GROWING FOOD
Back in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, the average middle class homeowner put decorative garden elements in the front yard and more utilitarian features in the back. Food growing, laundry drying and chicken husbandry all took place in the back. The neighbors knew that you did such things, but day-to-day they preferred to admire the bedding schemes, shrubs and trees that you planted out front.
Laundry no longer goes out on the line, but other old habits are new again, as millions of people return to keeping vegetable gardens and sometimes even chickens. However, these days, if a property’s sunniest spots are in the front, the neighbors probably won’t be shocked to see tomato plants there.
Some food gardeners, like their spiritual kin who specialize in roses or orchids, would like you to believe that home growing is a complicated and mysterious thing. It isn’t–or rather, it is only as complicated as you want to make it.
You start by figuring out what you want to grow, which should coincide with what you like to eat. There is no point to growing beets if all you are going to do is look at them.
The next step is to create a planting bed. The best advice on this is to start fairly small– say three by three–which is enough for a few tomato or pepper plants or a number of herbs. If you decide that you like growing your own food, you can always enlarge the bed later. You can set the bed’s dimensions by marking the plot out with stakes and string.
Some people swear by tilling before planting. Others, like me, are afraid of mechanical tillers. Some people double-dig their beds, adding organic material as they go. I don’t do that either. With vegetable or flower gardens, I like the “lasagna method,” which alternates multiple layers of newspaper and compost or mulch over the entire bed area. You can plant through this right away, but it is best left to decompose for a period of time before planting. If you make a “lasagna” bed now, the soil under it will be considerably looser in a month or six weeks’ time when you want to plant.
If your soil is a mess–heavily compacted, solid clay or otherwise untenable– make a raised bed. This is essentially a bottomless, soil-filled box that sits in a designated sunny garden spot. If you are handy, you can make your own raised bed out of two-by-fours, two-by-eights or wood of other dimensions. You can also buy easy to assemble kits that include side walls made of recycled plastic or rubber. Once the raised bed is built, it should be filled with good garden soil.
If raised beds are too much of a problem, you can also grow many edible plants–from tomatoes to lettuce–in containers, “grow bags,” or upside-down apparatuses that you hang from hooks on porches or balconies. Catalogs and mass merchandisers carry a wide variety of these.
Plant your selected species and varieties, and make sure that you have a handy water supply–either old fashioned cans or hoses or newer-fangled drip irrigation systems. Some drip systems can be hooked up to timers, so the watering is automatic.
The food you grow will be just as attractive to birds, insects and animals as it is to you, so prepare for critter control. Since you are going to eat the final product, organic methods make sense. However, this often means hand picking unwanted pests like tomato hornworms. Deer can be managed with repellant sprays, but are deterred much more thoroughly and efficiently with barrier fences. Stop birds with netting or other covering. Burrowing, digging or tunneling animals, like rabbits or groundhogs, are best deterred by barriers that extend below ground level. Talk to other food gardeners in your neighborhood about the pests they encounter most frequently and take their advice about controls. The one advantage two-legged gardeners have over varmints is that we can talk to each other and use the Internet to solve problems. Exploit that advantage.
Once you have tackled all of the above, all you have to do is watch and wait until your harvest is ready. If you can’t eat everything you grow; can it, freeze it, foist it off on neighbors or call your local soup kitchen or food pantry to see if they can use the surplus.
Gardening, like other pleasurable activities, should have as little stress and guilt attached to it as possible. Large garden centers have all the equipment you need, not to mention seeds and starter plants. A good mail order source for growers of things edible and ornamental is Gardener’s Supply, 128 Intervale Road, Burlington, VT, 05401, (888) 833-1412, www.gardeners.com. Free catalog.