Comments on: Planning a Kitchen Garden

By: tentaculistic

tentaculistic — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 00:25:37 +0000

Somehow everything in my life this year inspired me to start a garden – well, two actually, one on my balcony in pots and one in a communal garden – and I’m so excited! There is nothing better than watching the little seedlings poke up out of the soil! I’ll probably screw up a ton this first year, but oh well, it’s a learning experience. I think next year I’ll start a Square Foot Garden, maybe even up on cinder blocks if I have a problem with critters this year.

By: Catherine

Catherine — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 00:08:54 +0000

I am starting my first gardening attempt, a modest small effort, this spring in our new home. My grandfather was an organic farmer long before it was in vogue. I loved the “cayenne/chili” spray. He always sprinkled straight cayenne pepper on his corn silk to keep the raccoons at bay. Plastic bags from the grocery store also flapped beautifully, if perhaps a little uglifully (a word?), but they worked. He loved compost tea and ladybugs, and I only hope I can match my grandmother’s abilities with canning. My mother only was able to drink soda-pop when it was time to make catchup! Here’s to beautiful weather to all across this wonderful land!

By: joan smith

joan smith — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 22:52:53 +0000

I have an upside down planter with tomato plant. Looks great, however, as soon as the tomatoes start turning red about half the tomato is eaten. Any ideas on what, how to eradicate the problem and get ripe whole tomatoes, untouched? Thank you

By: Daniel

Daniel — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 03:51:44 +0000

I hope your tomatoes came in as well as mine did this year. I’ve canned more than two gallons of tomato sauce so far, with another five gallons of tomatoes to cook down tomorrow. There’s little more appetizing than salad made from basil and home-grown tomatoes.

I’ve written some tips about growing tomatoes–as well as other vegetables–in a kitchen garden. Please check it out if you have a chance: http://www.smallkitchengarden.net

By: greg

greg — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 23:17:51 +0000

100 lbs from a single tomato? Quite impressive.
I grow about thirty different varieties of herbs and tons of chile peppers. With the price of spice drying your own chiles saves beaucoup denaros

By: jaime

jaime — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 18:30:27 +0000

To solve the critter problem, I always put a couple of 3′ stakes in my garden with a couple of disposable pie tins tied to the top of each one. When the wind blows, they rattle around a bit and scare critters off. And the birds don’t like the light that reflects off of them.

By: Evelyn Vincent

Evelyn Vincent — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 04:53:52 +0000

Here are some links to articles I've written that reader's may find helpful in having a successful and tasty garden... tips from my lifelong passion of plants. Safe Weed Killer's When did "Flavor" fall out of Favor? There are so many books and garden gadgets out there that are unnecessary that I was prompted to write this article to help fellow gardener's save time and money and have success... Where to find great seeds and gardening books. Happy Gardening!

By: Carrie

Carrie — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 21:52:55 +0000

We also have a garden which we tend to in cooperation with our neighbors. They’ve been growing organically for 30 years, and have much to teach us. Last year, they put in 24 tomato plants, and with that harvest there is more than enough tomatoes to can for juice, whole tomatoes, sauces, salsa, and of course, lots of sandwiches with tomatoes. We have 3 families that use the produce, and usually, we still have some left over from the previous year by the time the new tomatoes come in. So, 12 plants will go a long way. They’re starting their plants this week in a green house, and we’re all looking forward to a garden full of tomatoes, corn, beans, and squash. Best wishes!

By: AnKa

AnKa — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 20:02:08 +0000

Trent –

nice plans. Predicting the future is a hard science. We grow our tomatoes, too, and every year I have grand plans. In 2006 the grand plan was heirloom tomatoes. Uh oh. Lots of uninvited dinner guests appeared! Have you seen the feared tomato hornworm? Take a look: http://lashwhip.com/hornworm.html
This little critter makes more damage than a family of deer. Which we also have. And rabbits.

My best success so far is a perennial herb garden. I stock it in the spring with annuals such as basil. It’s so nice to step outside to have the fresh herbs at your fingertips. A simple omelette becomes gourmet!

Since I am losing our tomato patch to our planned addition, I signed up for a CSA share this year. That might be a topic for another post sometime!

By: Jason

Jason — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 03:51:50 +0000

I’ve got similar plans and ambitions Trent. After a dismal experiment last year, I came back full force this season. I built a 4ftx24ft raised bed and filled it with unscreened black cow composted manure, which has a nice loose quality. Additionally I added some oak leaves from last fall, and plan on fertilizing with worm castings. I’ll also bee adding several pounds of live earthworms to the soil, so they may begin to do my bidding for me, as this will be a no-till bed. Like in personal finance, everything is easier when it’s automatic, so I ordered a T-tape kit plus a battery operated timer from dripworks.com, so that watering will continue if we decide to take a weekend trip. After planting time the only maintenance will be weeding, fertilizing, and harvesting. I will set up a grid over the bed with white twine, and begin intensively planting according to the square foot gardening guidelines. I’ll be focusing on romano green beans, conch peas, English peas, and limas, plus brandywine, yellow pear, and roma tomatoes, bell peppers, carrots, radishes, lettuce, zucchini, cucumbers, mustard greens, cantaloupe, watermelon, okra, and sunflowers, plus anything I pick up at the gardener’s festival this weekend. I am planning to expand to a total of three identical beds by next spring, and possibly begin marketing surplus to local eateries, if I get good enough at producing. I’ve even thought of starting an edible garden design business, for people who have the desire but not the passion to research all this for themselves. One day I’ll make the leap to aquaponics, and raise my own tilapia with my vegetables, but that is another post for another day. Best of luck with your garden. Genesis 2:8

By: Nerida in Oz

Nerida in Oz — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 22:36:07 +0000

A word of general “warning” – my parents have an amazing garden this year, with tomatoes that are particularly tasty and wonderful.

