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Getting Started with Sustainable Gardening

What you need to know to start planning your green garden.

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You know homegrown food is fresher, safer, and better-tasting. You've heard the locavore buzz. You're itching to get started with your own backyard garden, but where to begin? GrowandMake to the rescue! In this article, you'll find everything you're looking for.

Why Grow Your Own?

When I was growing up, my mom tended a huge sunny rectangle of vegetable garden in our backyard. In every season, there was something she grew on the table: meaty, hard-skinned squashes in winter, heaped, particolored bowls of lettuce in spring, mounds of broccoli in summer, and fresh tomatoes and peppers until first frost in autumn. I'm not sure I ever really gave mom her due-- to me, having fresh veggies in every season was simply the way things were. The way things were supposed to be.

Now it's my job to tend a huge sunny rectangle of garden, and I relish the labor as a one-way ticket out of a world of weary, far-flung iceberg lettuce and jet-lagged tomatoes. Gardening is about more than just superlative flavor, however. Growing your own food, close to home, is homeland security in the truest sense. By safeguarding local foodways-- and maintaining and enhancing local food knowledge-- you're taking a step away from the agro-industrial supply chain most Americans depend on for their daily bread. In the face of so many global unknowns-- climate change, oil dependence, severe weather-- the agro-industrial supply chain seems shakier by the year. Like a giant, wobbling Jenga tower, each new crisis opens a precarious hole in the infrastructure. It seems as good a time as any to head out to the yard with a hoe-- or out to the window-box with a packet of seeds-- and start growing your own food.

New Gardener Checklist

1. Space. This could be as small as a kitchen windowsill, or as large as your yard. If you're truly new to gardening, I recommend you start small. It's best to begin with something manageable your first year-- no matter how small, it'll teach you a lot-- than to get discouraged with something too big to handle. For your first season, start with no more than 4 x 8' worth of planted space.

2. Light. Choose an area that gets at least 4 hours of sunlight per day. The vegetables at the bottom of this chart will be happy with that amount of light; the vegetables at the top need as much as they can get.

Table 2. Light Requirements of Common Plants
Require Bright Sunlight
Beans Broccoli Cantaloupes Cauliflower Cucumbers	Eggplant Okra Onions Peas Peppers	Potatoes Pumpkin Squash Tomatoes Watermelons
Tolerate Partial Shade
Beets Brussels sprouts Cabbage Carrots	Collards Kale Lettuce Mustard	Parsley Radish Spinach Turnips

3. Good soil. Plan to spend some time turning and amending the soil at your chosen garden site. Soil is hugely variable-- it can be sandy or clay, wet or dry, basic or acidic. If you're growing in an urban area, there may be potential for chemical contamination, as well. To be on the safe side, have a soil test done. Your local Cooperative Extension will be able to conduct a soil test for you. Once you've got the "dirt" on your soil, you can go about improving it with compost, lime, humus-- or just a good turning fork.

4. Knowledge. You're going to accumulate a lot of your garden knowledge over time, but before embarking, you should at the very least have a good idea of what crops do well in your climate. Start by learning your frost dates-- try this list of frost dates averaged by state-- which determine the length of the growing season in your area. Some vegetables are leaves or stems-- lettuces, asparagus, and kale, for example-- and may have a growing season of less than twenty days. Some crops are fruits--like tomatoes, squashes, and eggplant-- and may have a growing season over a hundred days long. When paging through a seed catalog, the "days to harvest" number will be shown with each variety on offer. Your growing season may be too short for some!

If you have more specific questions, turn to your local Cooperative Extension for advice.

5. Tools. Lastly, there are some basic tools of the gardening trade no grower should be without. Depending on the size and ambition involved with your garden, here's a general guide.

If you're growing in containers, window-boxes, hanging baskets, or grow bags, you need:

Gloves
Hand trowel
Seeds
Watering can (or re-purpose an empty container)
Graph paper and notebook, for planning and recording
Potting mix

If you're growing in a cold frame, flower bed, former garden space, or other area that's been recently cultivated (e.g., it isn't sod) you need all of the above (except potting mix) plus:

A shovel
Compost or other soil amendments
Supports for climbing crops (optional)
Fence to discourage pests (optional)

If you're looking at a patch of lawn that you want to turn into a garden, you may need to borrow:

A rototiller

Other helpful items for committed gardeners:

A hoe
A turning fork (also called spading fork)
A sunhat
A wheelbarrow

Planning: When to Start?

