Gardening for 2006

[sunsettommy]

It is late November and the frost and snow is already coming down on us in the northern states.

It is a good time to start dreaming about next years garden.

It is a good time to plan for the garden,with this years successes and failures in mind.

It is a good time to write up a list of varieties of those veggies you like and get those favorite seed catalogues by mail or online.

I for one hopefully will buy my house with a GIANT backyard.There a huge garden will grow and that I want very much.That will be a boon for me for 2006!

This year I grew Tomatoes,Eggplants,Sweet Potatoes,Green Bush Beans,Squash,Bitter Melon,Crookneck Sqash and Lettuce.

Hopefully I grow that and a whole lot more such as Peas,Carrots,Beet Greens,Broccoli,Skirret,Kohlrabi,Muskmelons,Bennin gs Green Tint Squash,Lettuce,Cabbage,German finger potatoes,Parsnips and so on.

I plan to build a ROOT CELLAR to store the harvest for the winter.

I hope you try the wide bed gardening method,if you have not been satified with your present single row gardening method.(It is a poor use of the space)

I use the Wide Bed method as seen in Dick Raymonds JOY OF GARDENING book(by garden way),with boards added.(they make the walls of the bed)

The bed size I use is 4 feet wide by around 25 feet long and about 4-6 inches ABOVE the walking spaces surface for drainage and frost.The walking spaces in BETWEEN the beds are around 18 inches.This way most of the garden space is GROWING SPACE.NEVER walk on the beds! This way NO TILLING is ever needed and weeding is easy.

The size of the bed is good for me,but others may prefer it be 3 feet wide or 5 feet wide.I chose 4 feet wide beds because I have long arms and like to maximize the growing area of an area in the yard.I suggest that for most people 3 feet wide is ideal for easy harvesting and still large growing area.

Some vegetables grow much better in such beds as they can support each other such as Bush Beans and Peas.Yes I actually spread the seeds like grass seeds! Then with some branches added provides support for the plants as they grow.

I like to put these beds to sleep for the winter with a topping of ALFALFA hay(avoid the first years cuttings to greatly reduce the weed seeeds) on the surface.It is a great way to feed the soil and also with its growth homones seeping from the hay,makes for better next years growing conditions.Then too the weeds are suppressed and the soil stays soft.

Well anyway I hope you all have a Happy Thanksgiving and more good gardening for 2006 as well!

[Charity]

I got 4 flats of flowers and lots of veggies the other day. Time to play in the dirt again. I love spring. :-)

[Charity]

My Gardening Links :-)

http://freedomtoschool.proboards29.com/index.cgi?board=Homemaker&action=display&thread=1143946429&page=1

[Native American]

I just started my watermelon and cantaloupe seedlings this afternoon. My tomato seedlings were set out in the garden patch a week ago, along with some parsley plants I bought at Lowes. A couple of days ago I put lettuce seeds in the ground, which is something I should have done about 6 weeks ago - it's probably going to get too hot soon, and my lettuce heads will bolt.

Corn and squash seeds will go in the garden patch in another couple of weeks.

And we had a chunk of ginger root start sprouting this winter, so we saved it in the kitchen windowsill and I put it out in the herb garden a couple of days ago. It may not live through next winter outside, but maybe I can at least get some decent root growth and some new (free!) ginger root by this Fall!

Chives come up wild all over the lawns down here in Arkansas, so I dug some up before the first yard mowing (last week) and put them in the herb bed also.

[Charity]

Sounds wonderful NA :-)

It was a real suprise a few weeks ago when I went in my garden and found lots of cilantro growing from the seeds I planted last year. I love cilantro and use it all the time in cooking. This old Georgia red clay is hard to grow some things in so I have to be very selective.

[Native American]

Yes, cilantro is GREAT. We use it a lot also.

Sounds like your soil is quite similar to ours - we don't have nearly as many of the nasty rocks that we had up in eastern MA (every year I'd pull new ones out of the garden plot, after they'd float to the surface each winter) but the soil is almost pure clay. I'm trying to create a half-decent little patch of garden soil by tilling my grass clippings in with the clay, plus we save our kitchen vegetable scraps and coffee grounds and all that goes in the garden also, but it's going to take a couple of years to loosen that soil up, since I only started working on it last August when we moved here.

At least what rocks we have are quite soft, and can be easily shattered with a shovel or even just a trowel. You did not smash rocks in eastern MA like that, because they were usually a very hard granite.

[Charity]

I have been adding top soil each year to my little spot to help it along. it seems to be working. Tilling it helps a lot too.

[Native American]

Yes, vegetable matter and grass clippings are great, if you're not putting weed killer fertilizer on your lawn, or if you limit your weed killer to stuff like Roundup (or Honcho, or other such brands) which quickly breaks down and doesn't produce long-lasting negative impact on broadleaf plants.

In fact, you can actually use herbicides like Roundup or Honcho to quickly create a weed-free vegetable garden patch! Spray the stuff on, wait a couple of weeks for it to kill every living green thing, then stick the vegetable plants in the plot!

[Charity]

Well, all my plants are in the ground. Now for the waiting part. I can just taste those yummy maters right now.. Mmmmmm nothing like a cheese, mater & mayo sammich.

[The_Sonarman]

I think the 60-odd day waiting period for tomatoes drives everyone just a little crazy. I know I get tremendously impatient to see the first of the year "real maters".

[Native American]

Update on the chive transplant: most (only one appears to have survived) of the little fellas that I put in the herb bed keeled over, so that experiment was a failure http://www.freeconservatives.com/vb/images/icons/sad.gif

But at least the tomato plants are looking good (so far) and one or two of them have actually started producing flowers, which is pretty early in the season. It's been unusually warm this Spring here in northwest Arkansas, with an all-time record high set for the month of April being set last week. :licky: