Little Garden in the Backyard: Part 3 - the plants

You mean we're actually growing things here? Amazingly enough all that prep work eventually leads us to real live plants. Growing from seed has its advantages - it's by far the least expensive method and gives you complete control throughout the life cycle. My five year plan definitely involves starting my own seeds, and maybe even harvesting my own for some varieties, but we're starting small here remember. Buying seedlings is far more foolproof. 

And here's where I get to pimp my local Master Gardeners. I'll let them explain who the heck they are for themselves, from the American Horticultural Society website where you can find your own local program: 

The Master Gardener program, conducted throughout the United States and Canada, is a two-part educational effort, in which avid gardeners are provided many hours of intense home horticulture training, and in return they "pay back" local university extension agents through volunteerism. Master Gardeners assist with garden lectures, exhibits, demonstrations, school and community gardening, phone diagnostic service, research, and many other projects.

I get a monthly e-newsletter from my local Master Gardeners program with all kinds of tips and tricks, and a schedule of workshops and classes which are mostly free. But by far the best thing they do is their annual plant sale. The seedlings are $3 each, which is a decent price to start with, and the proceeds all go back into the MG program. There are all kinds of different fun varieties available, the MGs themselves swarm the place with advice and answers, there are other vendors with all kinds of neat plants & garden products, and the day is filled with seminars and demos and more knowledge than you could hope to absorb. 

Tomatoes and peppers especially don't like cold ground, so I kept these seedlings right up next to the house for the couple weeks they were home, and brought them in the garage the couple nights we got near frost. I checked their moisture level nearly daily as they can dry up quickly with their small size, and watered them more than once a day during our heat wave of 90 degree + temps (Yes, the frost and record highs were within two weeks of each other. While I'm making baby steps, global climate change is catching up). They hung on bravely, but started loosing their patience. 

The whole idea of Square Foot Gardening is to plant things in square feet, instead of rows - it's a very complicated fancy name. If a plant is to be spaced 12" apart in a row, you would instead plant one in every square foot. If the spacing is 6" apart, you would plant 4 per square foot, and so on and so forth. Indeterminate (viney) tomatoes can be planted one per square foot; determinate (bushy, the kind you can grow in containers) one per 2 square ft. 

So, you're supposed to lay down this grid of wood or twine or something so you know where these square feet are, but did you see my pretty stained redwood box?! Well check this out - marigolds are an organic gardener's best friend. The yellow flowers are a natural repellent to all kinds of bugs, and they make a pretty little border. By planting a marigold every 12" around the border of my bed, I can roughly eyeball a square foot grid. Two birds, meet this one stone. Brilliant. You might notice in the picture at top that I couldn't bring myself to actually line everything up with the marigolds in exact square feet. It just looked so crowded, I couldn't imagine picking tomatoes off the grown vines. It's pretty close though; baby steps.

As for the actual planting, I did nothing fancy. I've got plenty of fertility in the soil, none needed in each hole. I just broke up the roots a bit and stuck 'em in. Tomatoes can use as many roots as they can get, and don't actually need much leaves, so I plant them deep, as much as 2/3 of the stem underground. Prick off the leaves you're burying and those stems will turn into especially nutrient-grabby roots. This picture is rather horrible (taking photos of dirt on dirt in the fading light isn't as easy as it sounds), but gives you a general idea. 

When it warms up some more, I'll be mulching the whole bed with a few inches of extra compost, but for now I dare say we're done. Time to sit back and wait for late summer magic. 

Seedlings: 

Tomatoes: I went for a wide variety here, but heavy on paste tomatoes that can be canned

    Paste - Sunset's Red Horizon (2), Mamma Mia (2)

    Beefsteak - Ernie's Round, Mariana's Peace

    Strawberry - Orange Russian

    Cherry - Sugary

    Green - Spear's Tennesse Green

Peppers: Gypsys are smaller and thinner than bells, the hot peppers will be used for salsa

    Sweet - Gypsy (2)

    Hot - Anaheim, Serrano

Lemon cucumbers: cute and yummy and fantastic for snacking, salads, or pickling

Herbs: 

    Sweet basil

    Cilantro

    Garlic chives

    Italian oregano: after planting I figured out this is a perennial; it may move to the flower beds in the fall

