plant a vegetable garden

I registered a field to grow some vegetable in my apartment community, but I never have any experience. Please give me some suggestions. 1 month ago

I’m interested in plants and herbs, and their vast effects on the body. I’d like to grow my own garden with vegetables and herbs, free from pesticides, and so that I may share the benefits of my garden in a healthy and comprehensive way with myself and those in my life. 4 months ago

Had baby tomatoes and potatoes this summer – not very tasty, considering the overabundance of rain – but still living vegetables! I was so proud. Definitely hoping to do it again, more successfully, this year! 7 months ago

Spent the day outside building a raised garden bed for the new vegetable garden. Measures 2.4m x 2.4m x 0.2m.

Was a lot of work but really rewarding. Included:

- Digging out and leveling the soil.
- Going to the hardware store to get the wood sleepers, brackets to screw the sleepers together, screws e.t.c. I opted for natural hardwood sleepers which were a little more expensive, but they look great. Totally worth it.
- Putting the sleepers in place and ensuring they are level (if they are not level, water will always run to one end – not good).
- Screwing them all together which was a real effort with hardwood. Lots of drilling and a few blisters from screwing it all together. Tough wood! Used galvanised screws which should last a long time.

Anyways, a big day with a great outcome. I now have a big raised garden bed box just waiting to be filled with heaps of vegetables.

Next step is to get a load (about 1.5 cubic meters) of good quality soil delivered and to fill the garden bed.

Then comes the planting of vegetables e.t.c. until one day we have delicious homegrown produce.

The box is large enough that we can grow heaps of food, and there is plenty of room to rotate crops each year to keep the soil healthy and disease free.

I have purchased 3 books (they were on sale and really cheap) about building and tending a kitchen garden and vegetable garden. So while I wait for a free weekend to do all the dirty work that remains, I am going to delve into the books and come up with a plan for the garden – what to buy, when to plant, how I will look after it all e.t.c.

Exciting and hopefully healthy times too! 7 months ago

It was a lot of fun, I learned a lot, and i got a few tasty things, but for the money I spent it was not worth it. It makes more sene to just go to the farmers’ market. The grape tomatoes did really well, as did the herbs, so I might do those again. 7 months ago

I’ve had mixed success with my vegetable garden over the years. Every fall and spring I add compost and sometimes manure. This year, in addition to applying finished compost, I’ve adopted the chop ‘n’ drop technique. It turns out that some of the plants in my garden that are over-exuberant, which I regularly pull out and used to put on my weed pile, are actually dynamic accumulators, meaning they draw nutrients from deep in the soil and store it in their leaves. What I do now is I remove parts of lemon balm, borage, and goldenrod plants, and lay the slightly chopped pieces directly on the soil, so that it also acts as mulch. This technique should help conserve soil moisture, attract worms, add nutrients, and distract insects from my veggies, while helping to tame the overly rambunctious members of my plant community. 11 months ago

RL swamped me for a bit so I’ve been working to catch up to where I want to be for the last few days.

I’ve added a third bed, also 4×4, and it was a pain in the kaboose trying to get it in. I used up all the best lumber on the first two beds and what I had left to pick through decided it wanted to be difficult. I finally managed to finish it off and fill it up on Thursday.

A local garden center had a coupon on groupon a few days ago that I snagged offering $50 of merchandise for $25 which dropped to $10 when combined with my groupon new member discount. The garden center’s a nice big place, but I’d never normally go there because it’s pretty much the most expensive place in the area.

I snagged some blood meal, bone meal, potash as well as eleven kinds of seeds and some onion bulblets. I fertilized all three beds, mixed it in and then thoroughly wetted it down. It was after this that I learned that dogs are attracted to blood and bone meal; for some reason none of the bags included warnings that your dog would chow down on dirt to get to it. I have no idea how I’m going to deal with that particular garden pest.

I stood a while in uffish thought and figured out how I’m going to be planting all of this: intensely with a lot of intercropping. I still need to buy some potato seeds, garlic bulbs and tomato seedlings, but otherwise I’m all set! 13 months ago

So today I added soil to the bed and tried to work it so it would have good tilth. There was way too much shoveling. The compost pile has been compacted so that needed to be turned and loosened, then there was shoveling it into the wheelbarrow, wheeling it over to the bed (without tipping over [this was not always successful]), shoveling it out of the wheelbarrow and blending it into the bed.

I believe that I ended up doing seven loads. The bed should probably have one more to top it off but I’ve three blisters and it started raining on me so I’ve put it off.

I’ve also added a second, smaller bed in the front. It’s 4×4’ and I’ve just started working the soil. I’ve gone a little further down with this bed so I might use it for my deeply rooted vegetables like carrots.

Finally, I’ve come up with a tentative list of things I’d like to plant. I’m going to do some research this weekend and see if I can come up with a concrete list and a layout. 14 months ago

I actually started this goal a few weeks ago.

Step one: pick a spot. I decided on the back corner of the yard. It has the best southern exposure in the whole lot (or it did until the maple tree came down) so it was the natural choice.

Step two: clear the area. This is what took me a couple weeks. The spot I chose was already occupied by a large wooden swing set and jungle gym that had been up for a quarter century. It was completely overgrown with grapes and wild roses.

That sounds somewhat charming written out, but the reality is that the grapes were sour, the birds ate them all anyway, the roses looked awful, didn’t smell and would grab at you whenever you tried to walk by. Taking them down was a fairly epic battle (which i nearly lost). Dad took the swing-set down for me which left me with a decent amount of lumber to pick through.

Step three: build raised beds. This is where I am today. Our soil is extremely clayey and that corner has rather poor drainage so the plan is to raise the beds up and amend the soil with compost.

So I went out today and sawed up some of the 2×4s laying around. Then I found a compass to double check where South was (good thing too because i was off by ~20°) so I could align the long side and nailed the whole thing together (i only hit myself with the hammer twice). There’s only one large bed at the moment, but I might go back and add two smaller ones later this week.

Step four: fix up the soil. I used a pitch fork to loosen up the soil at the bottom but decided not to do anything further because we had a lot of rain two days ago and the ground’s still rather wet.

Step five: pick plants. Uummm… 14 months ago

The vegetable garden didn’t work out so well in 2010 and I didn’t do it in 2011. In fact, I took out the garden that we had as it was overgrown with raspberries. Going to try for an above ground garden in pots on the patio in 2012 with corn, green beans, peas and more :) 17 months ago