10 Things I Wish I’d Known When I Planted My First Vegetable Gardens
Apr 7, 2014 | Gardens
- Soil amendment such as compost or composted manure is especially important for a veggie garden.
- Newly spouted seedlings may get eaten by slugs, earwigs and flea beetles. This is easily preventable with an organic product: Diatomaceous Earth. You just dust a little right over the plants and on the ground when the seedlings first appear. (NOTE: do this after you water, not before. The DE works best when dry.)
- Don’t plant too early. It isn’t frost that you’re necessarily worried about. If the nights are still quite cool the ground will be cold and many plants and seeds will just sulk.
- When the plants are young and tiny hand-watering is fine, but after they put on growth for two or three weeks it’s not deep enough. Bring out the sprinklers or soaker hoses.
- Lettuce is better planted from seed and thinned as you use the leaves in your salad. Buying lettuce plants is kind of a waste of money when seeds are so easy…
- The weeds explode in July and then their roots get baked into the dirt by the hot, dry weather. Pull or hoeing them early in June or July is easier than trying to yank out the big ones in August.
- You can plant several crops of lettuce and arugula, so have a few packages of seed on hand.
- Garlic gets pulled up in mid-summer leaving a bunch of space where other things can be planted. Beans, kale, carrots, and leeks can be planted in this spot and the last three will even last through several frosts.
- It’s better to start spraying an organic fungicide such as Actinovate or Green Cure on squash and cucumbers before they get powdery mildew – once you see it on the leaves the fungus is harder to control.
- Every year is different – one year you’ll have too many squash and not enough tomatoes and the next you’ll be overrun with eggplant but have very few beans. Sometimes it’s the weather, and sometimes you never know why things did or didn’t do well. You just have to roll with it.
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