My Chicago Garden

…Figuring out what you want to grow and how much you want to grow…

This four part series is on ‘Getting Started with a Vegetable Garden’. This episode will cover figuring out what you want to grow and how much you want to grow. Part two will cover picking a location to grow. The last two episodes will cover two different growing methods. The wide row method, and the square foot gardening method.

So you want to start a vegetable garden? There are few things in this world that can bring so much joy and personal fulfillment as planting a small seed, watching it grow and then reaping the harvest of your work. It can also be a journey of frustration and unnecessary labor and expense if you don’t start with the basics.

Before you do anything in your new vegetable garden. Before you buy a seed. Before you plant a thing. Before you buy a garden tool or visit your local garden store. It would be in your best interest to figure out exactly what you want to do with your garden. And the first step in that process is figuring out what vegetables you want to grow.

Take a look at what you and your family eat. Do you eat a lot of greens? None at all? If you don’t eat salads, why buy 5 packets of lettuce seed? Consider the last time you bought groceries. What did you buy in the produce area? Why grow 15 heads of cabbage if you can’t remember the last time you bought cabbage at the store?  The point here is don’t over estimate what you are really going to use.  There is nothing wrong in starting small. In fact I would highly advise it. Plant two pepper plants, instead of four until you are sure you really need four.  Also, consider what you are going to do with your harvest.  Do you plan on canning? Do you eat your vegetables raw. In a salad? Or do you prefer to make a soup out of a wide variety?  Take a few minutes to document what you think you can and will actually use. There…you have your list of wanted vegetables.

Let’s take my family for example. The family consists of two adults and two small children. My taste in vegetables do not exactly match with my wife.  I like certain vegetables, and my wife doesn’t. We do not eat a lot of vegetables as compared to some others, or at least the moment we don’t. So if I listed out the vegetables I like, and the vegetables she likes we have a pretty good list of the basic items I would want in my vegetable garden. We could also probably figured out how much we would actually use. One evening I followed my wife around the house firing questions at her about our eating habits and writing everything down.  Our average sized family turned out to need the following vegetables: corn, potatoes, tomatoes, cabbage, brocolli, caluflower, beens of various types, garlic, zuccini, butternut squash and asparagus. My wife also wanted strawberries, blackberries and blueberries in the garden.  I wanted some herbs for cooking like basil, thyme, oregano and rosemary.   

Now that you have your list, you need to figure out how much of each item you need or want to grow.  As I mentioned earlier, if you are the only one who eats peppers in your family there is no reason to plant 5 pepper plants. Unless you are experimenting with varieties or have some other reason to be growing the plants you are only making more work for yourself by planting things you won’t use.  You’ll have to take a guess as to how many plants you need if you’ve never grown a particular vegetable before. Some books, and even seed catalogs, will give an estimated harvest amount per plant. But they are only estimates and can vary widely. My recommendation is to make your best guess and then lower the number a little bit.

So let’s put that into practice. If you think you want to eat 2 peppers a week during the harvest, and your research says that you can probably get 6 or 8 peppers per plant over a several week period (here’s where books or searching the internet can help with your estimates), you might decide to plant one pepper plant.  Then wait two weeks and plant another. And then wait two weeks and plant another. For a total of 3 pepper plants that will mature at different times, thus allowing you to harvest over a wider time period.  That wouldn’t be a bad estimate and seems realistic to me. But for your first time I would suggest you plant 2 pepper plants and plant them 3 weeks apart instead of two.  You may come up short during the harvest, but I’ve never had the problem of not enough vegetables…maybe just not enough peppers. You’ll get the hang of exactly how many plants you need after your first couple harvests.

Now that you’ve decided you need room to grow 254 vegetable plants to feed your family, you’ll need to evaluate do you really have the room for that many plants.  How much room you need to grow what you want has a lot to do with the method by which you want to grow them. Yes..I said method of growing. There are several different methods besides what you see on TV with the rows and rows of perfect soy beens. In fact row gardening is probably not the best choice for a small garden. We’ll cover growing methods in a future episode, but for now let’s simply look at how much space you actually have.  If you live on a quarter acre lot with an unobstructed southern exposure you can probably grow anything you want in whatever method you want. But very few people have this luxury. You will probably find that your garden is going to be limited on space, not limited by what you want to grow. Our next episode will cover deciding were to put your garden and what to look for in growing conditions. Then once we pick a growing method we will be able to figure out exactly how much room we need and see if that matches up with how much room we actually have.

If you want some reading material to get your started I would recommend two books:

All New Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew which sells for about $14 dollars

and

The Vegetable Gardener’s Bible by Edward C. Smith which sells for about $16 dollars

They provide the basic information about two different growing methods and other reference material that would be useful during this series. They have enough good reference information that I actually created my own gardening book by cutting out the various pages that I liked from each and putting them into a folder.  Both books have their devotees and critics. I believe you can learn from both and do what makes sense to you and your situation. Both books will be used as references in future posts on growing methods.

 

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