Post by ogeezer on Mar 18, 2007 12:16:25 GMT -6
I was not surprised that my son-in-law was amazed how many veggies he harvested last year from a 25 by 12 feet plot of land in the backyard of his suburban homestead.
His vegetable garden, which we hand-watered using city water, with all the chemicals they put in it & all the other stuff people say is why they won't drink or cook with it, produced enough vegetables and herbs to most of year. All summer he ate the produce fresh and for future use, and with my help plus a high-pressure cooker, we canned, dried, or pickled a portion. And froze another portion for soups and stews of winter. Preserving a surplus of beets, carrots, potatoes, and turnips from my Fall garden, covered with soil in a box inside his mower shed.
Around the mid-March we planted tomato, jalapeno, bell pepper, and banana pepper seedling, I started in my greenhouse. During the waxing moon of April, and sowed cantaloupe seeds in raised mounds. Big on okra, we also put entire 25' row of okra seed, from which his family ate until well into November.
In between the tomatoes, we planted a few radish seeds and even some carrots (during a waning moon) and a number of herbs like basil, caraway, dill, parsley, thyme, and coriander herbs (at the next waxing moon) for my daughter (from a previous marriage) uses in her cooking.
A week after the cantaloupes went in, we tilled in 2 gallon ziplock bags packed with the zest & pulp (rinds) of all the orange peels saved from the oranges purchased during the previous winter (pulverized in a blender & kept frozen in the freezer) -- when tilled into the soil where cucumbers, zucchini, squash, and eggplants will be planted, will deter destructive nematods and sub-terranean organisms. Then we planted 4 eggplants, and finished planting with 3 cucumber, 3 summer squash plants, a 3 zucchini plants, hugging the outer perimeter of the garden. In order to give these creepers room as they grow, I trained them to flow away from the garden, and out onto the lawn.
In June, after the okra began to rise above everything else in the garden, we introduced climbing beans and peas seeds between the okra so that they would have a natural-like trellis on which to climb, and be afforded shading from the okra fronds during the heat of the summer.
Afterwards, it became just a matter of harvesting the veggies, feeding the plants (roots and focular portions) with periodic applications of organic fertilizers, mulches to deter unwanted weeds, and of course watering.
This year, my daughter's family is doing everything themselves, tho I'm still around if they need it. My son-in-law got an early start this year, introducing an improved layering of compost, and bought a front-tine tiller to work it into the soil, along with another batch of orange-peel grindings, and has had to replant his tomatoes, lost a few weeks back during a snap freeze.
He's on his way, and looks like their garden will just as good or better than last years. Fact is, they've even expanded it a bit - taking in a flower bed that never really turned out to be more than a few months of splendid colors but was barren all the rest of the year. In doesn't take a green-thumb to know that while flowers are nice to look at, there's so few of them that are edible.
So instead of diving into a flower garden, why not use the land as a springboard into a home garden?
His vegetable garden, which we hand-watered using city water, with all the chemicals they put in it & all the other stuff people say is why they won't drink or cook with it, produced enough vegetables and herbs to most of year. All summer he ate the produce fresh and for future use, and with my help plus a high-pressure cooker, we canned, dried, or pickled a portion. And froze another portion for soups and stews of winter. Preserving a surplus of beets, carrots, potatoes, and turnips from my Fall garden, covered with soil in a box inside his mower shed.
Around the mid-March we planted tomato, jalapeno, bell pepper, and banana pepper seedling, I started in my greenhouse. During the waxing moon of April, and sowed cantaloupe seeds in raised mounds. Big on okra, we also put entire 25' row of okra seed, from which his family ate until well into November.
In between the tomatoes, we planted a few radish seeds and even some carrots (during a waning moon) and a number of herbs like basil, caraway, dill, parsley, thyme, and coriander herbs (at the next waxing moon) for my daughter (from a previous marriage) uses in her cooking.
A week after the cantaloupes went in, we tilled in 2 gallon ziplock bags packed with the zest & pulp (rinds) of all the orange peels saved from the oranges purchased during the previous winter (pulverized in a blender & kept frozen in the freezer) -- when tilled into the soil where cucumbers, zucchini, squash, and eggplants will be planted, will deter destructive nematods and sub-terranean organisms. Then we planted 4 eggplants, and finished planting with 3 cucumber, 3 summer squash plants, a 3 zucchini plants, hugging the outer perimeter of the garden. In order to give these creepers room as they grow, I trained them to flow away from the garden, and out onto the lawn.
In June, after the okra began to rise above everything else in the garden, we introduced climbing beans and peas seeds between the okra so that they would have a natural-like trellis on which to climb, and be afforded shading from the okra fronds during the heat of the summer.
Afterwards, it became just a matter of harvesting the veggies, feeding the plants (roots and focular portions) with periodic applications of organic fertilizers, mulches to deter unwanted weeds, and of course watering.
This year, my daughter's family is doing everything themselves, tho I'm still around if they need it. My son-in-law got an early start this year, introducing an improved layering of compost, and bought a front-tine tiller to work it into the soil, along with another batch of orange-peel grindings, and has had to replant his tomatoes, lost a few weeks back during a snap freeze.
He's on his way, and looks like their garden will just as good or better than last years. Fact is, they've even expanded it a bit - taking in a flower bed that never really turned out to be more than a few months of splendid colors but was barren all the rest of the year. In doesn't take a green-thumb to know that while flowers are nice to look at, there's so few of them that are edible.
So instead of diving into a flower garden, why not use the land as a springboard into a home garden?