This is a great northern vegetable garden …
If 2013 is the year you plan to start a vegetable garden, welcome to the club! Since the economy stumbled in 2008, more Americans have started growing some of their own food and enjoying the delicious taste and health benefits of fresh tomatoes, crunchy cucumbers and leafy greens. The number of vegetable gardens in the U.S. rose from 31 million to 43 million between 2008 and 2009, that’s more than one-third of American households.
so is this one…
The reasons for raising vegetables are many: It can save money (sometimes a lot!), the food tastes wonderful and, if you grow without chemical fertilizers and herbicides, it is much safer to eat than some commercially grown food. Beyond that, growing a vegetable garden is a relaxing hobby and does not require expensive equipment (be careful if people tell you it does!) or a massive time commitment. Children also enjoy being in the garden, and many home gardeners come to relish those early morning or evening moments tending their garden.
You’ll be surprised how much food you can grow, too. Even a small garden (the average plot in the U.S. is less than 100 square feet) can produce lots of food to eat. Remember: In the 1940s, U.S. residents grew 40 percent of the nation’s food needs in home gardens.
With this series, we hope to provide northern gardeners the information they need to grow a great vegetable garden in 2013. We’ll discuss where to put the garden, what to grow, how to start plants from seed, planting, dealing with pests, harvesting and preserving the harvest. Along the way, we hope readers will leave comments and questions below. We’ll do our best to answer them. Tomorrow we get started with a discussion of where to put your vegetable garden. Stay tuned.
Follow Notes from Northern Gardener throughout January as we offer our series on 31 Days to a Great Northern Vegetable Garden. Tomorrow: Where to Put Your Vegetable Garden.
Looking forward to this series! We are thinking of adding potatoes but would need to start a new area for them. We have heavy clay soil. Do we need to bring in other soil to get started?
No all you need to do is bring in lots of organic matter, something to loosen the soil with. I add cow or horse manure along with lots of rotten hay from hay barns to the ground, then I till the whole thing under doing the winter months. By the time spring comes around the manure will have cooled off and added all that neautrants to the soil. Sorry about the spelling there. But work in all this and you should be good. Oh add potash or some kind of ash to your potato patch because that is good for them. If you haven’t tilled the garden yet you can burn off the veggie growth for instant potash or ash from a wood stove does wonders as well.
Very exciting! I am an avid gardener, but there is always room to learn new things and hone old skills.
Great series. Looking forward to a month of great ideas.
Looking forward to planting a garden with my grandchildren and eating the fresh veggies right out of the garden.
I have decided to plant my first garden this year and am looking forward to learn from your experience. Thank you!
Good question, as we too have the same type of soil so hope you get lots of informative feedback that we all can benefit from. Finally has soaked in that there is a huge didderence in having just dirt vs. having soil & it has to be fed & ammended in all diff kinds of ways to be not only be productive as far as supply but the produce will be tastier.
This will be fun! I love to veggie garden and enjoy reading about gardening during the long winter we have up here! Am looking forward to learning some new short season and cool weather gardeing tips!
Don’t think I can do much outside until the snow melts and the ground thaws, but I look forward to all good advice.
Looking forward to this series even though I’m a bit further west, in southern Alberta in a zone 3a-b. Gardening can’t really start here (out of doors) until late April. However, I have been thinking about my garden since we put in all our new raised beds last summer!
We live in Arizona started herbs inside with jalepino plants planted onion bulbs and covered with straw any sugesstions