Vegetables

How to start a vegetable garden, in the order the decisions come

Most vegetable gardening failures are decided before a single seed goes in, by where the garden is and how big it is. Most advice on vegetable gardening for beginners opens with what to plant, which is the third decision rather than the first. Planning is the part that pays; everything after it is maintenance. Get those two right and an average gardener grows food. Get them wrong and no amount of work later fixes it. This is the planning sequence for starting a vegetable garden, and the calendar section below is the growing season that follows it.

Site: six hours of sun, and water within reach

A vegetable garden needs at least six hours of direct sun a day to grow well, and fruiting crops such as tomato and cucumber want closer to eight. Leafy crops tolerate less, which is the only real flexibility you have. Before you dig anything, stand in the spot three times on a clear day and count the hours the sun is actually on the ground there.

• Level ground, or as close as you can get, because a slope moves both water and soil off the beds every time it rains.
• Within reach of a hose. A garden watered by carrying buckets is a garden that gets watered until July.
• Away from large tree roots, which take the water and the nutrients before your vegetables ever see them.
• Close enough to the door that you walk past it. The plot you make a trip to visit is the plot that gets checked once a week.
• Note where the frost settles. Low corners of a garden hold cold air, which shortens the growing season at both ends.

Size: start smaller than you want to

The most common beginner mistake is a garden too large to keep up with in August, when weeding and watering peak and enthusiasm does not. A 4 by 8 foot raised bed or a 10 by 10 foot plot grows a serious amount of food and can be run in twenty minutes a day.

Keep any bed no more than four feet wide, reachable from either side. Wider than that and you end up standing in it, which compacts the soil you just spent money improving.

Soil: test it before you amend it

Vegetable garden soil wants to be deep, crumbly, well drained and rich in organic matter, and the only way to know what yours lacks is a soil test through your local extension office. It costs less than one wrong season of fertilizer, and it gives you the pH and the nutrient levels rather than making you guess.

• Work in two to three inches of compost before the first planting, and add more each season rather than all at once.
• Do not add lime, sulfur or fertilizer without a test result asking for it. Most home garden soils are already high in phosphorus.
• If the ground stays wet, build up rather than dig down. Raised beds exist mostly to solve drainage.

What to grow, and whether it starts as seed or as a plant

Plan the planting around your grocery list rather than around a seed catalog, and write the plan down before you buy seeds. A row of something nobody in the house eats is work that produces resentment.

Choosing varieties, which decides more than most garden work does

Two seed packets of the same vegetable can behave like different crops, and choosing between varieties is the cheapest decision in vegetable gardening. It costs nothing at the point of purchase and it settles whether the plant fits your season, whether it resists the diseases in your ground, and how the harvest arrives.

• Days to maturity first. If the number is longer than the frost-free stretch of your growing season, no amount of care makes the crop finish, and short-season varieties exist for exactly this reason.
• Disease resistance next. The letters after a tomato name are resistance codes, and choosing a resistant variety removes more future work from a home garden than any spray does.
• Determinate or indeterminate on tomatoes. Determinate varieties set their fruit over a couple of weeks, which suits canning; indeterminate ones keep growing and producing until frost, which suits eating.
• Hybrid or open-pollinated. Hybrid seed gives uniformity and often disease resistance. Open-pollinated and heirloom varieties can be saved from your own healthy plants and come back true the following season.
• Habit and size. Bush varieties of cucumber, squash and beans exist for small gardens and containers, and they produce a real crop in a quarter of the space a vining variety needs.

Local seed guides are worth more than catalog copy here. Extension services publish variety lists tested in their own region, and a vegetable variety recommended for your state has already been grown through your summers rather than somebody else’s.

The whole thing as a short list of steps

Read as a sequence, planning and starting a vegetable garden is short. Every step below is explained above; this is the order to do them in, and each one is a place a new gardener commonly goes wrong.

• Step 1. Pick the sunniest spot you have, and check it holds six hours of direct sun rather than assuming it does.
• Step 2. Mark out a small plot or a single raised bed, four feet wide at most, so you can reach the middle without standing on the soil.
• Step 3. Send a soil sample to your local extension office, and work compost in while you wait for the result.
• Step 4. Write down the five or six vegetables your household actually eats, then check each one against the length of your growing season.
• Step 5. Buy seeds for the crops that are direct sown and transplants for the long-season crops, or start those seeds indoors six to eight weeks before your last frost.
• Step 6. Plant on your frost dates rather than on a calendar month, and plant the cool-season crops before the warm-season ones.
• Step 7. Mulch, water deeply once or twice a week, and thin the seedlings while they are still small.
• Step 8. Harvest early and keep picking, because on most crops picking is what keeps the plant producing.

