CHAPTER 9.
Gardening Gardening requires lots of water-most of it in the form of perspiration.
-Lou Erickson Many survivalists have vegetable gardens, because we"ve clued in to the fact that food may become scarce in the future and much of what you can buy at the grocery store is c.r.a.p. Tasteless, tasteless, c.r.a.p!
I won"t scare you with the details of how lettuce on sale at a grocery store may be contaminated with rocket fuel,1 how toxic chemicals on plastic pallets could be leeching into fruits and vegetables,2 or how foreign food packers are shipping us products contaminated with E. coli bacteria.3 The fact is, growing your own food is just plain healthier. But it"s also a good survival strategy.
Starting a vegetable garden requires a modest financial investment, and that investment can be reduced if you"re willing to put in more time. Most of the money you spend will be in the beginning. And the long-term benefits are incredible. You "ll save money on groceries, while providing easy access to healthy, even organic, produce. Plus, gardening is a fun, rewarding hobby for all ages.4 There are whole books on gardening-what we"re going to concentrate on this book is small-scale suburban gardening. The point of gardening in a suburban or urban environment, as I see it, is not to replace all of your food. That isn"t really a feasible goal on most suburban lots. Instead, your garden will supplement your stored food with the kinds of foods you are used to eating.
In this chapter, we"re going to cover topics like the basics of starting a vegetable garden, how to grow a lot of food in a small s.p.a.ce, how not to overspend when gardening, why you should grow heirloom seeds, what to do if you have no yard, how global warming will affect your garden, and I"ll also give you a list of useful gardening dos and my picks for the 10 best garden crops for beginners.
Thanks to the United States" worst-since-the-Great Depression recession, plenty of people are already catching the gardening bug. The National Gardening a.s.sociation (NGA), a nonprofit research group, estimates that 43 million of the nation"s 111 million households grew at least some of their own fruits and vegetables in 2009-a rise of more than 19% over the previous year. More than half of those who are taking up gardening (54%) say they are trying to save on food bills, according to the NGA"s annual report.
A Lot of Food in a Small s.p.a.ce
The United States" rekindled romance with gardening is proving to be a boon for some companies, such as Burpee & Co., the nation"s biggest seed retailer. The company projected its sales would jump by as much as 20% in 2009. And sure enough, with the recession and tight budgets in mind, Burpee sold its Money Garden, a $10 pack of seeds that will produce more than $650 worth of vegetables, according to the company. Each envelope contained six packets of seeds:1. Carrot Big Top 2. Tomato Steak Sandwich 3. Pea Super Snappy 4. Lettuce Burpee Big 5. Bean Heavyweight II 6. Pepper Home Run If you want to buy seeds from them, you can find Burpee"s catalog online ( other facts . . .
You don"t need much land to garden. The survey by the National Gardening a.s.sociation shows that 57% of U.S. home gardens were smaller than 100 square feet.
The NGA projected that the average garden could produce 300 pounds of fresh produce worth $600, a return of $530 based on an average investment of $70. And if you don"t have any room for a garden on your property, you can always join a community garden if there is one in your town. This is often a good option for urban gardeners. You can search for one in your neighborhood at the American Community Gardening a.s.sociation: provide enough produce for a family of four, the Oregon State Extension Service says you"ll need a 30 x 30 foot garden.5 If you also plan to supply your table and can, freeze, or dehydrate your vegetables, you may need a garden twice this size. However, the bigger your garden, the more time you"re going to have to spend on it on a weekly basis.
The traditional method of vegetable garden design is to plant long rows. Most home gardeners now opt for planting in beds rather than rows. This method allows you to concentrate your compost on the area where the plants are growing rather than wasting it on the paths between the rows. Walking between the rows also ruins the soil structure, so beds are really a better way to go.
The beds should be small enough so that you can easily reach in to weed and harvest all the plants without stepping on the bed itself.
If you have a problem with too much water in your garden, raising your beds by about eight to 12 inches will improve drainage and the soil will stay warmer in colder weather, such as early spring. If your problem is sandy, too - dry soil, you can line the bottom of a raised garden bed with cloth or newspaper to aid water retention.
Victory gardens are back in style. Mich.e.l.le Obama planted the first White House Victory Garden since Eleanor Roosevelt planted one in 1943. It"s estimated that 40% to 50% of the fruits and vegetables consumed in the United States in 1942 to 1945 were homegrown. Back then, they were known as Victory Gardens because citizens were helping the war effort by growing their own food. Now, a victory garden of your own could help you in a battle with finances.
