Starting Out

This blog is to help make vegetable gardening easy for people who haven't done it before, or people who did try it and didn't find it easy.

Gardening books have often given me information overload, and they are often intimidatingly perfectionist. On the other hand, web sites are mostly jumbled and confusing and contradict each other.

So to make growing a garden easy, and to avoid information overload, this blog proceeds step by step, week by week, just telling you what you need to do next.

To help keep it simple, we:

• keep it small (keeps the work load down)
• go week by week (keeps the mental work load down)
• grow only easy plants (see the short list)
• use easy, natural methods (effective modern organic approaches)

You can grow lots of different, as long as there's enough sun: on a balcony, in your flower beds, in pots on your porch - those can all be good options.

So if you'd like to grow some vegetables but think it's too hard, follow along, and I'll take you step by step through the gardening year. 

I'll be timing the instructions for Toronto - taking into account the weather and so forth. But if you're somewhere outside of the Toronto area, let me know in the comments, and I'll try to give you some hints about what to do differently.

What now?

Want to get started?  It's still only February, but you could take a look at the easy vegetables short list.

Or do you doubt it can really be easy?  Read more about how we keep it simple.

Want to know more about container gardening?  This Toronto book project proposal includes some video footage which might give you ideas.  You can find the book itself for sale by the author here.

Or just check back next week for the first step: Choosing your plot.

2012 season coming soon...

I'll be starting up this blog again soon for 2012.

Just like last year, I'll help new gardeners through the year step by step, keeping things as simple and straightforward as I can.

Freezing Temperatures Tonight (pick your tomatoes)

It's kind of late for this - I wish I'd thought to post about this a few days ago - but freezing temperatures are forecast for tonight.

Plants that were fine to plant in early spring should also be fine now at these temperatures, e.g. chard, arugula, mizuna, mustard greens.  (Chard is the only one that will still be around from spring, but you might have planted more of the others later or have "volunteers" growing from the left-over seeds.)

However, if you have basil outside or still have tomatoes on the vine, you probably should pick them right now (I mean: right now, before you go to bed!), even if they are still green.  Otherwise, they may be destroyed outside tonight.

Even picked green, larger tomatoes will usually ripen inside in a few days or weeks, if they're weren't extremely green. Just leave them sitting out at room temperature, and use them as they ripen.  (I have found cherry tomatoes don't ripen as well, but if they are already partly changed colour, they will probably make it.)  Green or partially ripe tomatoes can also be good cooked or preserved in various ways - you'll find lots of recipes online, of course.

Note that depending on your location, you may not actually hit the forecast low.  The urban heat effect can make a few degrees of difference - often it seems like my location at Bloor and Dufferin gets milder temperatures than the Environment Canada forecasts, and further east, past Christie from Bloor southwards often seems noticeably even warmer.

You may also be able cover your plants with a blanket, and that might be enough to protect them.

I picked mine just as it was getting dark, and then realized I should write this.  But now you'll need a flashlight.

Winding Down

Usually my gardening winds down by this time of year.  The work is mainly harvesting, rather than weeding and watering.  (And, it seems, not much blogging either.)

From the short list vegetables, you will probably still be able to harvest climbing beans, chard, chicory, cherry tomatoes, basil, and nasturtiums - all right until the first frost, which usually doesn't arrive in Toronto until October; or even later some years.  Chard and chicory will usually survive longer, until things really start to freeze hard in November some time.  One year, I was still getting greens in December, but that's unusual.

If you grew arugula, mustard greens, or mizuna in the spring, and they went to seed, you may have small volunteer seedlings growing in the same place now.  They are likely to grow quite well and give you some fall greens to eat.

This year, by the way, we are getting very little fall rain, so you probably should be watering if you still have vegetables out there.

For myself, I am doing more fall gardening this year, because I've done fall plantings of some of the spring vegetables.  Many people say it works great, but I haven't usually done it.  Depending on the results this year, I may include that in next year's version of this blog.


Feedback

Finally, I'd really love to have feedback about this blog, to help me improve it for next year.

My main goal is to make it very easy for new gardeners to garden successfully for the first time, without having to learn a lot in advance.  How do you think I could do that better?

It would help me a lot to hear what you think.  You can add comments here, or email me at sideplot@gmail.com to let me know.

Watering, Harvesting, Collecting Mustard Seed

If you are growing bush beans, chances are you have seen the first small white or pink flowers, and maybe small beans are already forming. If you are growing tomatoes, the plants likely have small green fruit, or perhaps even ripening ones if you planted quite large seedlings.

