How Does Your Garden Grow?

You can’t read a newspaper, watch television or listen to the radio these days without hearing somebody offer sage advice about ways to save money. The ones who worry me most say over and over that you can save a lot by growing a small vegetable garden. I’ll bet they all work for Ortho or one of those seed companies.

Take if from someone who has made a vegetable garden summer and winter for over 40 years, by the time you go out and buy or rent all the tools and equipment it takes to create a small, successful vegetable garden, you will have spent enough to pay for a truck load of fresh vegetables.

And there are a few things you need to know to garden successfully. I recently saw one poor guy who planted a nice row of sweet corn in his yard but he never thinned it. If you are going to make corn, your stalks need to be thinned to at least a foot apart. This poor guy had corn up over two feet high that was jammed together like the folks on those subway cars in Japan. He won’t make a single ear of corn for his expense and trouble this year. Maybe next year.

There are many good reasons for making a garden, but saving money is really not one of them. The most wonderful thing about where we live is that if you do it correctly you can step out in your yard and bring something into the house fresh from the garden every day. Face it folks, we live in a hot house!

A main key to successful gardening is knowing what to plant when. Other people may do it differently, but I plant my corn and potatoes in mid-February and I never spray. Then on March 15, I put in seeds for snap beans and cucumbers. Mid-March is early for tomato, eggplant and bell pepper plants, but I get away with it by watering everything just before daylight whenever the temperature drops below 40 degrees.

I dig my potatoes and put what corn we can’t eat fresh in the freezer in early June. Behind the corn I plant okra. The butterbeans go in behind the potatoes.

But the best deal is the fall garden. I don’t have room, but you can get some of those heat resistant tomatoes and make a second crop by replanting tomatoes in mid-August. In the middle of September I begin replacing things as they play out. When you start putting in winter vegetables remember, every day that it does not rain you have to water because September is just one more summer month around here any more.

In the fall I plant seeds for sugar snaps, carrots, mustard greens and turnips. All the rest are little plants – parsley, three or four different kinds of leaf lettuce, a variety of cabbage that produces small heads, celery, spinach, Brussels sprouts, broccoli and cauliflower. We have green onions all winter that grow from the seed I pick up in late spring and dry over the summer in a crawfish sack that hangs on a nail in the storeroom.

When our four children were growing up we lived for 25 years in a home on four acres near where Highland Road meets Interstate 10. There we had 38 rows 65 feet long and four rows 100 feet long. We fed all comers and supplied fresh vegetables to the whole neighborhood.

The kids fussed a lot about having to work in the garden. My youngest son used to try throwing clods of dirt at me so I would punish him and make him go inside. But it never worked.

I will tell you one thing, though. One of the very proudest things in my life is our four children all married with homes of their own and four vegetable gardens in their back yards. And when my grandchildren come over there is usually something they can help me do in my garden and you can tell they know exactly what they are doing. It would not surprise me if all ten of them have vegetable gardens of their own some day.

No, chances are you won’t save a lot of money with a small vegetable garden, but you sure can get a lot of good stuff out of one.