Start Your Own Victory Garden...Today!

Pictured: Lettuces from our own garden

Spring is the time when most of us get the urge to start a garden. But here in the Northern Hemisphere, Autumn is about to fall upon us.

Autumn, also called Fall, is truthfully the best time to start your garden if you have never before had one.

I know...I'm crazy.

No, I'm not asking you to suddenly dive in and attempt to get some fall crops going. For the novice, this may be a bit too much. But this is a great time of year for the novice to start. Start learning, start planning, and get a big chunk of the work of starting a new bed out of the way.
Live in an apartment? Never fear. There is always container gardening, which requires just as much education. We are slowly adding more container gardening as well as back-yard gardening.

Planning

You will need to find a place appropriate to garden in. In most neighborhoods, it may be preferable to have your vegetable garden in the back yard. The primary reason is appearance...vegetable gardens tend to be ugly compared to flowers, trees, and bushes. It takes extra work to make a vegetable garden appear as pretty as a picture, and we are more concerned with the other aspects of gardening rather than its appearance to the neighborhood. So keep the vegetables in the back or side yards, and leave your front yard for the ornamental edibles, such as berry bushes and fruit trees.

The second thing you need to keep in mind is light. Most vegetables tend to prefer a sunny spot. The angle of the sun changes what area of your yard will get the most sun month to month. For instance, with our back yard, late spring and fall the very back of the property gets the most sun, while those beds closer to the house get none at all. But by mid-summer, with the neighbors trees and the sun high in the sky, this changes. Those beds closer to the house get more sun, while the bed at the very back of the property gets the least sun. So, in our case, we have to keep our cool-weather crops towards the back of the property, and the warm-season crops closer to the house.

The third part about placement is underground lines. You may have to call your local utility companies and ask them to mark where any underground utilities are. Although you shouldn't be digging down any further than a foot, there are those occasions where utility workers (cable in particular) get a wee bit lazy and bury something within a foot of the surface. And you don't want to slice through something with an electrical current using a metal shovel.

Now that you have checked for neighborhood comfort, light, and underground utilities, your next task is planning out where the bed, or beds, will be placed. If you are planning the old fashioned type of vegetable garden with traditional rows, this probably will not matter. But if you are planning on permanent beds (raised or semi-raised) with pathways in between, this is where you need to do your planning. You'll want nice, neat beds with pathways in between that go with the traffic flow. Pathways will need to be large enough to allow access by your larger equipment, such as wheelbarrows, and large enough to allow smaller people or animals to run through without having to step gingerly around your plants. You can put the borders in at this time...just remember that you will be actively digging up the soil later, which could disturb the border. Flimsy plastic borders aren't very stable. Rocks or bricks are pretty, but tend to be more expense than they are worth. We simply recycled landscaping ties, old boards, and old fence boards that we or our neighbors would have otherwise thrown out.

Preparing the bed

Before you do anything, you'll want to do a soil test. There are simple tests which you can do at home, but I caution you...these tests will not give a positive reading on any slow-release nitrogens. Out of curiosity one year, I tested everything around our house for nitrogen...the blood meal, the compost, the cow-dookie...and everything we had tested negative for any nitrogen at all. It was only the quick-release nitrogen that showed positive.

For all, you'll need to kill the grass and amend the soil. One of the best methods I have heard was to dump compost materials directly on the area and cover it with plastic (preferably black plastic). Come the next spring, you can either remove the black plastic, or you can poke holes through it and place your plants in it. Of course, I'm crazy...I like to dig the compost into the soil where the worms can get to it easily.

However, compost won't add in everything that your soil may need. You may have to raise or lower the PH of your soil, it may be lacking in calcium, iron, or other important minerals or vitamins. Remember, the reason your food has vitamins and minerals is because your food has taken it from some other source. Calcium prevents blossom-end rot, while iron helps your plants produce deep, green leaves that will also be hardier against disease.

Do not over-amend, though. This can be just as bad. Nitrogen is like bread to a plant, but too much nitrogen can "burn" a plant. We all know that a slow calorie, like whole wheat, is healthy for you...but too much sugar can give you diabetes. Your plants are no different than your own body.

Study Up

Go to gardening websites, or pick up a good book or two. I wouldn't suggest using a single source as your be-all-and-end-all of knowledge because, frankly, there are some quacks out there, or people who peddle quackery. Not only that, but what works in California or New York may not work for your area...raised beds and hoop houses just don't work around here.

Look up the different types of plants and their preferred soil, their preferred temperatures, and their preferred watering. One novice to gardening I'm connected to on Twitter had quipped, "If I got this book before hand, I'd still have my cilantro.", and a friend of mine remarks that she can't get rid of the mint she planted several years ago. You can't such throw seeds around and expect everything to work out beautifully. Plants have personalities just as much as people do.

Look up common pests and diseases, and the variety of ways to control them. That way, if you are hit by something, you don't stand there, dumbfounded, and say, "What the (expletive) is that?", and then scramble to find out what it is and what can control it. You don't have to memorize the entire book about the bug or disease, but it sure makes it easier if you can look at the plant and say, "That looks like powdery mildew. I better look up what to do about that."

Planning for Plants

You'll have to decide what you are going to plant. First, you definately do not want to purchase plants or seeds if you are not going to eat them. Its a waste of time and space. Next, you'll have to decide what will be easier to grow. For the novice, the easier, the better. I find tomatoes, peppers, radishes, and leafy veggies to be the easiest to grow, and the best when it comes straight from the garden. The best thing about radishes and leafy vegetables is that you can just broadcast the small seeds, letting them grow haphazardly within their row or bed, and you can start harvesting when they are quite young (known as baby greens) by picking a leaf or two off each plant....the rest of the plant will continue to grow. Tomatoes and peppers tend to be hardy and very forgiving. Once you have mastered the art of growing these things, you can move on and begin growing other items.

You can order your catalogues now, or look through online catalogues. A lot of survivalist companies sell bulk seed packs...I've used one of these, and found it excellent enough to order a different one this year. But then again, I've been gardening full-scale on my own for 14 years, with 30+ years of experience helping other victory gardeners and farmers. You may wish to simply start small. In other words, purchase a couple packets of leafy-vegetable seeds, and purchase your pepper and tomato plants from a nearby nursery or hardware store. If you have already purchased your survival seed packs, stick it in the freezer, and give yourself a couple of years of practice with the smaller seed packs you can purchase at your local hardware store. Disappointment and mistakes on a small scale are a lot easier to brush off than a whole acre of failure when you are first starting out.

Planning for the whoops!

Above all, I want you to plan to be disappointed. Something is bound to fail every year, even for those of us with decades of experience. This year, we've had things that failed entirely, failed slightly, or did just okay...at the same time, we've had other things that gave us an overabundance. Some things will do great one year, and are sour the next. After all, there are certain things you cannot control, the weather being the main one. Our spring-pea crop failed entirely (eaten by a pair of baby rabbits), but we've had enough cucumbers to experiment with different methods of pickling, and enough green peppers that we're giving away as much as we're preserving.

This is why we tell all novice gardeners to start small. Small failures are easier to handle, but even small successes are a complete joy. My parents, always busy with "other things", never grew more than six tomato plants a year...unlike my other relatives who got nearly all their fruits and vegetables from their gardens. But those six tomato plants were enough to make my father, who had grown up on a true homestead, happy. But for me...I just couldn't stop with six tomato plants.