Basil plants are probably large now if you bought seedlings, or maybe even if you grew your own from seed. You can start to pick occasionally from your basil plant once it's a foot high or so, and more as it gets larger. A few fresh leaves are amazing chopped raw into a salad or in a sandwich. Rather than pick the lower leaves, it's actually good to pick an end cluster of basil leaves at the top of a stem (especially when flowers start to form there). Pick off the top part of a stem, just above a pair of healthy leaves below. When you do that, new stems will start to grow from the where that lower pair of large leaves join the stem. The replacement stems will be more numerous than what you picked first, and your plant will become nice and bushy, rather than tall and spindly as it would be if you picked the lower leaves first.

Watering Needed

In this weather, you should be watering things deeply at least once a week, possibly more. Obviously if plants are wilting, they need more! On the other hand, watering too much causes problems. (Okay, I don't know what those problems are: too much care has never been one of my gardening problems.)

For plants growing in the ground, once your plants are large so that they are fully shading their own ground, evaporation will be less, and they should have a well-developed root system. The ones on the short list will be fine with a deep watering once a week or so. As I mentioned before, a deep watering means enough water to soak deeply into the soil. You might find a different way, but I use a bucket, and a small container to pour water from the bucket around each plant. I make a small pool, and each time the small pool soaks in completely I pour some more, until I've percolated water down 2 or 3 times for each large plant. I do just use my intuition for how much - if you need more guidance, I'm not a good source!

For plants in containers, with the high heat and unusually dry weather (for Toronto) we've been having, you may need to water more often, perhaps every few days. Poking into the soil can give you some sense of how much moisture is retained. This is when pots within pots can provide a little protection from the worst heat.

Collecting Mustard Family Seeds

If you let them grow out, then your mustard family plants: arugula, mizuna, and mustard, by now will probably have ripened seed pods. Some may not yet: usually mizuna is first, arugula is second, and mustard is last.

If you want to keep seed for next year, you can collect seed when the pods have dried out enough to pop open almost at a touch.  I rarely buy seeds for these three, since they are very easy to collect and the seeds keep very well. The seeds I collect always sprout well for me the next spring.

Hold a round container (like a large plastic yoghurt container, for example) right beneath the pods hanging from their stems. Roll the pods between your fingers. As the pods open, some will drop their seeds; other pods will open but fall into the container themselves. When you have a container full of tiny black or brown seeds and dry pods, roll the pods in the container with your fingers some more to get all the seeds out of them.

The seeds now should be settled mainly on the bottom of the container, and the pods on top of them. You can pick out the pods, but that is a bit tedious. What's more fun is to blow (very gently at first!) slightly downwards along the inside of one side of the container. Your breath will circle around in the container and swirl the dry pods right up and out of container surprisingly quickly, while the small seeds will stay in the bottom as long as you don't blow too hard. (Okay, I always get some pods in my face. It always happens faster than I think.)

After you separate the seeds, you should leave them out in an open bowl or container on a shelf for several weeks to make sure they have time to dry fully. After that you can put them in a paper envelope and store them in a basically dry place. Make sure to label each envelope with the type of plant and the year. It's probably impossible to tell from looking whether it's mustard, mizuna, or arugula seed, and you also want to make sure that each year you are planting the previous year's seed. (If you collect from several of these, and they are sitting in bowls drying at the same time, you may also need to label the bowls.)

Just Keep Going

If you grew spring stuff, hopefully you are harvesting happily now. The only thing from the early group that is still small now for me is chard. I've eaten a bit, but not much.

The things planted in late spring are probably still a while away: my beans are still small plants with no flowers yet. I have the very first one or two tiny green tomatoes forming, on the two plants that I bought as large seedlings. My own smaller seedlings which I started myself have not yet grown to flowering size. My basil is still extremely tiny.

Anyway, now that the plants are bigger, it's usually easier to manage them. Just keep up on weeding, and watering them (not this weekend, obviously, if you're growing them in the open). Once plants are well established, most of them need only a good, deep watering once a week. Deep means you pour water into the pot, trench, or depression a few times, so that the water can flow down far into the soil, where the roots grow. Many plants will have roots that go several feet or more under the soil surface, and that is where you want the water (where it won't evaporate the next day).

If you have any questions, please ask.

