Vegetable Gardening (7 page)

Water your plants deeply and consistently.

Fertilize when necessary.

No matter how well you care for your garden, pests still may attack your plants. It's best to grow insect- and disease-resistant varieties when possible. And be sure to create barriers to block pests from attacking, clean up the garden well to remove overwintering insects and diseases, and only spray as a last resort. I provide more pointers on keeping your plants healthy in Chapter 17.

Finally, after all this serious stuff, comes the fun part: harvesting. Check the garden daily when plants are producing, and pick even if you don't have room in the refrigerator. With many vegetable plants, the more fruits you pick, the more you'll get. You always can give away the fresh produce to friends, family, and neighbors, so don't stop picking. Chapter 19 has details on harvesting and storing your veggies.

Trying tips for an even bigger bounty

To go further with your vegetable garden, try a few of the following techniques that help improve production and yield:

Use containers.
Growing in containers allows you to grow plants longer into the season and position your plants in the sunniest, most protected spots around your house. See Chapter 18 for the dirt on container gardening.

Practice cool farmer tricks, such as succession planting and inter-planting.
Succession planting
allows you to grow three or more crops in one season from the same spot.
Interplanting
is where you plant quick-maturing small plants, such as lettuce and radishes, around slow-growing larger plants, such as tomatoes and broccoli. The small plants are harvested before the larger plants shade them out. See Chapter 16 for more details.

Chapter 2: The Popularity and Benefits of Vegetable Gardening

In This Chapter

Understanding why food gardening is a booming hobby

Checking out a few advantages to food gardening

If you're interested in growing your own food (of course you are; you're reading this book!), welcome to the club. Vegetable, fruit, berry, and herb gardening (collectively called
food gardening
) is booming across the United States and around the world. Why, you ask? Simply put, people enjoy the many benefits from food gardening. In this chapter, I paint a picture of food gardening's popularity in the United States and describe a few major advantages of growing your own food.

Food Gardening: It's Popping Up Everywhere

While food gardening is a great activity to do in your yard, it's also part of a growing trend of people wanting to eat better, grow some of their own food, and have more control on the quality of their food supply. What better way to ensure that you eat healthy food than growing it yourself?

In early 2009, the National Gardening Association (NGA) completed a survey that characterized food gardening in the United States. Here's what it found:

Approximately 23 percent, or 27 million households, had a vegetable garden in 2008. That's 2 million more than in 2007. The number of food gardeners increases to 31 percent, or 36 million households, if you include those people growing fruits, berries, and herbs.

The average person spends about $70 on their food garden every year. (I wish I could keep my spending that low!) The total nationwide is $2.5 billion spent on food gardening. I explain what you gain from that $70 in comparison to what you'd spend at the grocery store later in this section.

The average vegetable garden is 600 square feet, but 83 percent of the vegetable gardens are less than 500 square feet. Nearly half of all gardeners grow some vegetables in containers as well.

The typical vegetable gardener is college educated, married, female, age 45 or older, and has no kids at home. And almost 60 percent of vegetable gardeners have been gardening for less than five years.

The typical reasons for vegetable gardening in order of importance are: to produce fresh food, to save money, to produce better-quality food, and to grow food you know is safe. (I go into detail on several important reasons to grow food later in this chapter.)

There you have it. Lots of food gardeners are out in their crops, and the numbers are growing faster than corn in July. You may grow only a small food garden, but when all the gardens are added together, the impact is enormous. Need more proof? Let me show you!

The
gross national garden product
(GNGP) is the combined amount of money that can be produced from America's food gardens. Here's how the NGA figured it out (time for some math fun!):

About 36 million households grow vegetables, berries, fruits, and herbs. The average garden size is 600 square feet. The NGA estimates that you can produce about 1/2 pound of vegetables per square foot of garden per year. That's about 300 pounds of vegetables in the average garden. The average price, in season, of vegetables is about $2 per pound, so the average vegetable garden produces $600 worth of produce. So, Americans invest an average of $70 to yield $600 worth of produce every year. Wow! That's a good return in my book!

When you figure the numbers nationally, 36 million households spend $2.5 billion to yield a GNGP of more than $21 billion worth of vegetables each year. That's a stimulus plan I can live with! (You don't believe it? Go to the section "Save some cash" later in this chapter to see how you can save that kind of money by growing your own vegetables.)

A Few Good Reasons to Grow Your Own Food

It's almost predictable: When economic times are hard, people head to the garden. It happened in the 1920s with Liberty Gardens, in the 1940s with Victory Gardens, and in the 1970s with increases in oil and food prices. Similarly, with current concerns about food safety, global warming, carbon footprints, and pollution, along with a desire to build a link to the Earth and our own neighborhoods, food gardening has become a simple and tasty solution.

Food gardens aren't just in backyards anymore. People grow food in containers on decks and patios, in community gardens, at schools, at senior centers, and even in front yards for everyone to see. Food gardens are beautiful and productive, so why not let everyone enjoy the benefits? I describe the advantages to growing your own food in the following sections.