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Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Any gardeners out there?
Hi Ladies-
We are moving next month and I really want to start a garden at our new house. This is something I've always wanted to do but haven't had the space where we are at now. So if you grow vegetables, how did you get started? Are there any books/websites you would recommend reading? I plan to start very simple as historically I have barely kept my houseplants alive, so any advice would be appreciated! TIA
Re: Any gardeners out there?
I will probably defer to Buckin or Terp on how to actually start a garden. I was fortunate enough to buy a house from a gardener, so my veggie beds were already built and laid out for me. I got very lucky.
One thing that I would highly recommend when planning your garden is to also plan to start a compost at the same time. I have the land for it, so my compost is in the ground (ie I don't have a container) but my mom has used a container compost for years and years. It's easy to keep and maintain--once you get it going, and it'll pay dividends for your crops for years and years.
How much land are we talking? Dimensions? What kind of equipment do you have and/or are you willing to buy?
You can start as simple as half barrell container gardens, or 20 x 5 box gardens which require hard work but nothing more than a shovel or a 1 acre traditional row garden (requires a tractor).
How much light does the area get?
I can recommend several books but it would help to know what style of gardening would best suit you.
I would definately recommend the boxed beds then. Check out books on Square Foot Gardening.
The Garden Primer is a good overview of gardening methods and plants and what they need but I'm warning you she is super dry and boring. However, she covers a lot of the basics and I like to use it as a Reference.
I have another one for bed gardening that I use as my "garden bible". The name is something like "Growing more Vegetables on Less Land than you Thought Possible." or something like that. It talks about garden beds and square foot gardening really in depth. I have one garden that consists of 20 x 5 foot beds (6 of them) with 3 foot path ways in between. This year I'm also doing a 3/4 acre traditional row garden.
I grew up on a farm so its in my blood. LOL If you have any questions, give me a shout or email me at thegardengourmet at gmail dot com and I'll try to help you.
I'm figuring derky probably meant charch about the gardening advice, as my garden limped along last year. I'm hoping next year will go better, though I'm sure some of it has to do with the soil drainage and the lack of sunlight my garden's location has. As far as prep work, I just set up some posts and fencing around an area, I didn't build beds since we didn't want to spend much $ on it. Then I cultivated, put down some fertilizer & lime (we have lots of pine needles), and planted. I asked my dad for advice on what to try to plant by seed vs. buying the plant. He told me to buy tomato & pepper plants and do the cucumber, squash, and zucchini by seed. "They'll grow anywhere" he said "and you'll have tons of them!". Well, I didn't have much luck w/ what I started by seed. It seemed like only 1/2 the places I planted that the something actually came up, and I put 3-4 seeds in each location. And for whatever reason the zucchini & squash plants that did grow (they looked great!) would flower but failed to produce fruit. My peppers kind of did the same thing, too, I only got 4-5 peppers from my 4 plants (and that was only from 2 of them, really). I almost wonder if there was a lack of bees last year or something that preventing pollenization. In conclusion, I suck pretty bad at gardening, yet I want to try again. We shall see!
Oops, you're right Terp--I did mean Charch. Sorry! Buuuttt, I did know that you had started your garden yourself...clearly with some mixed results. That's what I got confused about! Thanks!!
my first year was a pretty big failure, i had some tomatoes but nothing too exciting.
the book that changed my gardening life was square foot gardening by mel bartholomew. LOVE him. last year i ended up with about 15lbs of tomatoes, 2lbs of green beans, several peppers, but sadly my squash, zucchini and cucumbers met an untimely death due to squash vine borer bugs while we were gone for 4 days.
we spent roughly $150 building 5 raised beds (3-4x4' and 2-3x3') and getting compost, peat and garden soil to put in there. at that point my compost pile wasn't big enough to use, but this year i got 3-5gallon pails out of it to mix in. here is my blog post on compost (thanks for reminding me to publish it!)
look up companion gardening as well; i attribute some of my success last year to looking at what goes well together and what doesn't. certain plants are great when it comes to keeping bugs away from others.
this year i'm doing broccoli, onions, squash, zucchini, cucumbers, lettuce, spinach, green beans, tomatoes and peppers. my strawberries and blueberries are already existing plants.
my rain barrels have saved me a TON of money in watering. it's a workout too, the barrels are a good walk from the garden and since it's uphill i can't do a soaker hose or anything like that with them.