I have gardened off and on my whole life. As a kid, I remember going into the fields at my grandparents farm and eating tomatoes off the vine, armed with a salt shaker I took from the farm kitchen. It wasn’t uncommon to help our babysitter weed her garden, or to help her can the food she grew.
Grandpa’s farm was a small commercial operation, planting acres of tomatoes, rhubarb, and corn. The babysitter, on the other hand, was just trying to feed her family, so she grew a bit of everything, from cabbage to peas.
I have always had some kind of garden anywhere I lived. A few tomatoes in pots, or a 4 x 8 bed of cucumbers and onions tucked somewhere in the yard. But I have never truly gardened toward self-sufficiency. That’s changing this year.
Between the pandemic, and job losses, we want to become as self sufficient as possible. Here are a few of the strategies we are using.
- Plant everything possible. We have several seed starting trays, so we are planting at least one tray of seeds per day.
- Plant seeds from produce you already buy. We eat a lot of poblano peppers, so it’s easy to save the seeds from them for planting. We have also saved seeds from tomatoes, cantaloupe, and squashes that we bought.
- Look for ways to re-grow food. I have several small herb plants that I keep on the kitchen windowsill for use. It was fairly easy to look up ways to propagate those plants. Now, instead of a cup size container of Basil on the sill, there is a pot full of green leafy basil for future use.
- Just plant. Don’t get caught up in all of the hype out there. Find a spot that provides the right amount of sun or shade that your plant needs and put the plant in the ground! You may get better results by researching planting conditions and ph levels for your soil, but I’d rather be hands-on and have something growing. I’m the kind of person who learns by doing, rather than by reading. The worst that can happen is that you learn that your tomatoes don’t really like being in that super sunny corner of the yard.
- Just plant. But be sure you plant things you know you’ll eat. It does no good to plant tons of beans or beets, get an amazing crop, and then discover that no one in your family likes them.
- Experiment. I love fresh green beans and I’ll stand in the garden eating them right off the bush. However, you couldn’t pay me to eat them from a can. If I had never planted that first seed to try growing green beans, I wouldn’t know how much I love the fresh version, so do try one or two plants of foods you don’t usually like. You may find that, like me, some of those yucky canned foods are actually way better when you grow them yourself.
- Mulch. The number one tip for any gardener is mulch. Use hay, old cardboard boxes, even dried grass clippings. Mulch holds moisture in the ground, protects your baby plants from the heat of the sun, and helps to suppress weeds.
- Water low and water early. If you need to water your garden, do it early in the day so that your plants can use all that water during the hottest part of the day. And direct that water near the ground so that you don’t encourage leaf rot or fungus to form. I try to never get the leaves of my plants wet, but rather put the water low to their roots where the plant can make the most use it.
- Pest control. Most pests can be handled by either picking them off and dropping them in a small bucket of soapy water or with light applications of a mixture of dawn dish soap and water. I don’t keep a lot of chemicals around for the garden because I don’t use them. Squash bugs get neem oil if they get bad, and I do use diatamaceous earth around my plants, but I use both very sparingly.
As for gardening “methods”, there is a different method for every gardener out there. I combine quite a few, taking what I find to be good from each method.
Square Foot Gardening, made famous by Mel Bartholomew, is a fantastic system, in my opinion. However, most people get hung up in making Mel’s Mix, which is a combination of soil, peat moss, and vermiculite. I’ve made it and it was time-consuming, expensive, and tedious to find, make, and mix all of that together. I create beds by adding layers of cardboard, and then adding fill dirt over the area. For borders, I use what I have: old boards, concrete blocks, etc. I also draw a grid in the box with my finger, then plant according to the SFG charts.
YouTuber “Gardening with Leon” uses a modified hydroponic system for growing many of his plants. We tried the barrel method last year, but didn’t have much luck. But, his container method has been fantastic for other things! Leon uses large round pots with a hole drilled about 5 inches up from the bottom. At the bottom of the pots, he places milk jugs, covers those with landscape fabric, then adds dirt on top of the fabric and plants in the dirt. We substituted soda bottles with the lids on, added the landscape fabric and planted carrots and beans in ours. The bottles and hole at the bottom keep the pot from holding too much water, but leaves enough water so the roots never get dry unless it is really hot outside.
We also don’t use a compost pile in the traditional sense. We do it more like a hugelkultur set up. If we know a particular area is going to become a garden bed, we start putting yard waste, cardboard, and veggie scraps in that future bed area. Our goats and chickens will both eat in the area, which processes the products and adds animal manure from both. When we are ready to plant the area, it has already been mostly prepared for us by the goats and chickens.
Speaking of animal manure, some kinds are better for the garden than others. Horse and cow manure needs to age for a long time before it is usable in the garden. Goat manure is usable immediately, so you can mix it right into the garden. Chicken manure, and the pine shavings from their coop, needs to age for a month or two. We usually let a plot age for at least that long before planting, or mix things really well before we plant in that plot.
I mostly ignore the “plant spacing” guidelines on seed packages. We aren’t doing long rows or using our tractor to handle planting and harvesting our garden. We’re growing toward feeding ourselves and our family. So my beans get planted 6 to a square foot rather than every 4 inches in rows. I’ll plant 24 bush green bean plants in a 4 foot space, which makes it super simple to go out to the garden with a colander, pick enough for a meal, and go back to the kitchen to make dinner. Beans love to be picked and will make more pods the more you pick them!
We also aren’t big on fancy garden stuff. We’re a reduce and reuse household. We used pallets to create a fenced garden area where we put our plant trays for seeds to germinate. The pallets provide protection from our goats, who would love to nibble on the tender young plants. They also provide a climbing surface for vining plants. Our chayote vine grew up the side of the pallets, then hubby put an old cattle panel across the top of the posts and the vine has created a canopy that provides shade and heat control for the young plants.
We put all cardboard boxes down as mulch in our garden areas. The cardboard breaks down eventually, but it helps suppress grass and weeds and holds water to help young plants form roots. We shred old paperwork and use that as mulch, also. That way you know for sure that none of your personal information is going anywhere!
We don’t buy fancy planters, either. Hubby cuts barrels in half, then we fill them using the Leon Method I mentioned earlier. The barrels are all food grade, so we don’t have any concerns about things leaching into the food we grow. Used properly, those half barrels will last for years and more than pay for themselves.
We live pretty far out in the country, so we don’t have to worry about neighbors complaining if our pallet fence or barrel planters aren’t pretty in their eyes. However, white paint can tie everything together and make it look more appealing if that’s an issue for you. I happen to think that lush green plants provide lots of curb appeal and most of my neighbors seem to agree. Should I add that most of our neighbors are cows?
