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Neat and tidy vegetable gardens are so ordinary. I gave up on that ages ago. My garden always starts out in May with grand plans. By July it’s a little overgrown, while by August it’s a jungle and in September I am wondering what’s planted in there.
My strategy is simple: Grow what you love to eat. We have a huge raspberry patch because that is a favorite in our family. Plant lots of everything you like.
A neighbor advised me that it is good garden karma to plant double of what you really need so that if things go bad, you still have half the plants. It's not unusual for us to have about 30 tomato plants and a couple of dozen pepper plants. Enjoy what you get from your garden and share it liberally. There are plenty of people who can’t garden but will appreciate your extra produce.
Here are some tips when preparing your garden:
Involve the entire family
For our family, Saturdays are a good time to work on the yard and garden. Once the garden is prepared and planted, I usually get in about two to three hours a week. It’s not enough to totally eliminate the weeds, but it helps.
Watering and weeding
When watering, use soaker hoses and mulch to keep down a lot of the weeds. Soaker hoses water exactly where you put them. If you don’t water between the rows, you will decrease the weeds between the rows. Mulch smothers most weeds it covers but it doesn't look tidy.
I use grass clippings and black plastic to keep down the weeds. Black plastic also adds heat to the plants that need it, like tomatoes and cucumbers. Last year, we used black plastic as a weed barrier and to increase the heat in the area where the tomatoes were planted.
We will do that again this year because it worked well. We put the black plastic sheeting down the tomato row and cut holes for each plant to go in the ground. We put rocks and long boards on the plastic sheeting to hold it in place.
Don’t go crazy on the weeding. It takes the fun out of gardening fast. Making a kid weed and labeling it family time is a strategy that backfires for us. I want my kids to work enough so that they know how things grow, but I don’t want them to hate the garden.
Pre-emergent chemicals that prevent weed seeds from germinating really do help, but only if you are okay with using chemicals in your veggie garden. Even using them, I don’t know how to accomplish a totally weed-free garden.
Use good tools
For a long time, I thought we were saving money by getting the cheapest rakes, shovels and hoses possible. I began to buy better tools slowly and was amazed at the difference.
I bought heavy duty tomato supports when I realized that the cheap ones broke quickly and hurt badly when you got scratched. Whatever you get, if you are going to be using it a lot, make the investment in good, sturdy tools. It actually makes the work easier.
Small space? Try containers
If you have a small garden space, you can increase your production by learning to grow herbs and vegetables in flower pots, buckets and wash tubs. They require more vigilant watering because they are prone to drying out, but they have virtually no weeds.
A good container holds enough soil for a full-grown plant and has good bottom drainage. Cucumbers, tomatoes, spinach, potatoes, herbs and leafy greens can all be grown in containers. We have a large typical garden and then lots of other things growing in pots on the patio. It increases our production and is just as pretty as pots of flowers.
Try something new every year
I pick a new vegetable or a new growing strategy to use each spring. This year, we are growing parsnips. We tried them during the winter and I want to see what we can produce.
Go vertical
We are growing more things vertically this year. I have a great bean tower for green beans and a cucumber trellis, too.
Supporting vining plants on trellises will allow me to fit more plants into the same amount of growing space. The cucumber trellis should keep the cucumbers off of the ground and bug free.
Our garden is a mess but it produces enough for us and some to share. Every year, when the weather starts to warm up, I can't wait to go out and start all over.
Julia Parslow is an educator, working mom, gardener and knitter living and working in southern Utah.
