Plans for a Small Garden

They say that hope springs eternal. They also say that fools never learn. Both adages probably apply as I sit here on a rainy February day and plan out a “postage stamp” garden. The garden will consist of four 3’x12’ beds which I refer to north to south as beds A, B, C and D. If you do the math the entire garden is less than 200 square feet even with a pathway between beds A and B. Any of the beds could be a micro-garden by itself, especially so the north bed A which contains the taller, more vertical and more prolific vegetables. I will describe the vegetables grown in each bed beginning with tomatoes, peppers, zucchinis, cucumbers and pole beans grown in bed A. I have tried this small garden scheme once before and I hope I have learned from the mistakes that I made then. I will report next fall on the quantities that I actually harvest. Feel free to read each of these entries as separate blogs.

T is for Tomato in Bed A

I dig deep holes for tomato plants, about two feet deep. Tomatoes have roots that can go down four feet. One old farmer told me that he dug tomato holes with a posthole digger. My two foot hole means I have some subsoil to dispose of outside the garden. Then I work a couple shovels of inverted rye grass sod into the bottom of the hole and fill it to within six inches of the top with compost mixed with half a cup of organic tomato fertilizer. Judging by the number of tomato plants which volunteer in my fall compost pile, they must really love compost.  This deep compost drought proofs the tomatoes and they should produce until frost.  Next, I take my tomato transplant out of its pot, pinch all the leaves off except for the top three and bury it into the compost up to those top three leaves. Eventually the tomato plant will grow out of this six inch deep hole and I will fill in and hill up the tomato plant which will grow that much more root system from its stem. When I do bury the stem, I will also bury an inverted bottle near the stem for efficient watering of my compost sponge. In the mean time, with the transplant down in the hole, I can cover it with a plastic milk jug at night and cold days and uncover it to daytime sunlight and warmth. My soil is well drained sand so I don’t need to worry about my transplant drowning in a hard rain.

As my tomato grows, I cage it, snip off some of the bottom limbs and suckers to prevent any splash up soil borne diseases and when the soil gets hot, I mulch with straw. Straw mulch moderates soil temperature, prevents soil splash in rains, but does not block the rain from penetrating the soil. I plant an Early Girl variety on one side of bed A and a main season Jet star variety on the other side. Tomatoes love lots of sun and should be planted apart so they don’t shade each other. Indeterminate tomato varieties are very regenerative and easily cloned. To get a late fall harvest of green tomatoes for after frost storage, I pinch off  eight to ten inch suckers  and put them in jars of water until they get some roots and in early July, I can replace worn out zucchini plants with semi-sprawling late tomatoes. These late tomatoes do not shade the caged tomatoes because I let them sprawl over straw mulch and some low structure, like a tomato cage opened and laid on its side.

I pick tomatoes at the first hint of red or when they are full sized and opaque green and then allow them a couple days to finish ripening on a kitchen counter. Do not refrigerate tomatoes or they will get mushy. Much ado is made about vine ripened tomatoes, but I find that if left on the vine when red, you will lose nine out of ten tomatoes to bugs and rot. When they are full sized and green, only the horned tomato worm and the tomato fruit worm seem to bother tomatoes. Horned worms can be handpicked and tomato fruit worm damage can be lessened by not planting near corn. The tomato fruit worm is also the corn ear worm. Mature opaque green tomatoes make excellent mock apple pies and there are a number of recipes for fried green tomatoes which we like as much as sliced red tomato salads and BLT sandwiches. Mature green tomatoes picked just before the first fall frost can be rapped individually in newspaper, laid in cardboard boxes and eaten as they ripen. Tomatoes are very versatile and prolific plants. The two plants and their late season clones in bed A should provide for our needs.

