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.