Thread by @UrsulaV

Hello, fellow Pandemicians! Check-In Day 4. Let’s talk about starting a garden, since a lot of people have been asking!

Okay, first of all, if you have dreams of feeding yourself mostly out of your garden, abandon that for now. Unless you want this to be your second job, you are not gonna live off your garden. But you can still get a lot of good stuff and furthermore, do a lot of good for nature!

Now, unless you’re at the Arctic circle, you can grow some awesome fresh produce and herbs. So let’s start at the very basics—you are gonna need water, dirt, and sunlight.

Unless you are growing very specialized plants, tap water is fine. Run a hose, buy a watering can, use a bucket. If you use a bucket, get a nice thick handle, not the little wire, your hands will be grateful.

Dirt! Okay. The dirt in your yard may work. But—this is critical—it also may not. Many if not most residential lots have the topsoil stripped when they level the property. You can’t grow veggies in clay subsoil. You can barely grow weeds in clay subsoil.

So if you have tried to grow veggies in dirt in your yard and they didn’t do anything, it’s okay. You are not a bad gardener. That was not your failure!

So! In that case, you are gonna need a raised bed, or a container. (And on a balcony, of course, skip straight to container.) Raise everything up four inches. Edging on the bed does not have to be pretty. I’m not gonna rat you out. Cinderblocks. Fallen logs.* Whatever.

*fallen logs will only last a couple years, but by then you’ll know if you actually like gardening.

Four inches is about a minimum. You may or may not be able to d root veggies in that. Small beets, maybe. That said, if you want to get fancy and have the cinderblocks, build a big keyhole garden or whatever makes you happy. (Lots of stuff available on line.)

What you can do at first is limited by how much dirt you’ve got. If you have access to lots of dirt, build a two foot raised bed and Damn the torpedoes! If not, big containers will help.

Fill bed with dirt. Most landscaping places sell bulk dirt. Otherwise you gotta go to a feed store or big box hardware store and buy bags. That’s way more expensive, but “not having a six foot pile of dirt in the driveway” may also be worth it.

Okay! Potting soil goes in pots. Try to avoid either Miracle-Gro or Stay-Green, their cheap sibling. I like Coast of Maine and Foxfarm, myself. If you have a gigantic ass pot, you don’t actually have to fill it all the way up. Flip a cheap terra-cotta pot over and put on bottom.

(Eventually we will be making our own dirt through sound regenative farming practices, but we’re doing 101 stuff here.)

In a raised bed, lay down a double layer of cardboard over the grass and then throw in lawn trimmings, leaves, whatever you got. Manure if you can get it. THEN top with dirt. This is called lasagna gardening, works wonders.

Avoid peat if you can. Peat is unsustainably harvested.

Now! Atop this goes my favorite substance...MULCH! Oh, how I love mulch. I like a nice hardwood mulch. Do NOT use cypress, it’s unsustainable.

Honestly, though, you can literally use anything that blocks light but lets moisture through. Landscape fabric. Newspaper. Cardboard. Whatever. It May be ugly, but that’s okay! The point of this is to make a barrier that keeps soil underneath damp and at more stable temperatures.

Water thoroughly! (In lasagna gardening, water each layer.) Cut a hole in it (or make a little hole) and plant your seed!

But what seed?! Okay, we’ll get to that in part two. I gotta go do grocery curbside pickup now. Some good reading—Lasagna Gardening, Square Foot Gardening, The Bountiful Container.

Oh! Almost forgot—raised bed gardening is great if you’re disabled and can’t bend down easily. You’ll need a big damn bed, that’s the only problem, and of course it’s more expensive, because what isn’t?

If you can find the tall, narrowish Tartar brand galvanized metal raised beds—the long ones, not the circles—they’re sturdy and raise things up very nicely, and if you set it so you can easily reach all sides, you shouldn’t have to lean at all.

Likewise, weird as it sounds, if you have arthritic hands and gripping a trowel is a problem, those claw gloves are a totally different motion with no gripping. Great for digging small holes without a trowel.

Right! Where were we? Yes! Planting a seed.

Now, the seeds you can plant depends on your available light. Think about how sunny your spot is. Full sun? Part sun? Filtered shade?

Now move it down one notch because most gardeners delude themselves about available sun.

There are charts online about how many hours of sun constitutes what. This also varies by location. Desert sun is brutal compared to Pacific Northwest sun. Humidity holds heat. Etc.

Veggies are gonna vary on how much sun they want. Tomatoes want full sun. Yes, they do. No, that won’t work, not even if you use reflective mulch. Okay, fine, if you plant them against a white wall, you miiiight get a little more, but you’re pushing your luck.

Let us segue for a moment to the Ancient Bargain of Domestication, as applies to plants. Vegetables, which we are current discussing, are domesticated. The vast majority cannot grow well in the wild, or at all. They require human care.

The bargain is that domestic plants will grow in ways their wild ancestors can’t, as long as we take care of them. Think of these vegetables like Basset Hounds. They’re not wolves. They were bred to do one thing well, as long as a human too, care of them for the rest.

*took

Anyway, the point is that you can’t just chuck most vegetables in the ground and walk off and get veggies. These aren’t wild plants.

(Believe me, I learned that the hard way. I was growing native plants way before tomatoes and the standard of care each require is night and day and made me mad.)

So! Let’s start with the big one. Everybody wants to grow tomatoes.

And you know what? For most people, tomatoes are hard. They gotta have a LOT of sun and they get weird diseases and they suck up gallons of water when it’s hot. But fear not!