Using the date of last spring frost for your area, you can draw up a general schedule for your season's gardening. It might look something like this:

March

Purchase seeds, plant lettuce in cold frame, plant tomato seeds indoors (to be moved out the garden when it's warmer), turn over the compost pile.

April

Till/spade garden soil, work in compost. Plant cool-season crops such as lettuce, spinach, chard, and radishes.



May

Last frost: May 15. Place tomato seedlings in the ground and water. Plant warm-weather crops like squash, cucumbers, and beans. Keep everything weeded and watered.

Other Helpful Articles on Garden Planning:

Draw a Shade Map to determine the best site for your garden.
Get Your Garden Started-- The Right Way.
Container Gardening Guide.
Straw Bale Gardening if you have poor soil.

Starting Seeds Indoors

Starting your own seeds-- like the tomatoes I mentioned above-- is not a necessary part of having a garden. Seedlings-- sometimes called sets or transplants-- are widely available at your local garden center. Crops typically transplanted into the garden (as opposed to directly-seeded) include tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, broccoli, herbs, cabbage, and others. Choosing to start your own seeds is far more inexpensive than buying, but also a tad on the messy side. Also, it allows you a lot more freedom and control over what you plant in your garden, since you won't be limited to whatever the garden center has in stock. If you'd like to dabble in starting your own seeds, here are links to some articles that can help:

A greenhouse or cold frame can provide the perfect, sheltered space to start seeds or get an early jump on the growing season.

A general guide to Starting Seeds Indoors.
Homemade Newspaper Pots for starting seeds indoors.
Hardening off Plants before transplanting them in the garden.

Dealing with Weeds

As much as I wish it wasn't so, weeds are a reality for the home gardener. There are many steps you can take to minimize your time spent dealing with weeds, including

Designing with weeds in mind
By keeping your planted beds no more than 4' wide (reachable from both sides) you'll make it a lot easier on yourself when it comes to weeding. Since the average adult has an arm-span of about two feet, being able to reach in from both sides to grab weeds ensures you can grab every pesky volunteer without having to trample your crops. Beds that are only reachable from one side (such as those planted alongside a building) should be no more than 2' wide.

Keep it small
Weeding is a task that can get overwhelming. By keeping your garden small, you'll have far less open ground to keep weeded, and spend far less time at the task.

Mulch
Keeping the exposed ground in between crops covered with mulch-- be it newspaper, shredded paper, dead leaves, or compost-- is a great way to keep down weeds, as well as retain moisture.

Pest Control

Pests are an unfortunate reality for the gardener. Thankfully, dealing with them can be easy thanks to our article on organic pest control.

Enjoying and Preserving the Harvest

Make your harvest experience as enjoyable as possible by:

Always being prepared to whip up a quick salad for dinner. Some simple dishes-- like roasted or grilled vegetables, pasta salad, and cold pureed soups are handy for using up a glut of summer produce.

Spacing out your plantings to ensure you don't get overwhelmed with a huge amount of ripe produce all at once. In my garden, I plant a short row of lettuce every three weeks or so, to ensure I always have enough, but never too much, to use. This is the sort of knowledge that accumulates over years of having a garden.

Learn some simple food preservation techniques, like canning.

Composting

No garden is really complete without a compost pile. At the end of the growing season, you'll be left with inedible things like cabbage stumps, bean vines, and rotten tomatoes. A compost pile allows you to turn these things into next year's fertilizer with a few simple steps. Read our composting article.

We hope you enjoyed this article on getting started with sustainable gardening. We have many more gardening articles available-- in addition to those included in this article-- in our Sustainable Yard & Garden Guide.

Related Articles:

How to Make Liquid Fertilizer

Build a cold frame

Seed Saving Tips

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