P is for Bell Pepper

Although peppers and tomatoes are relatives in the same botanical family, there are both differences as well similarities in their culturing. Like for tomatoes, I also plant bell peppers in compost amended holes but not so large or deep. I throw a few matchsticks into the compost amended with organic fertilizer because peppers like the sulfur in matches. For both tomatoes and bell peppers, I buy an organic fertilizer composed of dried poultry manure and feathers, bone meal, and potash rock. For the price and convenience, I do not feel it is worth the effort of finding and mixing these individual ingredients. My major contribution is the home-made compost that this bought “tomato fertilizer” with a NPK of 3-3-3 is mixed into.

Like the tomatoes, I plant the peppers as deep as I can, all the way up their stems to their leaves. The deeper planting will protect the roots from summer drought. Peppers like warm soil so I wait until mid May to plant them versus mid April for the tomatoes. Unlike tomatoes, peppers like to be a little crowded so that their foliage shades their stems and roots; for that reason I plant them one foot apart so that the foliage of the mature plants will just touch to shade the ground. Peppers may stop producing in the hottest days of summer, but do not pull the plants because they will produce in abundance again when the weather cools a bit until frost. Green bell peppers will eventually color to red, yellow, orange or whatever if left on the bush long enough. Like tomatoes, we pick ours at the first blush of color and take them into the kitchen to finish ripening. Sliced peppers freeze well and we have them year round to sauté with onions for omelets, pizzas etc. We especially like them in a pepper, rice, tomato and hamburger dish called Texas Hash.

Bell peppers have little insect problems but they are subject to lose from rots. Other mild peppers you might try are banana peppers.

Z is for Zucchini

All of the vegetables in bed A are prolific; just this one bed can produce lots of food for a family. Zucchini are notorious for their abundance so only two plants are necessary. Grated zucchini freezes well and so we use it year round for zucchini bread. Fresh picked it can make zucchini boats (think Stromboli), French fried wedges and numerous other ways.

I plant seeds or transplants about the beginning of May and give them some protection with a plastic milk jug without a cap. I plant over a “honey hole” filled with fertilizer amended compost at natural ground level. The main negative against zucchini is that they are very subject to insects and disease and normally do not make it through July. Mexican bean beetle (looks like a copper colored lady bug with 16 spots), squash bug and squash borer are the main villains. Some sort of row cover protection is needed until the first female flowers appear and even then cover the plants at night. One method is to make four-sided,
 topless, bottomless wooden boxes and staple cheese cloth or row cover cloth on top; another method is to make row cover cloches over wire or sapling arches and held down with boards and rocks. Two scrap boards with aluminum foil stapled to one side placed beside a plant may confuse the squash borer and allow squash bugs a board to hide under until you flip the board and stomp them in the morning. Another solution might be to plant a circle of onion sets in early March around the hill where you want to plant your zucchini in the beginning of May. These scallions could not only repel the bugs and borers but also serve as a support for row cover cloth anchored with stones. All the garden literature says that once a borer is in the vine, it should be slit out and killed and then the zucchini stem and some of the vine should be covered so that the plant may reroot. My feeling is that this advise is a case of too little too late; I prefer to rap a scrap rag or some aluminum foil around the stem and hill up the stem and a little of the foliage with soil as soon as possible to prevent the borer moth from ever laying its eggs. Always destroy any red BB shaped eggs of the squash bugs on the leaves. Neem oil is probably one the oldest and safest insecticides and I might spray this on the stem but not on the flowers as that could kill the bee pollinators.

I have driven my point into the ground about controlling insect pests and disease on squash plants because in my opinion if you can control them you will have a very bountiful harvest. I have seen Mexican bean beetles totally ignore a bush bean patch to eat and kill every zucchini plant that I grew.