It turns out, what’s hard are the big slicing tomatoes. Everybody wants to grow Cherokee Purple, but that goddamn tomato is a diva. It wants exactly what it wants and it goes off its feed if the wind blows funny.

Me, I grow cherry and grape tomatoes.

Cherry and grape tomatoes are much sturdier in terms of setting fruit because they don’t have such a massive energy investment per fruit. One goes bad, meh. It’s not like find a huge tomato you were watching closely got eaten by slugs. They also will fruit in a smidge less sun.

They can train nicely to hardware cloth between two T-poles, and there are zillions of kinds. You can also now check out the Dwarf Tomato Project, which is an open source breeding project for people making container friendly tomatoes.

Now, I want to make this bit clear—there are literally thousands of cultivars of tomatoes. If you can’t grow any given one, it is not necessarily because you are a bad gardener, it is because that wasn’t the right tomato for the conditions available. Try another one, try again!

Next up, squash! You can start that from seed if this is your first garden (I recommend not starting tomatoes the first few years, unless you come from a background in, say, aquariums or illicit weed growing and love fiddling with that kinda stuff.)

Squash seeds are big and fun. You pop them in where you want them, after the soil has warmed up a bit, pat dirt over them, and voila! Until you get the borers, which is a whole nother topic for Advanced Gardening another day. Crookneck and summer squashes are easy.

They want sun, but small squash can handle a little less sun than tomatoes. They sprawl madly, though. A happy squash takes up a LOT of space. They want to be climbing vines, see, but they’re not great it. You can train them up a very sturdy trellis, but they’re a lot of plant.

Cucumbers are exactly the same as squash in terms of growing, although a small pickling type, you can often get away with the low end of full sun.

Melons are advanced level stuff. Don’t start melons for your first foray, it is a road paved with tears. And ants.

Peas are great! Plant them early—it’s late this year for me, but in more northern climes, do it! They can take cool but heat kills them. Give them something to climb and eat them raw. They’re unlikely to produce enough to do a lot of cooking unless you have scads of space.

Beans! Ah, beans. My favorites. And yet, I shall now issue this warning—you need a fair amount of space if you’re going to get large amounts of food out of them. In terms of food sufficiency, I hate to say it, but dry beans are CHEAP.

If you grow several green bean varieties and you actually cook them in a timely fashion—I.e. when they have just been picked—and you don’t do the thing where you mean to cook beans but then you’re tired and suddenly it’s a week later—you can get some good yield.

If you are like me, you know you aren’t gonna do that and so you grow dry beans. Ah—Dragon Tongue bush beans, pods good raw in salads, very pretty, if you do a daily salad or something, that’s a great choice. But mostly dry beans.

I love dry beans. I love how they look like little jewels and how you roll them around in your hand and how you strip off the drying pods and there they are. I love the thousand varieties and the names and the stories.

And, realistically, I get maybe two pounds of beans a year off my plants. And believe me, I’m out there with them harvesting each pod as it hits readiness. We get two or three nice meals out of it, then we buy black beans in a can like everybody else.

If you decide to try it though, any of the Trail of Tears varieties are very sturdy. I also get great yields in hot humid climate from Rattlesnake Pole, Mother Stallard, and Tarahumara Red.

You can grow beans in containers, BUT they require beneficial soil bacteria in order to fix nitrogen. If you are putting them in sterilized potting soil, give them a little something to get bacteria in there. I give mine a big drink of worm tea.

Beets aren’t hard if you have the soil depth, but it gets hot and they bolt—that is, go to seed. You can do them in more shade to keep them cooler, but their days are numbered. They like soft, loose soil they can wiggle around in. Of course so does everything else.

Carrots want exactly the right kind of soil. Otherwise they come out looking like knuckles. It’s not you, it’s the dirt. Carrots are cheap at the grocery store, so don’t break yourself unless you’re just really passionate about carrots.

Hot peppers are easy, bell peppers are hard. At least for me. If you don’t water a hot pepper, it just gets hotter and more pissed off. If you don’t water a bell pepper, you end up harvesting a sort of squashed pepper that is full of seeds and hatred.

Peppers also want a lot of sun. But if you’ve still got that part sun patch laying around, lettuce! Lettuce will take some shade. Downside, all the bits you want to eat? SO DOES EVERYTHING ELSE. I gave up here because of bugs. You may have better luck!

If you felt like doing a daily garden salad for one person, maybe for lunch, in spring you really could get some nice results with cut-and-come-again lettuce, a couple of peas, maybe some chickweed (you can feel smug about foraging) and just transition through the season.

Whew, that’s a lot, isn’t it? And I have to go actually work in the garden! Next time, we can talk about stuff like thinning seedlings, staking, supports, etc.

We can also cover Weird Plants That Break The Rules, like potatoes and strawberries.

If you want to know what varieties to plant in your area, looking online is best. I don’t have suggestions for every biome!

The very best resource I’ve found is Seed Savers Exchange online. They have seeds grown by gardeners all over, and if you look for gardeners from your state (or country) you can see what kinds of varieties they’re growing. Locally adapted seed is always gonna do better.

I think the Dave’s Garden website also has resources by state, but I can’t recall. Anyway, worth checking out. Or visit your local feed store! Feed stores are the great underused resource of our time! Just keep a six foot distance and shout the questions or something.

Finally, in the US your county has a County Extension Officer. Your tax dollars at work! The extension handles this sort of thing, and believe me, they probably have handouts and can tell you what to plant and when to plant it. You’re paying for them, call on them!

Now imma go weed. Check in if you need to talk, internet! We’re all in this together!