Because I have had more insect trouble this year than before, I've learned more about controlling insects this year. All my insect problem seem to have reduced to a more normal state: a few bites and holes here and there. Hand-picking the large ones, and diatomaceous earth for the small ones seems to have worked.

For the first time I've also been using my Korean "Homi" garden tool to weed with the blade. (Before I only used it for digging to loosen and prepare the soil for planting.) To weed, you run the straight edge of the tool (its blade) along the soil surface, cutting off small weeds. Farmers use long handled tools to weed like this, so they can do long rows very fast. Mine is a short one like a trowel. It takes a bit of practice and care to weed like this, especially so you don't kill your own plants too, but it's definitely faster than hand weeding. (On the other hand, if you have a nice small patch, hand-weeding won't take long. It's all I've done in the past.)

Vegetable Harvesting Hints, and Tomato Side Shoots

Tomato Side Shoots

Tomatoes are naturally large spreading vines. Varieties that are not listed as determinate on the package will grow this way. Heritage and open-pollinated varieties are mostly indeterminate, meaning they will grow continuously as spreading vines, and if they are cherry tomatoes, produce more and more fruit all the while, until the frost kills them.

That's great: that's why cherry tomatoes are on the short list. They just keep growing larger and growing more fruit.

However, there can be too much of a good thing. As they grow, they like to send out more and more side branches. These will fill up your garden with tomato branches. The side shoots themselves have side shoots, so this is literally exponential growth we are talking about.

Therefore it's normal to pinch off some or all side branches while they are just starting out. (People also say the excessive leaf growth will use resources and slow the production of the fruit. I'm not sure this is true for vigorous cherry tomatoes, since every branch seems to produce more fruit. Space is the main issue with cherry tomatoes.)

It takes a bit of practice to spot the side shoots while they are small. They start out in the V where each of the tomato's big compound leaf stems meets its main stem. (The botical term for this spot where new stems emerge is called the leaf axil.) Left alone, the side shoots quickly grow into a full-fledged stem, with leaves, fruit, and... more side shoots of their own. Every single leaf spawns a side shoot, and every single side-shoot's leaves spawn their own side shoots.

I usually aim to allow a few branches on each plant, and pinch off all the rest. They grow so fast some always get away from me. If they're not in a bad place, I may let the extra one grow, or I may cut it off even if it's already somewhat large.

On the other hand, if you are totally out of vertical space, you can also cut stems off at the ends so they don't grow longer. But if you prevent all new growth, you will also prevent all new fruit. In that case, you might want to allow new side shoots to grow from below.

Harvesting Vegetables

I should have thought to talk about this earlier. I'm not sure how much of this is obvious.

For the leaf vegetables (arugula, mizuna, mustard, chard, basil), you can just keep harvesting the largest leaves, while always leaving enough leaf area on the plant so it can feed itself to grow more leaves or grow seed (if you want to collect seed). You don't need to cut them: just break the leaf stem off near the base.

By this time of year, arugula, mizuna, and mustard usually have also started growing tall seed stalks with only small leaves on them. You can still continue to harvest leaves off the seed stalks, and also you can eat the flowers (which are essentially the same as extremely tiny broccoli florets). Even the seed pods are edible, though I find them tough. Anyway, these are all good ones to collect your own seed from, to plant next year, so don't eat all the flowers and pods if you want to do that. When they dry out completely, you can collect the seed. (More about that in a future post.)

Pea pods may also be ready, depending on when you planted. They are tenderer if you pick smaller pods, of course. I have heard that they bear more peas if you don't let any pods mature, but I'm not sure if that's really true. Again, you may want to collect seeds for next year, in which case you'll have to let some pods mature, later when the plants are getting close to the end. (Pea plants finish and die by mid-summer.) Beans are young yet, but will be similar, except that climbing beans continue to produce beans all summer, slowing down gradually through the summer and into the fall.

Basil branches side shoots extensively, a lot like tomatoes do, but they are much smaller plants, so space is not an issue. What it does mean is that you can pick off the end clusters of branches, and let the new growth generate from those leaf axils. The supply of fresh leaves lasts until the first frost if you do this. When basil starts to get big, it will also start to produce flowers, and rumor has it that you should pull off the flowers to keep the plant growing actively, or for better tasting leaves. Again, of course, you will want to let some flowers mature at some point if you want to keep seed for next year. I do pick off the flowers as they form (before they open), and my plants keep going all summer and fall. At some point I pick a few whole large plants to make pesto with. In late summer I also let a few flower and produce seed.