Cucumbers and Pole Beans

Along the north side of bed A I dig in three inches of compost amended with a couple metal cans of organic fertilizer and pound in three metal fence post  angled a little to the north to  support a section of fence. Around the beginning of May, I plant pole beans on the north side of the fence about four inches apart and a week or so later I will plant cucumbers on the south side of the leaning fence, i.e. about the same time as I plant the zucchini in front of them. I believe cucumbers can take a little more shade than the other members of the cucurbit family, especially from the afternoon sun. They wilt a lot and most varieties turn bitter if they get too much heat. The zucchini should shade the roots of the cucumbers along with deep straw mulch. The cucumbers will climb up among the pole beans and get a little extra shade from the bean leaves. I will choose a variety of cucumber known for not turning bitter in the heat; keeping them picked daily and picking them before they get large as well as giving them plenty of water will delay or avoid them from turning bitter. Cucumber bitterness attracts the cucumber beetle, so planting non bitter varieties is actually a pest control; because the cucumber beetle infects the plants with disease, non bitter varieties are also disease control. Use row covers to protect cucumbers until female flowers appear.

Some books suggest planting cucumbers among sun flowers, but my experience has been that sunflowers have super root systems which suck up all the ground water. Sunflowers are one tough plant that can outcompete the other vegetables. Cucumbers, tomatoes and zucchini are all mostly water. If I do plant a couple sunflowers, just for beauty’s sake and to attract bee pollinators, (which they do exceedingly well), then those sunflowers will be isolated outside of the garden beds.

Japanese beetles really love pole bean leaves but mostly attack the highest leaves. Japanese beetles drop before they fly so in the early morning you can hold a pan of soapy water beneath an infested leaf and tap the leaf and the beetles will fall into the soapy water. In addition to providing an occasional mess of beans, the pole beans provide the cucumbers with something to climb on. We have a good recipe for freezer pickles that we enjoy year round in addition to summer tomato, onion and cucumber salads. Because the plants in bed A are so prolific and have so many culinary uses, a single 3’x 12’ vegetable plot can provide lots of food.

Carrots and Onions in Bed B

Carrots and onions make good companion plants. The onions need rich, moist soil for their shallow roots; carrots have deep roots which can catch nutrients which leach below onion roots. Onion leaves grow tall and can stand above thick shorter carrot tops which act as a living mulch to shade out weeds among the onions. The onion sets get planted around the beginning of March in 3’ rows about a foot apart so that I can easily drag a sharp hoe down the row to shave out weeds. Around the beginning of April I do a final weeding of the onions and finger poke coated carrot seeds every couple inches down the empty row between the onion rows. Coated carrot seeds are a little more expensive but eliminate the need to thin the carrots later.  I put some wooden slats over the carrot seed and check under the slats and mist the seeds until I see the carrots sprout. When the carrots sprout, I remove the slats and let the carrot tops spread between the onions. Any weeding I need to do, I do with a sharp old butcher knife, my favorite weeding tool.

As a row of scallions are harvested during the summer they can be replaced with more succession carrots, hopefully keeping a steady supply until late fall. Onions and carrots constitute bed B of my postage stamp garden.

Succession Planting Potatoes, Bush Beans and Turnips

Around the middle of March and after I have worked in several inches of compost, I plant a couple rows of Yukon Gold seed potatoes in bed C of my postage stamp garden. I have sprouted these seed potatoes by exposing them to warmth and light for a couple weeks in the house. When the sprouts are half an inch long, the seed potatoes are ready to be planted. Sprouting seed potatoes will mean a couple weeks earlier harvest maturity.  I plant the seed potatoes about 6” deep. If a frost threatens after the potato shoots have broken ground, I hill over them with some soil to protect them. In the past I have used egg sized seed potatoes because I thought that not cutting the potato would reduce the chance of the potatoes rotting in cold soil. Lately I have read that small seed potatoes may carry the genetics for small potatoes and large potatoes cut into pieces may carry the genetics for larger potatoes. This year I am going to plant a row of small and a row of large cut seed potatoes to see if there is a difference in yield. I plant the seed potatoes one foot apart and hill them twice. Yukon Gold potatoes taste great, store well if kept covered with a large towel in a laundry basket and they also produce early. Planted mid March, I expect to harvest them in early June. Remember that you can only do such early plantings if you have well drained sandy soil. If you do not have sandy soil then raised beds may help some to warm and dry your soil.