Materials & Cost

Planting took about one hour, and involved only a trowel. Most of the peppers and tomatoes were purchased at the Master Gardener's sale, and a lot of the rest was purchased from other vendors at the event. I picked up a couple things elsewhere and even got a couple tomatoes as gifts, but my rough total is $45.00 plus $11.00 for marigolds (I'd file this as pest control rather than seedlings). I'm not proud to say a number of seedlings fell victim to my black thumb just waiting to be planted; the cilantro that made it into the ground was no less than my third. This is an additional dimwit cost of about $16.00, and a recurring theme I need to get a handle on (you may remember tomato canning involved a similar dimwit fee, when I got so burnt out I never got around to preserving the peppers and basil I had bought as well). Remember seedlings are the only real recurring cost of the whole project, so I have to harvest about 23 lbs to break even assuming an average farmer's market price of $2/lb for local, organic produce. Stay tuned. 

Little Garden in the Backyard: Part 2 - the soil

That's a whole ton of sh_t. Almost literally, really, the picture above is all the soil we bought for the vegetable garden, and it's mostly steer manure. If I can't grow something in this stuff, there is truly no hope for me. We used roughly equal parts garden soil and steer manure compost, and another half part peat moss. Square Foot Gardening recommends 1/3 compost, 1/3 peat moss and 1/3 vermiculite. Whatever vermiculite is, they didn't have it at OSH and I was in a hurry as usual. We even added in a little all-purpose organic fertilizer to the top layer.

Another plus to the raised bed, and a rather tall one at 12", is we don't have to worry about weeds or grass, especially crab grass, encroaching on the garden space. I did a flat bed with my mom's garden and we ended up digging a trench around and installing a wood border, this on top of all the digging we did to clear the bed in the first place. With this raised bed, we dug up about one whole square foot - just enough for the four posts to sit in the ground. We left the rest of the grass, it won't grow through 10" of soil, and will eventually break down to become nutrients for the veggies. The only drawback is I can't yet grow something with really deep roots like carrots, at least not yet.


We layered the ingredients in thirds and raked/mixed after each addition to make sure everything was well-incorporated. The end result is a porous, aerated, uber-nutrient-rich blank canvas ready to make yumminess. We got a late start, so we left planting the seedlings for another day, this gave the soil a chance to get some water and settle. For now we're watering it with the sprinkler right behind it in the corner there, but I won't want the tomatoes watered as often as the lawn once they really get going, so we'll have to figure something out.

Now before I break down the costs, I have to share one last tip, and beg you to forgive the little woman nature of it. Growing up without a man in the house, there is a certain handiness to Not Michael Landon that continues to amaze me, five years after moving in together. When mom and I used bags of steer manure compost, we'd open them up potato-chip-bag style, usually with whatever was lying around like a trowel or a rake or just tear at them with our hands until they finally gave in. Then we'd flip them over and attempt to distribute each bag evenly over the entirety of the 8'X8' bed, which mostly resulted in the momentum of the bag swinging us around until the majority was in a big clump in one corner, and the rest scattered a bit here and there.

So imagine my wonder when Not Michael Landon evenly sets out six bags of compost in our garden bed, makes a big open U-shape on each with a utility knife, and dumps each over in its place, resulting in a nearly even layer of compost with almost no effort at all. I was speechless. He wondered how I hadn't died off on my own already. You're probably too smart to be as amazed as I was, but here's a picture just for funsies.

With digging the holes, dumping everything in, turning and raking, this stage took all of about an hour. We bought a lot more soil components than we needed, but it will all get used eventually, in the next bed if not in other places around the yards.

Materials & Cost

This was all on a no sales tax sale, whoopee! Tools used were a spade, large shovel, and small rake.

Steer manure blend: 12 cu feet, 12 bags at $1.09 each = $13.08

Garden soil: 10 cu feet, 3 1/3 bags at $8.99 each = $29.97

Sphagnum peat moss: 2.5 cu feet compressed, 2/3 bag at $15.49 each = $10.33

All purpose organic fertilizer: 3.5 cups of 20lb bag at $19.99 = $1.17

Total: $54.55

The box and the soil are really the start up costs of this garden. Next year will involve some added compost, fertilizer, and seedlings, but this soil and box will be used again. So the sum total for the installation itself is $129.96 and 6 man hours of labor.