My purpose here is to put together a very high level perspective on managing a productive vegetable garden that is used as a source of sustainability for a normal family.
1. Raised Beds. Start with a gardening space that you can manage with an easy effort. It's easy to start out enthusiastically and plant hard through the spring, but by the time July rolls around, you are exhausted and have no desire to go outside in the heat.
If you garden in raised beds:
- You have significant control over the quality of your soil. In-ground beds are at the mercy of whatever hard-pan clay soil the developers left after they leveled your lot. Rehabilitating that inhospitable soil can take 5-10 years and considerable frustration. Making a finished soil your top layer in a raised bed creates ideal growing conditions for your very first year.
- Raised beds can give you discrete, carefully defined boundaries that are considerably easier to manage. It gives you clear area for measuring fertilizer, planning crops
- It is easier to keep the space weed free. Beds raised 18" above the surface of the lawn helps to keep down weeds and reduce nuisance pests like rabbits, squirrels, and the family dog.
- Distinct beds allows you to better manage disease, minimize transmission
2. Start small. Begin with 1-2 beds and go through the entire process first. Then add more beds as you are able to manage them.
3. Plant what you will eat. Think about things that you will use in your kitchen and pair that list with things that are easy to grow. Your objective is to create a list of things you can use. This will form your initial planting list.
4. Find the recipes that you need to prepare the vegetables that you grow. For example, when growing radishes, I can use it fresh in a salad, pickle it in the refrigerator, or roast it on a sheet pan with mixed vegetables. If your objective is to preserve the harvest, like tomatoes, put that plan in place. Consider both the preservation method, and also the recipes that use the preserved produce.
Next, ask yourself how often will you want to prepare that crop. Will I eat radishes once a week, or once a month? This will give me guidance on how much of it to plant.
5. Research the varieties that work best for your region and the uses you will put them to. Do you need hardneck or softneck garlic? Are you looking for slicing tomatoes or tomatoes for sauce?
6. Research the growing techniques you will use for your chosen variety. Which potatoes will match the length of your growing season? Do you need an 8' stake or a cage for your tomatoes?
7. Think in terms of three season gardening. Put on your list Spring crops, Summer crops and Fall crops. For each season, identify the time you need to plant outside in the garden. This transplant becomes a marker for the rest of the calendar and is often in May for most summer crops. Count back two months to identify when you need to start seeds indoors to grow into transplants. Count forward the "days to maturity" written on the seed packet to know when to harvest (typically 70-90 days).
Then, look at ways that you can put in a Spring crop that will be ready by May. For example early maturing peas, lettuce, and radishes. Use the same three dates: start with transplant date, go back for seeding date, go forward the days to maturity for harvest date and make sure that falls in early May.
Finally, most summer crops are ready for harvest by the end of August. In my area, there is still plenty of time to mature a crop between September and the really cold weather of late November.
8. Identify Succession Partners. Start with main crops, grown from May through August. Then find a seasonal replacement for the Fall season. Starting plants in September and growing into Fall can be easy. Similarly, find a pre-season crop for early Spring that can start in cold temperatures. The crops grown in the cool weather seasons can be the same or different.
This will give you Pre-season, Main Season, and Replacement harvests. This will give you a suite of three vegetables that will occupy the same garden bed throughout the year.
These three partners, grown in succession, means that you always have something growing in your garden. Because they are determined ahead of time, you already have made preparations for them; you have the seeds ready, you know the spacing and supports they need, you've already got them started in seed trays.
For example you may want to start with peas in the Spring, switch to Kentucky Blue pole green beans for the Summer, and then back to Provider bush beans in the Fall.
9. Stay with the plan. As with all gardening, a 30 minute session in the garden 3 times a week will keep on top of most activities that it requires. Frequent short sessions are easier and more effective that waiting until you have a big project. An overly complicated plan is hard to stick to. Having no plan is easy to get behind and lose interest.
Instead, keep to the seasonal schedule and the weekly sessions.
10. Record your activities and observations in your garden journal. Keep a record by date of your weekly activities. What are your planting. How is it growing. What is the weather like. What is being harvested.
Make it a habit to check back on how things were doing a year ago by reading previous journal entries.
11. Set up a place for starting seeds. You will need a place for initial germination of seeds, and then a place to transplant your seedlings into 2-4" cups that can be grown on into a size for the garden. This could be a section of your office, a corner of your garage, or an outdoor greenhouse. Take the steps necessary to provide light and warmth, which could be heat mats and LED shop lights or full-on hydroponic systems, or simply a bright window.