May 13, 2009: Beginner Veggie Gardeners, Part 2

In between tornados, downpours, and plenty of lightning, my daughter Lynde, my friend Sharon, and I did finally manage to plant a garden-full of veggies.

A cautionary observation: If you rototill and fertilize ahead of time, and then you can’t plant because the weather goes haywire, the weeds will flourish with their excellent feeding! Another observation: the pine straw you put down to control the weeds will prickle your knees when you kneel down to pull out the weeds that grow anyway, thanks to the fertilizer that you thought was going to be for the plants.

One last mea culpa: We didn’t follow Charles Pollard’s excellent advice to be patient planters. Charles is a local horticulturalist and nursery owner who has been our mentor. We planted zucchini and peppers on Good Friday, and they froze a bit. Thinking they’d die, we added more, and now have 18 thriving zucchini plants and 27 peppers. I’ll be bringing the overflow to the library on Saturday mornings.

We did follow Charles’s advice on tomatoes, and I’m happy to report that all are thriving. Considering I bought the smallest, least expensive tomato plants (about 30 cents each), they are doing us proud. The secret is to dig a deeper hole than you think you need, and work in a couple of cups of pickling lime into the bottom. Mix the lime and soil well, and then plant the tomato on top of the lime mix, but still deep enough to encourage a sturdy stalk. We peeled off the bottom leaves and planted our little guys with about two inches of plant showing.

Being experimental farmers as well as beginners, we decided to do a controlled study and plant a couple of tomatoes without lime. Okay, we ran out of lime. So far the plants all look healthy, but we’ll monitor progress.

Next step will be to add more fertilizer, this time ammonium nitrate. For tomatoes and eggplants, dig a shallow trench and add one big spoon of ammonium nitrate on each side of each plant. Squash, greens, and corn also like extra nitrogen. Legumes (peas and beans) are nitrogen-fixing, which means they put nitrogen into the soil, so don’t include them in the ammonium nitrate feeding. Nitrogen in the soil lasts 60 to 90 days.

The garden is beautiful now, with the veggies in flower. Planting, watering, and weeding have become fun community times to share laughs and squeals. Isn’t it a blessing that hard times can push us toward healthy living?