Vegetable Gardening Tips

Growing Your Own Groceries

This web site is not a gardening site, so the purpose of these vegetable gardening tips is to show you the benefits of gardening from a preparedness perspective. Or there may be times when you want to grow your own groceries — just to save money, to feed your family in times of turmoil or crisis, or just because you want fresh vegetables.

Hopefully, these vegetable gardening tips will get you started, but I've linked to several sites that can give you more in depth information if you need it.

There may be times, in the near future or further down the road, when we might be unable to just run to the store and buy food. Any number of scenarios could cause empty shelves in grocery stores, like a natural disaster, a financial collapse (personal or national), or a nuclear/terrorist attack.

Small Gardens or Large

Not everyone has a big yard or a 10-acre farm to grow food. Maybe you have just a small piece of land. There's no rule that says your garden has to be a neat, rectangular space with straight rows and furrows.

It doesn't even have to be all in the same place. A square foot here and a patch over there can supply all the fresh vegetables a family can use, with plenty left over to put in bottles or your freezer for the winter. (For home canning help, visit Simply Canning.)

 

If you think you will ever want or need to have a vegetable garden, it would be good to begin dabbling in it now.

If you have to start from scratch and put in a garden where lawn or weeds flourished before, you probably could not do it because gardening is not cheap to begin with. But if the garden is already there (from years of dabbling) and the supplies are in your shed, then you're ready to begin growing food at any time.

So these vegetable gardening tips will include a bit about preparing the soil, planting for bumper crops, container gardening, indoor vegetable gardening, small gardens, and storing survival seeds for later — when and if you need to grow your own groceries.

Start With a Plan

Whether you have space for a big garden or a small garden, planning is the key to success.

Preparing the Soil

I can't emphasize enough the importance of good soil. I have a "black thumb" — my house plants usually die. In the last two years, we have been planting a huge variety of plants in our yard (trying to get it to look like those fabulous gardens on the cover of gardening magazines). Sure plants will grow, but feeding the soil with good compost has made a big difference. Good drainage is also important.

You can buy good compost by the bag at gardening centers or you can have it delivered by the ton from landscaping companies. Or if you are a REAL gardener, make your own compost with scraps from the kitchen (except meat or fat), leaves, grass clippings, and refuse from the gardens. You can learn all about composting No-Dig Vegetable Garden. Megan has some terrific ideas for making gardening easy and fun.

Planting for Bumper Crops

The key to having plenty of vegetables in a small space is to plant at the right time and keep each spot producing for the entire growing season.

The idea is to use the same small gardens simultaneously for two or more crops. Plant fast-growing plants in the same space as slow-growing ones.

Radishes, lettuces, onions, and spinach grow quickly, so they can be intermixed with slow growers like cabbage, tomatoes, and broccoli. Corn, beans and squash are good companion plants. Plant all three in the same spot of ground at the same time. The corn will quickly grow tall, get the first sun, and the most moisture. Pole beans will climb up the cornstalks to get the sun. The squash will grow along the ground and begin setting fruit at the same time the corn and beans are harvested and cleared away.

Try planting carrots (slow) with peas (fast and early), onions or potatoes (slow and below ground) with beans (fast and above ground), or lettuce (somewhat slow) with radishes (very fast).

Never let a space stand empty. When the peas are finished producing, pull them up and throw the vines in the compost pile and plant squash or something else. You can always get a head start by planting seeds in peat pots several weeks earlier.

On the back of all seed packets are the number of days it will take for those seeds to mature for harvesting. That information, along with knowing whether plants do better in hot weather or cool weather, will help you determine which vegetables can be used in succession planting.

Caring for Your Garden: Watering and Weeding

Vegetables need plenty of water on a regular basis to grow best. A good rule of thumb is an inch per week for small plants, two inches for large ones. However, that's a general rule at best. Your soil, the humidity, and extreme heat will all have an effect on your garden's water needs. Letting plants wilt before watering will cost you almost three weeks of recuperation time for the plant — it takes that long for the plant to get back to the point it was before it was deprived of water. Full irrigation or drip irrigation is better for your plants than sprinkling.

WEEDS. There . . . I said it! That horrible 5-letter word that plagues every garden and gardener. Is there anyone who thinks weeding is fun? It's a never ending chore but, if you want great vegetables (or flowers), the weeds must be kept under control and they will rob your precious plants of all the water and nutrients.

Spending an hour digging out small weeds will save you hours and hours if you wait until they're big weeds.

You can put down a weed prevention cloth or black plastic. But even better, lots of compost will keep most of the weeds from germinating while it feeds your soil. The cloth or black plastic will compact the soil as well as restrict where you can plant.

I hope these vegetable gardening tips help you get started on growing your own fresh vegetables this year.

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