of the perfect brussels sprouts planting date, I have settled on June 5-10.

You should set up a camera for 24h and tell us what was eating your seedlings!

well, now I suspect it may be small birds. I noticed a few of them hopping around my garden at about 9:30 this morning when I went outside. I guess my plastic owl isn't scaring them away! I put some chicken wire over the garden boxes, we'll see if it works!