How And Where To Plant Vegetables
Unless your garden spot is covered with at least a thin layer of topsoil containing humus, it is worth postponing your plantings for a year and devoting your time to making compost and creating soil with it. But once you have soil, and the season for planting approaches, you should have two things ready: the seed and a complete plan of where you expect to plant it.
It pays to get good seed. Get, catalog’s, from reputable nurseries and choose the items you want. Whenever you can, choose varieties recommended for home use, not for commercial use. Most of the best-flavored varieties do not ship well. If you think you dont like” certain vegetables, it may be that you have never tasted them fresh. Some vegetables deteriorate with alarming rapidity, once they are picked. So try planting a few vegetables you think you dont like.
Now make a diagram of your future garden. Vegetables are normally planted in straight rows. If your garden slopes be sure the rows do not follow the direction of the slope. If they do, hard rains will wash away your valuable topsoil. Also, if it slopes south, plant your tall things, like corn and pole-beans along the northern edge of the garden. where they will not cut off valuable sunlight from the little fellows, such as lettuce or carrots.
How wide apart should your rows be? Some vegetables like tomato require more space than others, either because they shade more ground or leave less room for the gardener when he cultivates between rows, or have bigger appetites and should not be forced to compete for food in nearby soil with other vegetables planted too close to them.
How much of each vegetable should you plant? That depends, of course, on how much you want to produce. That obviously depends on the size of your household, on its members tastes, and even on their tuckaway! And if you want to can or freeze a part of your produce you need heavier plantings. If you have plenty of space, err on the heavy side with one proviso: dont use up all your available space in first plantings or have a container garden. Some vegetables can be planted every two weeks in early summer, so long as the last planting has time to “make” before frost.
When planting time draws near, you have a decision to make. You can wait for a date that local gardeners consider safe from frost, remembering that some vegetables are hardier than others. Or you can gamble and plant a week or ten days ahead of safety: you may get away with it and enjoy eating fresh vegetables earlier. You will not have lost much in either seed or labor. You can also spend a little extra and buy plants that have already been started by a local nursery, instead of planting seed. Or you can start them yourself by building simple hotbeds and coldframes.
You cannot plant if your garden is too wet. The soil should be moist and crumbly, not muddy, when you put your seed to bed. When the plants come up, do your “thinning” promptly. In the case of some plants, such as lettuce, you can do this by stages. If your directions call for six-inch spacing, leave a plant every two or three inches. Then, when the plants you have left begin to crowd each other, you can eat every other immature lettuce and still reach your six inch goal. The same goes for baby beets and carrots. The flavor and food value of immature vegetables amply repay the extra trouble of picking and preparing smaller units.
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