Sasha & other gardeners

[Earthmama]

I'm daydreaming of trying to get the kids & I into a place where we can grow a full-fledged garden next year.

What would you recommend we start with?
And how much space would we need to grow enough to regularly have home-grown veggies for a 1 year old, 4 year old & me & maybe a guest? (Next year.)

We've had very modest experience growing things in pots - we had some tiny tomatoes this year - but I think I chose pots that were too small, and only one gave us 4 fruits - but there are still buds on the vine, so maybe we'll get more.

Lease will be up in May, should we start anything indoors before then?
Where's the best place to get fruit trees? Should we grow them from seed?
Any other tips?
Thanks in advance.

[Sputterduck]

Woot! I am excited for this thread! I want to know too!

[AuLait]

Well, I'm not an experienced gardener by any means, but I love, just LOVE, the square foot gardening technique. Unfortunately, my postage stamp yard doesn't have enough sun or space to implement anything large scale, but when we do get more space I will use his methods. Here's the website (http://squarefootgardening.com/). The book is about $16 and well well worth it. You can also find it in the libraries. The techniques were totally different than I'd always heard about gardening and they are very labor and space efficient as well as logical.

[paper_]

It very much depends on how much vegetables you eat and what you decide to grow. From my childhood, I remember having a ~40' x 15' garden that kept us pretty well in veggies. Of course you need to think about shade (from houses, trees, etc), slope, and water availability.

I would not suggest growing trees from seed, as they don't cost ALL that much from stores and it will save you a few years of no fruit. - unless of course you don't care how long it'll be before they start producing.

[Elffriend]

Most fruit trees will not breed true. You can plant seeds from one kind of apple and wind up with something completely different and often inedible. Stark Brothers has nice trees and sometimes in early Spring they have sales. Go to their website and request a catalog.

This is our first summer in our new house, so I started with a small garden. It is about 20X20 and will not meet all of our needs for freezing and canning, but is doing an ok job of keeping us in fresh veggies right now and giving me a little to put up for later. I'm using square foot spacing so it's really kind of crowded looking.

Find out what gardening zone you are in and start seeds inside next Winter based on the last frost date for your area. If you can't move until the end of May, there will be some cold weather things you shouldn't try to grow next Spring. Onions, peas, cabbage, broccoli all like to be planted while it's still cold out and won't grow well if it's too hot.

As for what else to grow, grow the things you like to eat. :) Some things are especially satisfying with little kids. Radishes, because they are ready to pick in about 30 days, and summer squash/zucchini because they are so prolific. My kids also like peas. They like opening the pods and seeing how many peas are in each. They like to snack on them raw. They snack on raw green beans, too.

[jessiehannan]

I garden in raised beds as well, and we did cucumbers carrots, tomatos, peas and radishes.
Now that I have to learn how to container garden instead, I have to figure out a new technique

[jessiehannan]

I am thinking about kiddy wading pools for my container of choice. I have to refigure my watering plan, the way my mom taught me, I only had to water every 3 days.

[caryn]

We have been organic gardening for 14 years - every year the lawn disappears more and more!
Depending on your zone, you could start some seeds now for the fall - radishes, beets, lettuce, carrots as well as some herbs - oregano and parsley - we have fruit trees (well, I should call them fruit plants, they're not very big!) in pots - this year I tried mini bananas and oranges - the flowers outperformed the veggies by far though - and today my first dahlia bloomed!

[Sashahomeschoolmama]

If you're short on space I agree that square-foot gardening is a great way to get the most bang for your space. Also, I highly recommend using some sort of trellis system for your vining plants. We grew all of our cucumbers up a fence this year and it saved a lot of space. It'll work for anything that vines, including pumpkins and watermelons.

I would think about not only what foods you eat the most of but what foods are most expensive to buy (for example, organic strawberries are hard to find and expensive here but it's really important to me that that particular fruit is organic. We ended up planting over 100 plants and will double that next year). Some people say to grow veggies that never taste as good when they're from the grocery store (tomatoes are famous for this) but IME *nothing* tastes as good when it's from the store.

Still, an onion is going to take up space and only give you one onion. A tomato plant is going to take up space and (hopefully) give you a lot of tomatoes. So you have to prioritize, obviously. For some plants, like zucchini, you'll only need one or two plants. They are prolific!

Do you have a farmer's market? You might check out what they have and grow whatever can't be found there plentifully and cheaply. If a container of green beans is dirt cheap at the farmer's market you might use your space for something else.

Also, think about if you are going to want to preserve any of your harvest. We're big into preservation so we planted a lot of tomato plants, cucumbers, and pumpkins because those are foods that we will use a lot of this winter. We can only eat so many watermelons so I didn't plant as many of those. Nobody really loves peaches so our two trees are more than plenty, but we'll need to add several blueberry bushes in the spring.

We start seeds in the house in the springtime. Broccoli, spinach, so on...the only things that don't work well for starting and then transplanting are root veggies (carrots and so on).

I would *not* start fruit trees from seed. I'd check your local nursery in the springtime. They should have the varieties that will grow best in your geographic location and should be able to help with fertilizers and other nit-picky things that fruit trees like.

HTH!

[AuLait]

Sasha, I'm so jealous of your land space and impressed with your industriousness. I always enjoy hearing about your farm.