However, my father’s family are disposed to gout. Tomatoes can be a trigger for episodes of gout. Between the tastiness of the tomatoes and his own stubborness, my father is constantly crippled by gouty outbreaks!

And this is without cooking/canning/doing anything to concentrate the effects of whatever it is that sets it all off!

However, I’m praying that I have my mother’s genes when it comes to this, as sun-ripened cherry tomatoes are a little taste of heaven!

By: Chris

Chris — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 21:50:09 +0000

How about planting garlic? It would go great with those Italian inspired dishes!

By: bacall

bacall — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 20:51:13 +0000

While I would love to have a garden, our extremely compact clay soil combined with my recent shoulder surgery ranks gardening unlikely. I’m planning on joining a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA)group this spring. For about $300/season, I can pick up fresh produce once a week (about a 7 mile roundtrip that I can tack on to other errands), reduce fossil fuels since I don’t have to buy fruit/veggies trucked over 1500 miles to the grocery store, and support local farms!

By: Bobbi

Bobbi — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 17:56:21 +0000

Last year we had only 1 tomato plant. But we tended it carefully. And just before the frost would have ended it in the fall, we picked all the tomatoes and put them in the basement between sheets of newspaper. We had tomatoes ripening well into January.

This year we are growing our garden a bit. Wonder how long we will have fresh veggies this year??

By: shan

shan — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 16:55:51 +0000

I hope this is not too off-topic…

I make a point of bringing in my peppers at the end of the season, before the frost gets them. In their native state, peppers are not necessarily “annuals”. I have a single pepper plant survive 4-5 years this way. They’ll even produce fruits in the winter. It’s nice to see green and living things in one’s kitchen (or wherever you keep’em) in the middle of winter.

By: Karen

Karen — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 15:28:58 +0000

Trent,

Peppers and tomatoes do not like to be planted next to each other.
Tomatoes like carrots and nasturtiums. Peppers and basil like each other. Petunias and beans are good companions. There are books on companion gardening at the library.
Eating from the garden is one of life’s great joys. You will be amazed at how many fewer trips to the store you’ll make.

By: valerie Wicks

valerie Wicks — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 14:59:45 +0000

We lived at one time in a central California town where one of the farmers actually left a strip of tomatoes by the road for anyone who wanted to have them to pick. It amazed me how many tomatoes it took to make tomato sauce. Our favorite thing was homemade catchup.
One thing to be sure to think about when planting tomatoes is that the best canning tomatoes are not the best eating tomatoes. So you probably want a variety of types in your garden.

By: Marilyn

Marilyn — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 14:14:09 +0000

Another use of milk jugs or even large soda bottles: I have nasty, evil, vicious, vengeful squirrels who enjoy eating or extirpating young seedlings. Cut off the bottom of the jug and push the bottomless jug down into the soil, creating a shelter and individual greenhouse for each seedling. Do not leave the lid on the bottle. Removing the lid allows hot air to escape on hot, sunny days and admits moisture from outside.

By: Rita Waters

Rita Waters — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 14:13:48 +0000

Jerry Baker has several books with some wonderful tips and tonics made from household stuff. For example, “Practically all four-legged garden pests and pets will flee from the scent of ammonia. Soak old rags in the stuff, put them in old pantyhose toes, and hang them in areas you want to protect. If there’s no hanging space, pour the ammonia into wide neck bottles, like the kind juice comes in , and bury them up to the rims.” This year I’m trying this homemade tonic for deer.

By: Cindy

Cindy — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 14:00:59 +0000

Hi Trent,

About 5 years ago my husband built me a raised vegetable garden running parallel with the house. There is about 5 feet or so between the house and the garden. The tomatoes are tucked up next to the house where they happily suck up the reflected heat and are somewhat protected from hail while the raised garden contains the rest of the vegetables. Instead of soil we used free sawdust from a sawmmill (you could possibly get it from a lumber yard), a couple bags of peat moss and some lime. For the first two years you have to add liquid fertilizer each time you water but by the third year the sawdust is nicely turning to soil and there is no longer any need to fertilize. No weeds. All winter my garden is fertilized with vegetable waste, I mulch with grass clippings in the summer which nicely amends the soil too. Here in Canada we can get overnight frosts too so most gardeners don’t plant till the end of May but there are cool crops which love to be planted in early April and do not mind a late spring snow fall dusting their new leaves: spring onions, peas, radishes, lettuces and swiss chard. As a result we have fresh salad stuff very, very early. We get so many cucumbers out of the raised bed that we can hardly eat them all and by the time the season is over I’m heartily sick of them. Canned vegetables are great but I don’t usually have the time to do that but freezing tomatoes works well and makeds a decent sauce. As far as I know that is as much as you can do with frozen tomatoes. I pick them green as our frosts come early enough that there are usually pails full of green tomatoes still on the vine. I put them in the basement on the cool floor where they slowly ripen for a few months giving me a regualar supply of tomatoes. Vegetable gardening is incredibly rewarding, I’m looking forward to your gardening experiments.