After I harvest the Yukon Gold early potatoes, I plant fast growing bush beans which can be harvested by the beginning of September. I plant three rows of bush beans in rows about one foot apart so that I can easily drag a sharp hoe from either side of the garden and shave out weeds when they first emerge. Get them small is the secret to weed control. If it doesn’t rain, I water the beans to get them up quickly. When the bean plants are about 10” tall I hill them to bury and kill any in-row weeds. After they are hilled, I can either straw mulch between the rows or plant more beans down the middle of the foot wide gap between the rows to provide living mulch to shade out weeds and increase the bean harvest.

When the bush beans have been pulled up and harvested in early September, I add some organic fertilizer then plant some fast growing turnips to be harvested before the first hard frost in November. These turnips along with carrots or winter radishes can be stored in containers of damp sand in the garage. At some point in winter, the stored Yukon Gold potatoes will be used up and then the turnips and sweet potatoes can be used as substitutes. Sweet potatoes will store until after the next crop of new potatoes come in and they make excellent French fries and hash browns; turnips can replace white potatoes in stews. Cooked turnip greens with onions can be eaten in the fall, allowing green beans frozen in the freezer to stretch through the winter. The seed catalogs claim that some Japanese turnip varieties such as Tokyo Cross are especially quick to mature and milder tasting than the traditional purple top turnips.  Three succession plantings take a lot of nutrients and require amending the soil and weeding between each planting.

A Salad Garden Followed by Sweet Potatoes

The southernmost bed D begins as one row of cabbage transplants planted early in April, one row of leaf lettuce planted at the beginning of March and a row of German Giant radishes planted mid March. By mid May the lettuce and radishes will have been eaten as spring salads and the cabbage row covered with rock anchored floating row cover to protect it from white cabbage butterflies and their offspring.

In mid May in the space vacated by lettuce and radishes, I will plant a row of a dozen Beauregard or Georgia Jet sweet potato slips. The traditional way to plant sweet potato slips is to hoe up a 10” ridge and use a hoe handle to poke holes into the ridge about a foot apart; the slips are put in the holes, the holes are filled with water and smashed down tight around the slip to form a shallow basin. This bowl basin is watered every day for a week until the slip takes root and then it is pretty well left on its own. The slips are kept cultivated and weed free until they begin to vine and spread. The sweet potato is a poor soil crop and probably can get by on what fertility the lettuce and radishes left behind. When the sweet potato plant begins to vine, I put down a newspaper and leaf mulch for the vines to grow over. This mulch is mostly for weed control. I will allow the vines to spread right over the top of the cabbages and reach under when I need one.

As I said planting slips vertically into ridges is standard practice and has its advantages, especially when it comes time to dig sweet potato roots before the first fall frost. But I am tempted to try something different and plant the slips horizontally, in shallow troughs a couple inches deep and running north and south. The slightly raised bed will still run 12’ east and west and the plants will still be about one foot apart in the row but the actual slip will be buried in a shallow north-south trench with only a few leaves showing. This is very similar to the way some gardeners plant tomatoes. Like tomato stems, sweet potato stems have the ability to put down roots from buried horizontal stem. I am experimenting to see if this type of planting will significantly increase root yields.  The seed catalogs claim that both Beauregard and Georgia Jet varieties grow in the north and yield up to 10 pounds per plant. I would be happy to get half of that.

Whatever sweet potatoes I get can be used to replace white potato French fries, baked potatoes and hash browns during the winter and also substitute in recipes for the winter squash and pumpkins which take too much room to grow in a small garden. I have really had good luck storing sweet potatoes all winter in baskets in our cool back room. They are good keepers.

Except for a couple rhubarb plants to make spring pies and a couple chard plants tucked in somewhere for summer greens and a celery substitute, that pretty well describes my small 200 square foot garden plan. It is small enough to work with hand tools but large enough to put a dent in a grocery budget.

