Dear Dot,
Help me build a small garden bed. I would also love some tips to help the vegetables grow more prolifically and heartier.
– Royce Ann
The short answer: A small vegetable garden requires selecting a sunny spot, protecting it with fencing from animals, and boosting soil nutrients with compost and garden soil. Stick to space-efficient plants you actually enjoy eating, such as herbs, root vegetables, leafy greens, and climbing plants on trellises, while avoiding sprawling crops like squash and melons. Maintaining healthy soil through annual composting and organic fertilizers is key.
Dear Royce Ann,
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Confession: While Dot applauds your desire to start a vegetable garden, my own attempts have been dismal and I have defaulted to a small raised bed where I can manage to keep alive some tomatoes, peppers, and basil. Consequently, I have enlisted Dot’s delightful, talented, and green-thumbed copyeditor Laura to answer your question. Here’s what she had to say:
Beyond the fact that every home-grown vegetable you eat means less fuel is used in getting dinner on your table, local veggies (including those from your farmers market) taste better and are more nutritious than their trucked-in counterparts. The minute a vegetable is picked (and thus cut off from its own source of nourishment), it begins to break down, losing nutrients and flavor as it does so. My father loved fresh corn on the cob. He’d get a pot of water boiling in the kitchen, and only then would he walk out to our cornfield to pick the ears we needed for dinner. He’d shuck them while walking back to the house so he could plunge them into the boiling water the minute he reached the stove. The result? The sweetest corn imaginable ― yum!
You have similar rewards awaiting you, Royce Ann, once you get your own garden up and bursting with produce. Since you’re planning a small garden, backyard corn is not in your future, but plenty of other good things are!
Don’t be scared off by the up-front work involved in setting up your garden. Once it’s done, it’s done — and now the fun starts! You get to play in the dirt!
Your first task is to site your garden. Pick the sunniest place possible, preferably not too far from your kitchen door.
Next, protect it. The veggie-loving animals in your area will view your garden as a new neighborhood eatery, and they’ll become regular customers unless you take measures to keep them out. Start by fencing the whole thing in. Some posts with chicken wire stapled to them will suffice. A low fence will deter rabbits and skunks, but if you have deer, your fence needs to be at least eight feet high. Down the road, if you start finding holes pecked in your tomatoes, you could also put a mesh “roof” over your garden to keep the birds out.
Next on your list is soil. What’s in most of our backyards generally needs improvement before it can start hosting healthy vegetables. This means buying bags of garden soil and compost from your local garden store and mixing them together in your garden. You want light, fluffy, nutritious soil, whether you’ll be planting directly into the ground or using raised beds. (If you build raised beds, use untreated wood. Materials like treated wood and cement blocks leach toxic chemicals into the soil. Untreated wood will eventually rot and have to be replaced, but at least it won’t poison your dirt.)
Don’t be scared off by the up-front work involved in setting up your garden. Once it’s done, it’s done — and now the fun starts! You get to play in the dirt!
Since you’ll be working in a small space, be strategic about what you plant. But always keep in mind my first rule of vegetable gardening: plant what you want to eat. (I have a friend who planted a crop of turnips, only to discover that neither she nor her husband much liked turnips.)
Herbs are a must for small gardens, and many of them (chives, thyme, sage, etc.) are perennial, coming back year after year, often getting bigger as they age. Don’t even think of planting winter squashes and melons; they grow on vines that can stretch to 15 feet. But root vegetables don’t require much real estate, and you can grow climbers like cucumbers and beans on space-saving trellises or tepees. Leafy greens like kale, collards, and Swiss chard are gifts that keep giving all season long, growing new leaves as you pick and eat the older ones. Some vegetables, like lettuces and radishes, grow well early and late in the season, but not in the hotter parts of summer, which frees up space for other things between plantings (cabbage, anyone? Or husk tomatoes?)
The only way to increase your garden’s yield is to have the healthiest soil possible. This means adding compost every year. (Dot hopes you compost, Royce Ann. It’s a great way to turn what might have become food waste into what gardeners think of as “black gold.” Of course, you can buy compost, but why not make your own?) You can also ask your garden store to recommend organic fertilizers that work with specific plants. Onions like different nutrients than do tomatoes. Mulching will also improve your soil. Where Dot spends her summers, some people use seaweed, which nourishes the soil as it decomposes. Others mulch with straw, because it breaks down quickly, and worms love it. Earthworm poop is the best fertilizer out there.
Dot hopes this guide to gardening helps you, Royce Ann. Send me photos (or share the bounty) next summer!
Farm-to-tablely,
Dot
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