It"s about more than saving money. Growing your own food could be your best investment right now-it"s hard to lose money, and the food you get will be a big improvement over the stuff you find on supermarket shelves: no pesticides, no chemicals-just good old dirt and non -genetically modified seeds. The fresh vegetables, hard work and dirty hands are better for your kids, too.
Five hours a week will cover most gardening ch.o.r.es in an average suburban garden. This is after the initial planting and before harvesting; the time for those tasks will depend on what you plant and your skill level. Can you spare five hours a week? After spending a few evenings and a weekend building raised beds and filling planters with soil, my wife and I now only spend a couple hours a week watering the garden, weeding, and cutting back dead leaves.
Nielsen Media Research says that the average American watches 142 hours of TV in a month, which is close to five hours per day. Switch just a few of those hours from couch potato to actually growing potatoes, with a little fresh air and exercise thrown in, and we"d probably see the nation"s obesity rate go down significantly.
If you really don"t have time for a regular vegetable garden, consider planting fruit or nut trees; they require little in the way of heavy work, and nearly all of the work you have to do comes at harvest time. On the other hand, fruit trees take a long time to start producing fruit, and we may get to WTSHTF before your trees are ready.
Tips for Getting Started
Getting started is easy, and the garden department at Home Depot, Lowe"s, or your local nursery is a good place to ask questions. Here are a bunch more tips:1. Good soil for a good garden. I highly recommend you either use potting soil (if you"re doing container gardening) or get your soil tested. A basic soil test is inexpensive, costing as little as four to six dollars, and the results will indicate exactly what you need to add to your soil so you can grow healthy crops and reap big harvests. A quick study by a professional soil tester will tell you about the pH and nutrient content of your particular patch of earth. From there, you can add the right nutrients and get your crop off to a good start. You can find a soil test laboratory at the OrganicGardening.com web site: If there isn"t a soil test laboratory near you, you might want to consider just replacing the top layer of dirt in your garden with good quality soil.
2. Get free government help. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has Cooperative Extension System offices all over the place. There you can find out about what crops grow best in your area and also tap a treasure trove of agriculture information and advice. To find the local CES office near you, visit Start small and start smart. Gardening and horticulture doesn"t have to be back -breaking work, it depends upon how you approach it and how much you tackle.Using mulched, raised garden beds, for example, cuts down on the need to do a lot of weeding and also gets you off your knees. The Colorado State Master Gardener program has a great explanation of how to do this, which you can download from the Master Gardener web site: 4. Don"t overspend. It"s easy to go crazy at the garden store and buy everything, so remember to buy only what you need. Here are some money-saving gardening tips:* You can pick up second-hand gardening equipment (like pots and tools) quite cheaply at garage sales.
* Plan before you buy, so plants and seeds do not go to waste.
* Don"t buy more than you need. Not only equipment, but also seeds-you"d be amazed how long you can stretch out a packet of seeds in a small garden. You can store seeds from year to year, depending on the type.
* Egg cartons make great seed starters. You can push up on the bottom of the carton to release each individual plant when it"s time to transplant.
* Use the library. You don"t have to buy every gardening book in the world. Many of them are available at your local library.
* Make your own compost bin. It"s as cheap as buying a trash can with a lid. You can find do-it-yourself guides all over the Web for this; here"s one as an example: Along with being a great way to recycle your kitchen waste, a compost bin will be a cheap source of excellent compost. If you want your kitchen waste to break down faster, add worms. If a good amount of compost is incorporated into the soil, less water is needed. Compost holds six times its weight in water. This is an inexpensive way to make your soil much better for healthy plants * Potatoes, lettuce, radishes, and garlic are quite hardy and you don"t need to buy much special equipment (like greenhouses or climbing frames). I"m growing all of them.
* Share rental costs. If you need to rent a tiller or other gardening tool, see if a neighbor, family member, or friend needs it, too. Splitting the rental cost or s.p.a.ce can save a lot of money.
* Got slugs? Kill them with beer. Fill beer in a small empty container, about the size of those disposable Ziploc containers or a small b.u.t.ter tub. Dig down into the soil so the top of the container is flush with the ground. Leave it overnight and the slugs will drown in the liquid. Refill it and keep it up until you do not see any more slugs!
* Cut the bottom off a plastic gallon milk jug and place over a young plant-it will work like a miniature greenhouse. Leave off the cap to provide air circulation. Once the plant is large enough to survive on its own, remove the jug.
5. Find out what to plant and when. Your local gardening store is a wealth of information on this; likewise, if you can find a local gardening club, you"ll be ahead of the game. I also recommend checking out MotherEarthNews.com. It is chock full of great gardening tips, and importantly, it has an online guide to tell you when to plant and what crops to plant in your part of the country. You can find that by pointing your Web browser to You Should Grow Heirloom Seed Plants
Heirloom seeds and plants are varieties that were commonly grown before the advent of industrial farming. If you are a gardener, it is very important that you use these kinds of seeds.