Thoughts on Tomato Cages

                Home-made tomato cages usually take one of two forms. Either a little over six feet of four –foot  fencing is rolled into a cylinder  or two four- foot lengths of fence are bent into “L” shapes so that when put together around a tomato plant the two pieces form a cubic cage. The principle advantage of the “L” shapes is that they store in a very small space, one atop the other. I tie my tomato cages with strong twine from any straw bales I open rather than wire them into cage shapes. This allows me to easily open up the cages when the tomato season ends with the first frost of October and use both the cylinders and the “L” shapes as the framework for cool weather cloches for crops like lettuce, kale, radishes or carrots. Another cold weather use for cylinder cages is to open two of them up and retie them together to form a cylinder twice as large as the originals to hold compost rotting over winter or to hold the brown material autumn leaves that are raked in November. Whenever you decide to turn the compost, just pull the fence cylinder off the material and then refill it. These compost cylinders sit right in the garden so the material is handy and available for the next gardening season. A third winter use for tomato cages is to hold down winter mulches, such as those over asparagus, rhubarb, or carrots. Strong winter winds can blow mulches and sheet composting of leaves and straw off of the beds and out of the garden. Just flatten the cylinder cages a little and lay them over the leaf and straw mulches. Next May all the cages can be reformed and retied with a couple short strands of straw bale twine and they are again ready as tomato cages again. In summer, a tomato cage also makes a good structure to allow a hill of three cucumber plants to climb up.

A Third Choice: Trench Planting/Hilling

                Most organic gardening literature encourages using raised beds or double-digging (trenching) or a combination of the two to incorporate organic matter into the soil. I am experimenting with a third method for my well drained, droughty, sandy soil which begins by looking like double-digging and ends up looking like a raised bed but actually is neither and I think better than both. For the first step, I skim off my winter cover crop of ryegrass and put it on the walking path to the south of my east-west running wide-row growing bed. Next I dig out a shovel –wide, shovel- deep furrow and put that top soil in the garden pathway to the north of the bed.  The pathway to the north of the bed is now all top soil and the pathway to the south is all ryegrass sod. Next I invert the cover crop sod, roots to the sky, from the south pathway into the furrow trench and chop it into the subsoil bottom. (To this point, it sounds a lot like the double-digging method.) Then I pull a couple of inches of the top soil  from the pathway to the north of the bed into the furrow and let the whole trench rot and warm up as a stale seed bed and  skim- hoe out any weeds that emerge over  the next couple of weeks.  After a couple weeks I plant vegetable seeds into the furrow and allow the sweet corn or beans or what have you to grow up out of the trench and once they are tall enough I pull in the rest of the top soil from the north pathway and fill the furrow around the plant stem to natural ground level.  As the corn or bush beans or tomatoes etc. continue to grow taller, I hill them up with top soil from both the north and south pathways to the point that the hilled- up vegetable bed looks like a raised bed to the eye but it is not because the seed and its roots are not above the natural level of the ground as with a raised bed, but are deep in the soil on top of an organic water sponge with many inches of soil between them and the hot drying sun. The moisture is down deep and that is where roots are and that is what makes this method different from either double digging or raised beds. Many people probably use this method for growing their white potatoes but I think it can be used with a lot of other vegetable. If you have poorly drained soil, like clay, this furrow planting/hilling method will not work because when it rains you will just end up with a mud puddle. Another advantage to hilling is that three water- catching trenches are formed: both pathways are lowered to form trenches as soil is dragged out of them to hill the vegetables and a third trench appears atop the growing bed itself as it is hilled up, especially if two rows of vegetables are planted in each wide growing bed. This top trench makes it very easy and fast to water two rows of vegetables at once, even with just a watering can. Add a couple inches of temperature- moderating organic mulch on the sides of the hilled vegetables and you have gone a long way toward drought proofing your sandy soil.