The first six weeks, where most beginners lose the garden

More vegetable gardens are lost in the six weeks after planting than at any other point in the season, and the losses are rarely dramatic. Weeds take the water and the light while the seedlings are still too small to compete, so the weeding that matters is the weeding done when the weeds are barely visible and come out with a finger and thumb. Thin seedlings to the spacing on the packet even when it feels wasteful, because two crowded plants produce less between them than one plant given room to grow.

Water deeply once or twice a week rather than a little every day, so roots follow the water down instead of sitting at the surface, and put two to three inches of mulch over the bed once the soil has warmed. Mulch is the single thing that does most for a new gardener: it keeps the weeds down, holds the moisture even, and removes the daily decisions that a beginner has no basis for making yet.

The vegetable garden runs on a calendar, not on effort

Ornamental gardening forgives a late start. Vegetable growing does not, because almost every crop has a window measured in weeks, and the difference between a good year and a poor one is usually timing rather than care.

Two dates govern everything: your last spring frost and your first autumn frost. Every sowing instruction in this section is written relative to one of them, because a calendar date means nothing across a country that spans zone 3 to zone 10.

Cool season and warm season are different gardens

This is the division that beginners miss most often, and it explains failures that look inexplicable.

Cool-season crops germinate and grow in cold soil and deteriorate in heat. Beets, lettuce, spinach, brassicas, peas, carrots and garlic belong here. They are sown early in spring and again in mid to late summer for autumn, and the hot middle of the season is deliberately skipped. A beet that sizes up in July is pale and woody and no watering regime fixes it.

Warm-season crops need warm soil to germinate at all and are killed by frost. Tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, squash, beans and eggplant belong here. Seed sown into cold ground rots rather than waiting, which is why so much early enthusiasm produces empty rows.

When to plant vegetables: planting dates by crop group

There is no national answer to when to plant vegetables, because the whole schedule hangs off two local planting dates: your average last spring frost and your average first fall frost. Every window below is written relative to those, with example dates for a zone 6 garden where the last frost falls around the middle of May and the first around the start of October. Shift the whole column earlier if you garden further south and later if you garden further north, and take the exact dates from your extension office rather than from any national chart.

Two things make those planting dates work in practice. The first is soil temperature rather than air temperature: bean, cucumber and squash seed rots in cold wet ground and gains nothing from going in early, so a soil thermometer is worth more in May than a calendar is. The second is counting backwards. For a fall crop, take the days to maturity on the packet, add two weeks for the shorter days of autumn, and count back from your first frost; that arithmetic is what tells you whether a variety fits, and it is the step most home gardeners skip.

Thinning is not tidying, it is the crop

Root crops in particular are decided at the thinning stage. Beet seed is a multigerm fruit containing several seeds, so seedlings come up in competing clumps and produce leaves instead of roots unless they are separated. Carrots behave the same way from over-dense sowing.

The thinnings are usually edible, which removes the main reason people avoid the job. Beet thinnings are the best greens the plant produces.

Water evenly, because unevenness has its own diseases

Several of the most common vegetable complaints are not diseases at all, they are the plant recording an interrupted water supply.

• Blossom end rot on tomatoes: calcium the plant could not move into the fruit, from erratic watering rather than a soil shortage
• Split tomatoes and split beets: a dry spell followed by heavy water, so the inside swells faster than the skin
• Bitter cucumbers: cucurbitacins moving into the fruit under heat and drought stress
• Bolting lettuce and spinach: heat and day length, accelerated by dry roots

Mulch does more for evenness than any watering schedule, because it removes the peaks and troughs rather than reacting to them.

Rotation, which matters more in a small garden than a large one

Soil-borne diseases accumulate where the same family grows in the same ground year after year, and they cannot be cured once present. NC State asks for three to four years between nightshade crops in a bed for exactly this reason: fusarium and verticillium wilts persist in soil.

In a garden with four beds that is easy. In a garden with one bed it means containers with fresh compost for the vulnerable families, which is a real answer rather than a compromise.

Harvest earlier than feels right

Almost every vegetable is better slightly young, and almost every gardener waits. A beet over three inches is woody, a cucumber left to swell tells the plant to stop producing, a zucchini turns into a club in four days.

On plants that fruit repeatedly, picking is care rather than reward. Beans, cucumbers, zucchini and peppers all slow down or stop once a fruit is left to mature seed, because seed set is the signal the plant is waiting for.