Before agriculture was industrialized, our forefathers grew a wide variety of plants. The yields were lower, but this variety was a strength-diseases that would kill one type of corn didn"t kill another type of corn.
Big agriculture changed all that. Today, most crops are grown in large, monocultural plots. Only a few varieties of each type of crop are grown. These varieties are often selected for their productivity, their ability to withstand mechanical picking and cross-country shipping, and their tolerance to drought, frost, or pesticides.
They"re also protected by patents. I won"t go into why Monsanto may be the most evil U.S. corporation ever. Plenty of other people cover what Monsanto does regarding patents (see What both Monsanto and its critics can agree on is that the company does provide the seeds for 90% of the world"s genetically modified crops. It will go to any lengths to protect those patents, including sue farmers for growing seeds the wind planted on their land from their neighbors" crops.
The fact is that Monsanto"s dominance is making the United States dependent on seeds that the company controls-seeds that cannot be harvested from a grown plant to sow a new crop. Seeds from most modern hybrids, as genetically modified crops are called, result in seeds that range from sterile to ones that have unpredictable gene expression.
So, if civilization collapsed, and you had to grow a new crop from vegetables in your garden, and those vegetables grew from Monsanto seeds, you might have some difficulty.
In case you"re wondering, Burpee-a Philadelphia-based family seed company for over 100 years-is not owned by Monsanto. Burpee is privately owned, but the company does carry some Seminis seeds, and Monsanto now owns Seminis.
Plenty of heirloom seeds can still produce impressive yields. You"ll be doing yourself and the planet a favor if you grow them.
There are free online guides to gardening. Along with MotherEarthNews.com, here are a few others I"ve found useful:* The Garden Helper: * Victory Seed Company: (a source of heirloom seeds) * MasterGardening.com: "But I Have No Yard!"
Ah, the mournful wail of the zero lot- line suburbanite. If you really don"t have s.p.a.ce for a standard garden, you can always try micro - gardening-intensive gardening in a small s.p.a.ce. You don "t have to grow all of your own food. But anyone has the room for a small garden, even if they live in a condo (okay, that"s a really small garden).
Here are some micro-gardening tips . . .
A garden can be a collection of large pots. Even better, if you can build an enclosed area as small as three feet by three feet, you can build a raised bed garden. Make it as large as possible in your small s.p.a.ce. Home Depot sells eight- foot- long landscape four-by- four lumber for cheap. They"ll cut those boards to size for you, and you can nail them together. I used six- inch nails. My sister, who also does raised bed gardening, uses plain" ol boards and much shorter nails.
Once you build the enclosure, line the bottom of it with thick cloth, such as landscape fabric or rock wool. Or, use multiple layers of newspapers and cardboard if you don"t have the cloth. This will help your raised garden bed retain moisture so you won"t have to water it so much.
Fill it with a mixture of top soil and fertilizer, or you can use a premixed planting soil. You can estimate the amount you will need by multiplying the width by the length by the height to determine the cubic feet of soil needed. For example, if your garden is four feet by eight feet by two feet, you would need approximately 64 cubic feet of soil. Unless you"re investing in some fancy-pants wood for the enclosure, the soil will probably be the most expensive thing in your micro garden.
For the price of eight pieces of lumber, some nails, and potting soil, you can have a great raised-bed box garden. Once the soil is in place, mark off sections of the garden for each of the selected vegetables. Don"t crowd the garden-plants need s.p.a.ce to grow.
How Global Warming Will Affect Your Garden
Every gardening book refers to plant hardiness zones, also known as climate zones or growing zones. Calculated by the USDA, the hardiness map divides North America into 11 lat.i.tudinal zones, each representing a 10F range of average annual minimum temperature-the coldest lows that can be expected in that area. Zones 2 through 10 are each subdivided into two sections-a and b-that represent 5F ranges. Zone 11 (southern Mexico and much of Hawaii) is tropical, with winter lows above 40F.
Basically, plant hardiness zones are a guide to help you know which plants will grow where you live, so you don "t plant things that will soon die just because they can"t handle your region"s temperatures.
Get in the zone.
