3 Things You Need to Know to Start a Kitchen Garden
A few days ago I gave away some extra tomato seedlings on Instagram and was so surprised by the number of people who expressed something along the lines of “I’ll take them, if you tell me what to do!” I definitely didn’t have enough tomatoes for everyone who wanted to adopt them, but I can help give you guidance on how to get started with your own. I remember all too well the intimidation I felt before planting my first vegetables (just!) two years ago, but the only way to get over that initial reticence is just to dive in and try things. And to do that, there are only a very few things you need to know first. I’ve written them out for you here.
Know your light. This is the most important piece of the puzzle, because it’s the only thing you can’t easily change. The amount of sunlight in any given spot is generally a fixed variable, though it does change by season because of tree cover, day length, and the angle of the sun. The best thing to do is track it carefully, making notes of which spots the sun is hitting on the hour. For a summer garden, all you need to be sure of is where the sun is hitting right now. (If you plan to do a winter garden later, you can repeat the exercise at a different time of year. I was surprised after doing this last winter that I had about three hours less sun in the same area, which meant I had trouble growing winter crops in my summer garden plot.) “Full sun” is 6 hours or more. If you have at least 6 hours, you can grow the widest variety of crops. Fruiting crops like tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers do best with 6+ hours to get maximum photosynthetic energy for fruit production. If you have between 4 and 6 hours, you can grow root vegetables (carrots, radishes, potatoes, beets, etc). With less than 4 hours of light, you can still grow a thriving salad greens + herb garden. Your light tracking activity might instantly determine where your garden needs to go. We have a lot of large trees on our property, and there is only one spot that makes sense for an in-ground garden. We do have plans for a classic courtyard kitchen garden with raised beds, but that probably won’t be until 2021 or 2022. For now, we let the light determine where we grow things in-ground. It took a bit of sweat equity, but not a lot of money to get started.
Amend your soil. This section is primarily for in-ground gardens. If you plan to build a raised bed or beds, then you will be filling those with a good portion of potting medium and likely only adding a small portion of native soil to inoculate the areas with beneficial microorganisms. In my area of upstate South Carolina, we have predominantly clay or clay loam soils. This is both good news and bad news. The good news is that the soil holds onto both water and nutrients, reducing the need for water and fertilizer inputs. A great way to tell what soil you have is to dig out a small handful, get it slightly wet, and then squeeze. If the soil doesn’t stick together at all, there’s a good chance it’s largely sandy. If it sticks together somewhat but quickly crumbles when poked, you have a balanced loam. If you can squeeze the wet soil into a ribbon and almost mold it, that’s clay. Water runs through sand extremely quickly, loam is in the middle, and clay holds water the most. This can also be bad news if you’re in a low area where water tends to collect. Just like vegetables don’t like to dry out completely, they also don’t like to sit in soggy soil, which can lead to root rot. Fortunately, the prescription for whatever kind of soil you have is similar: add organic matter. Organic matter can take in the form of purchased mushroom compost or soil conditioner, homemade compost, or composted manure (from herbivores or chickens - no dogs or cats). OM has almost magical powers for soil improvement. It aids with drainage in heavy clay soil and it adds water-holding power in lighter sandy soils. It encourages beneficial soil life like microorganisms and earth worms to populate your garden and keep the ground aerated and healthy. If you are living in a new or recent build, there’s a good chance that a part of the grading process included scraping off all of the topsoil and actually selling it to make money, so what you’re left with is subsoil - which looks like the hardest clay and rocks in our area. If this is your case, it’s even more essential to amend your soil with a load of purchased topsoil plus some extra compost. In large areas or areas with very poor or abused soil, the most economical way to amend is to buy topsoil or compost by the scoop or dump truck load, rather than by the bag. Some places, such as farms or local waste processing facilities, even give away compost. The downside of this method it’s probably not going to be sterilized (weed seeds!) and you don’t have a way to know what exactly went into it (treated or sprayed material?), which can be a concern if you’re trying to grow organic. We learned this the hard way when we dumped a load of composted horse manure from a local farm on the garden over the winter. It’s beautiful and rich and has already cut down on our watering load this season… but it’s absolutely full of weed seeds from everything the horses ate, so I’ve created a huge maintenance/weeding issue for myself this season. It may have been worth it, but the jury’s still out on that one.
Make watering easy. You can water a garden by hand, but having done that one year with a small 8x10 patch, let me tell you that it’s a miserable task in the heat of summer. Not only do most plants not prefer overhead watering because it encourages foliar diseases, but it’s a lot less efficient because much of the water gets dispersed in the wind, or hits the leaves and evaporates, never even making it to the roots. It’s much better both for you and the plants to set up a drip or soaker system from the beginning. It will make your job so, so much easier, and the plants will be healthier. The very simplest way (what we did for our first irrigation iteration) is to run a soaker hose through the bed area in a snaking pattern. If you have a small patch, this method should work well for you and not require the installation or setup process that can come with drip. The drawback of a soaker hose is that the pressure isn’t regulated evenly, so you can’t do a long run of connected hoses without risking an uneven flow of water from the beginning to the end. One side of your garden might be well-watered and the area at the end of a long hose run will be nearly dry. We expanded the garden last spring to four quadrants and two ancillary strips, and at that point I knew I needed to do the research and install drip irrigation. The best thing to do if you’re in the position of having a large garden or one with a complicated layout is to either pay someone to install irrigation, or if you’re up for a little DIY challenge, contact your local irrigation supply company and go talk to them about your needs. They should be motivated to help you because you’ll be buying all of the supplies from them! We’ve had a wonderful experience with a company locally (Greenville, SC) called W.P. Law.
Extras: The truth is that points 1-3 are the only real essentials. Giving plants the light they need, the soil environment they need, and the water they need are the foundation to growing a garden. Everything else is nuance and bonus. Of course, a lot of the fun is in the nuance and bonus, which is what keeps gardeners experimenting year after year, changing something here, trying a new variety or 5, testing different trellis or support options, trying special fertilizers or methods of reducing pests. I’m looking forward to bringing a human baby into the world in just a month and a half, and there are thousands of things about taking care of babies and children that I don’t know yet and will have to learn as I go along. I’m taking a lot of comfort in the idea that I could read all the books but the real education comes with diving in and doing it. Providing the basic needs of food, water, and a nurturing environment is where everything begins for both babies and plants. Since this is a post on the only things you must know to get started, this is where I’ll stop. Armed with this knowledge alone you could grow a beautiful summer garden (and I’d love if you would!) There couldn’t be a more perfect time to dive in. However, for those curious among you, I wanted to include a few of my favorite books on practical kitchen/edibles gardening. There are so many out there; these are just a handful that I love.
A Garden Can Be Anywhere by Lauri Kranz — (This is a gorgeous book - both inspiring and so helpful).
The Foodscape Revolution by Brie Arthur — (Edible plants are beautiful and incorporated with your landscaping in surprising ways!)
Kitchen Garden Revival by Nicole Burke — (This is a brand-new release, focused on raised-bed small space gardens)
The Complete Gardener by Monty Don — (This is a classic with a much wider focus but excellent section on veg gardening)