Green manures (also called cover crops) will improve soil quality A green manure crop is plowed under right in place, adding organic matter high in nitrogen to the soil. In decomposing, it produces humic acid, which helps release locked-up minerals, so you need to add less fertilizer in other forms. Read the rest of this entry »

Leave two hands free for harvesting raspberries, blackberries, and highbush blueberries. Tie the gathering bucket around your waist. Pick more berries in less time.

Don’t bother to wash raspberries. It makes them soggy and is a waste of time. Just eat. Read the rest of this entry »

The extreme case of the lazy gardener might be the college professor who planted his entire vegetable patch in spring and never looked at it again until it was time to harvest. He overplanted and just let the whole business go weedy. He got enough food for the family out of the enterprise, and that was all he was after in the first place.

Most of us aren’t that lazy. We take pride in order and control. The specter of carefully planned and planted crops being choked by weeds makes us shiver. Read the rest of this entry »

The only things I worry about with succession crops are getting seeds to germinate in hot, dry weather and keeping transplants watered so they’ll root quickly with no moisture stress.

When it’s hot and dry and the soil doesn’t have much moisture, seeds can start to germinate only to run out of moisture. That kills them.

To avoid this, plant seeds a little bit deeper, an extra 1/4 to 1/2 inch for small seeds, an extra 1/2 to ³ inch for larger seeds. The very top of the soil may be dry, but you’d be amazed at how well seeds use the small amounts of moisture beneath the soil surface. Also, I time my succession crops so that they’re sown just before or just after a rain. With clay soil it’s wise to plant before a rain. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve harvested peas and turned under the plants while they were still green and tender, you have put green manure in your soil. Any green plant spaded or tilled back into the soil can be called green manure. Some green manure crops are grown just to be plowed back into the soil while they are still green and rich in organic matter. Alfalfa, buckwheat, and annual ryegrass are a few examples. There are many others.

You might hear green manure crops being called “cover crops” or “catch crops.” These names indicate two of the jobs of a green manure crop:

1. To cover bare soil at the end of the season. This protects it from erosion over the winter. Read the rest of this entry »

Amount needed per 1,000 sq. ft. … 10 lbs. Approximate cost/lb. … $1.40-$1.70 Varieties: Little Marvel, Wando, Progress No. 9 Best time to plant: early spring or early fall.

I like garden peas as a green manure crop because I can plant them very early and because they produce so much food for so little work. I call them an

“edible” green manure crop because I don’t till them in until after Jan and I harvest bushels of peas for freezing and eating, and to give to friends and neighbors. Read the rest of this entry »

Amount per 1,000 sq. ft….2-3 lbs.

Approximate cost/lb….$0.55 ($23.50 for 50-pound bag.)

Varieties: very important to buy only annual ryegrass. Don’t be confused by similar crops or names.

Best time to plant: midsummer through early fall.

I plant annual ryegrass up to about 3 weeks before our first hard frost. It grows fast, but it needs time to put on some lush top growth before the cold weather hits. Like buckwheat, it can be planted in all regions and in all soils with good success. Read the rest of this entry »

Summer workers in your nitrogen factory

Amount per 1,000 sq. ft. … 10 lbs. Approximate cost/lb. … $1-$2.

Varieties: your favorite green or yellow bush varieties, such as Contender, Eastern Butterwax, etc. Or shell beans such as French Horticultural, or lima beans (seeds are slightly more expensive). In South: plant favorite Southern peas.

Best time to plant: anytime after last spring frost and up to 8 weeks before expected first fall frost. Read the rest of this entry »

1. Prepare a good seedbed. If the area has plant residues, spade them into the soil or pull them and pile them on a compost pile. Some crops with heavy stalks and stems, such as corn, broccoli, and cauliflower, are best pulled out and worked into your compost pile. Some of the greens and vine crops are easier to dig in. Loosen the soil to a depth of 6 to 8 inches. Give the area a final raking. As you do this, step backwards so that you can rake over your footprints. Read the rest of this entry »

Beans have been the most important vegetable crop through the ages. They are the best vegetable source of life-giving protein, and today in many societies, beans are still the staple of life. Beans are also the one protein source you can keep for a long time without processing. And you can get a heavy harvest from a small amount of work.