So that sounds simple enough. Except, thanks to global warming, the hardiness zones are moving. The National Arbor Day Foundation has released an updated hardiness zone map. (See Figure 9.1.) You can find the original at the Arbor Day Foundation web site: And you can see how global warming changed the Arbor Day Foundation"s map in this online animation: USDA originally rejected the Arbor Day Foundation map, but that was during the Bush Administration, which seemed to think it could clap real hard and wish global warming out of existence. Now, finally, the USDA should follow with an official map of its own. A sneak preview of the new USDA map raised hackles among some gardening experts who have seen it. For example, Washington D.C., which previously was a climate fence-sitter, has been swallowed by a southern climate zone, the same zone as North Carolina.
Figure 9.1 Global Warming Moves Planting Zones North Source: National Arbor Day Foundation.
Along with the fact that plant hardiness zones are sliding all over the map, there are other problems that global warming raises for gardeners.
* Earlier spring warming does not rule out sudden drops in temperature. If the trees are blooming earlier, a sudden cold spell can bring the risk of frost damage to flowers and developing fruit.
* There"s increased danger of drought and extreme precipitation events-what some scientists now call global weirding.
* Weeds like poison ivy and ragweed are thriving. With higher temps and increased CO2, ragweed produces 10 times the amount of pollen.
* Invasive plants like English ivy and j.a.panese honeysuckle are thriving under the changed conditions.
* Canada thistle has become more resistant to herbicides, requiring three times the dosage in the presence of higher carbon dioxide.
The point is, local climates are changing, as are the plants that thrive in them. What worked for your grandfather may not work for you. It makes it all the more important to do your research. Local nurseries should have the scoop on what"s working in your area now.
A Useful List of Gardening Do"s
I"m not a great gardener. But there are a few things I "ve picked up. So here"s my list of Gardening Do"s-you may find them useful.
Chose the best available site for your garden. Situate your vegetable garden in a sunny place (six to 10 hours of sunshine per day) and start growing food early in the spring. Keep planting all summer long so something fresh and tasty is always ready to harvest. If you can, place the garden near your kitchen. It will be easy to go pick a few things you need, and you can spy on the garden from your window.
Be aggressive with weeds. Weeds rob your plants of water and nutrients, so it"s very important to keep them at bay. The best way to remove weeds is to chop off the top of the weed at ground level. You might have to repeat this a few times, but the weed will die eventually.
Use mulch. Organic mulches such as gra.s.s clippings, wood chips, old leaves, compost or straws help improve the soil by adding organic matter as they decompose. Mulch also may encourage the growth of worms and other beneficial soil organisms that can help improve soil structure and the availability of nutrients for plants. Mulch should also cut down on weeding and watering.
Water enough (but not too much). Proper watering is the most difficult part of growing a garden. Roots need to stay moist, but not too moist since roots do not grow in the soil but in the air between it. In other words, with too much water your can actually drown your plants. Complicating things, the visual signs of overwatering are the exact same as under-watering-wilted leaves and yellowish color.
The key is the soil. If you have sandy soil, you"re going to water about twice as often as loamy soil and three times as much as soil that contains a lot of clay.
A guideline is that mature plants need one to two inches of rain per week in summer (more for hot climates). You should provide whatever portion of this moisture is lacking. One inch of rain equals 65 gallons per 100 square feet of garden s.p.a.ce. A rule of thumb is to water your vegetables at least twice a week. With adequate organic soil content, the garden should be able to go two to seven days between irrigations. But this is just a guide. Along with soil composition, the time of the season, stage of plant development, and many other factors affect the amount of water required.
A drip system, which is an irrigation method that delivers small amounts of water to the roots of plants, will make your life easier, though it involves time, effort, and expense at the start. A drip system on a mulched garden reduces water need by around 50%.
Finally, water on a consistent schedule: It is easy to forget the last time you watered your garden, and watering a few days late or early can have a significant effect on your harvest.
Fertilize! In addition to water, air, and sunshine, plants need nutrients. Nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), and pota.s.sium or potash (K) are the common fertilizer nutrients. These three-N, P, and K-are the most heavily used nutrients, and you"ll need to apply them every year.
How to Plant a Three Sisters Garden The Native Americans knew how to farm and how to farm well-they taught the pilgrims a thing or two. One of the basic native farming traditions in the Northeast, where I grew up, is the Three Sisters Garden.
The three sisters are corn, beans, and squash. The old legend goes that they were originally three sisters who could only grow and thrive together. What the natives were telling us is these are great complimentary plants, as they build on each other"s strengths.
Corn provides a natural pole for bean vines to climb. Beans are nitrogen fixers, adding nitrogen to the ground, which helps the next year"s corn crop. And squash has lots of shallow vines and leaves, which keep weeds down and prevent soil moisture from evaporating.
If you want to try gardening native style, here"s what to do:* Use a hoe to create a mound of soil approximately five feet across and one foot high.