How to Garden

Four years of growing vegetables by trial and error may not have taught me enough to write a gardening book, but at least I can write a blog post about it. Here goes!

General pointers:

1. Mulch + cardboard > weeds: Be aggressive at keeping weeds down or they will get out of control. A combination of heavy mulching and cardboard works great.
2. Never let weeds reach their reproductive stage: If you do, you'll be fighting a more difficult battle next year.
3. Dan's 2-day rule: Check on the garden every 2 days. Otherwise, you'll be sorry when your tomato plants have been decimated by caterpillars, your squash penetrated with worms, and weeds are out of control.
4. Make sure your fence is super-solid: There are all sorts of varmits waiting to wreak havok on your lovingly cultivated veggies.
5. Harvest seeds and immediately replant in early August when possible.
6. Save seeds for next year in paper (not plastic) bags, labeled with plant and date.
7. Plant seeds inside in March and transplant them to the garden in mid-May (in zone 6b) when the weather for the next 7 days looks promising.
8. Be ruthless about culling plants that have gone to seed.
9. Always plan what you'll do if something doesn't sprout or gets killed.
10. Fertilize every month: It doesn't pay to be stingy with the fertilizer, especially the first few years.
11. Compost as much as possible.
12. Don't vacation in August: if you do, you'll miss a fifth of your harvest.
13. Grow what you like to eat... and what your rabbits like to eat.
14. Gardening by yourself can be very meditative, but gardening with your spouse is more fun! They can also help you weed when the garden is in danger of being overrun by weeds.

Species-specific pointers:

1. Make sure carrots are planted in loose, rich soil: Otherwise, they get stunted by the hard Carolina clay.
2. Roma tomatoes are the best variety to use for tomato sauce.
3. Interplant basil and tomatoes.
4. Stake asparagus fronds: otherwise, they'll all fall over and take up half your garden.
5. Even if kale looks like it died in the winter, give it until June to come back before you cull it.
6. Expect squash seeds to produce some funky varieties the next year if you have more than one squash variety in your garden. Part of me likes the surprise and figuring out what to do with the hybrid varieties, but there are some varieties (delicata, spaghetti, acorn, butternut, buttercup, summer) that I do really like, so I need to either buy those seeds or an actual squash from the grocery store if I want to make sure I get the type of seeds I want.