Our family relied on dry beans when Iwas young. Every Saturday night (if not more often), the heart of our family meal, like the traditional New England Saturday supper, was baked beans. Read the rest of this entry »

I blanch it with its own leaves

A thriving row of cauliflower is a spectacular sight in the vegetable garden, but few people think they can have great success with it. I think it’s as easy to grow as any cabbage family crop. Cauliflower is less tolerant to hot weather than its relatives, though, so it’s important to set your plants out very early or plan on a fall crop. If the heads mature in the heat, they’re apt to have a bitter taste or go by very quickly.

For your first crop, set out some plants 3 or 4 weeks before the average date of the last spring frost. Pinch off a couple of the lower leaves.

As cauliflower heads get to be 4 to 5 inches across, they should be blanched by preventing sunlight from reaching the heads. Read the rest of this entry »

A good potato crop starts with good seed potatoes. Get the best ones you can because you don’t have many chances at planting time. A garden store will have certified seed potatoes that are free of disease. These are the best. Don’t rely on old potatoes from your root cellar because they could be carrying disease organisms without showing it.

When you buy seed potatoes, you’ll get some small ones. Plant these whole. Cut the bigger ones into two or three blocky pieces, being sure to cut them so that each piece has two or three buds, or “eyes.” I cut up seed potatoes a day or two before planting and leave them in a warm place. This gives the cut surfaces time to heal over and dry out a little.

I also douse seed potatoes with sulfur immediately after cutting them up. Sulfur powder is a cheap, natural protectant available at most drug stores. Two ounces will protect 10 pounds of seed potatoes. Put the cut and whole potatoes in a paper bag. Add 1 or 2 tablespoons of sulfur and shake the bag. The powder sticks to the potatoes and helps keep out rot organisms. This sulfur also will lower the soil pH around the potatoes a bit. That’s good because potatoes like an acid soil. Read the rest of this entry »

If you have a big garden and a tiller, use this method to plant vine crops and you’ll save a lot of time.

1. I till the planting area about 6 to 8 inches down. Then I slip my furrowing attachment onto my tiller and plow a 4- or 6-inch furrow where the row will be. The straighter the better.
2. I sprinkle in compost or other natural fertilizers, or place a thin band of 5-10-10 fertilizer at the, bottom of the furrow. Vine crops like fertilizer; put it where the roots will find it.
3. I cover the fertilizer with soil from the sides of the furrow and level it out. (Whenever I plant seeds, I get the soil as smooth and level as possible.) Read the rest of this entry »

Even more of us are besotted about strawberries and here the process is a good deal simpler. Barrels provided with planting holes, or terracotta planting pots with similarly distributed holes, make a most attractive sight when filled with merrily flowering and then ripening fruit. The plastic planters sold for the purpose are less pleasing to look at in themselves but equally good for growing good clean fruit, while growing bags and boxes can be used for alpine strawberries. These are rather more of a myth than a meal, since they tend to produce too little fruit at one time to satisfy anything but the most elfin appetite. But they are undeniably a treat. Read the rest of this entry »

Cucumbers have come on a great deal since the old days when they needed expert attention to get anything other than a miserable crop of bitter fruit. There are now all-female varieties that save you the effort of removing the male flowers that produce bitter fruit and there are also bitter-free varieties. Nevertheless, cucumbers are something of a specialist crop. If you feel like trying them, buy ready-grown plants and put them three to a growing bag or singly in pots. The outdoor or ridge varieties are easiest and for a novelty crop you could try to get hold of plants of ‘Crystal Apple‘, which, for some reason or other, produces cucumbers the size, shape and colour of a large lemon. ‘Sweet Success’ is an all-female plant that can be grown out of doors in a container and ‘Patio-Pik’ claims to take up no more room than a cabbage and endure neglect yet still produce more than thirty cucumbers per plant. I haven’t tried it myself but, even allowing for a bit of horticultural hyperbole, it sounds just the thing for the window box gardener. Read the rest of this entry »

In the days when half an acre was regarded as a small garden the idea of growing vegetables in window boxes would have been a huge joke. Today, with our smaller plots and smaller families, the idea is not so laughable. Seedsmen, too, have been working for us to produce dwarfer, tidier plants that can be accommodated in boxes, tubs and other containers. There are, too, the ubiquitous growing bags so that anyone with a fancy for home-grown beans or peppers or tomatoes or other salad crops can easily indulge this. All right, you will hardly have surplusfor freezing but you should be able to enjoy good early pickings. And what a triumph, to be able to serve French beans with a real snap to them, freshly picked from your own window sill. French beans, especially the dwarf varieties that need no staking, are a vegetable particularly suited to container growing. Read the rest of this entry »