Vegetable Gardening (94 page)

If your soil is heavy, you may want to plant in a
raised hill
(also called a
mound
). The raised soil warms up more quickly than the surrounding soil and drains better. But be careful in midsummer not to let the mound dry out. You can easily construct a soil basin around the mound for watering (see Chapter 15).

Thinning seedlings in your garden

Soon after seedlings grow their second set of true leaves, you need to thin them out. Don't neglect this important step; crowded seedlings turn into weak, spindly plants that don't produce well. Separate the plants by hand or with a narrow hoe according to the distances in Chapter 3.

When you thin plants, either discard the extra seedlings or move them to another part of your garden. Newly transplanted seedlings need extra attention until they get established. Shade them from the hot sun for a day or two and be sure to keep them well watered. Lettuce is one of the easiest vegetables to move when it's small. Root crops such as beets and carrots transplant poorly, as do beans and peas.

You can thin some crops in stages, with delicious results. Carrots, lettuce, and beets are all good candidates for gradual thinning. If you've ever tasted beet greens cooked up with tender, marble-sized beets still attached, you know what a real treat they are. Start thinning carrot, lettuce, and beet seedlings when they're 1 to 2 inches apart. After the plants grow to 6 to 8 inches tall, pull up every other one and enjoy them. Leave a final 4- to 6-inch spacing for larger plants to develop.

Chapter 14: Workin' the Dirt

In This Chapter

Clearing your garden plot

Adding the right nutrients and other stuff to your soil

Mixing your amendments into the soil

Forming a compost pile

Properly preparing the soil before planting is an all-important first step toward a bountiful harvest. Don't take shortcuts with your soil. You'll be cheating your plants at their roots, and they won't like it.

In this chapter, I tell you how to take care of your soil — clean it up, straighten it out, and make it an all-around better place for roots. Remember, good soil makes happy roots, and happy roots mean a healthy garden.

Razing Your Garden Spot

After you choose a good sunny spot for your vegetable garden and draw a plan on paper (see Chapter 3 if you haven't done this preparatory work), you need to clean up the area so the soil will be easier to work. You can clear your garden area any time during the year, but the season before planting works best — clear in the fall for spring planting, clear in the spring for summer or fall planting. You can clear the area the day before you plant, but you may have more weed problems later.

If you already have an established garden, clean up any debris in fall or winter, depending on where you live, and till the ground before planting.

Here are the basics of initially clearing your garden spot, which I explain in more detail in the sections that follow:

1. Outline the areas of your garden plot that you want to clear.

You outline the areas depending on how you want the plots to be shaped. Follow these guidelines:

• To get your edges straight for a square or rectangular vegetable plot, stretch a string between sticks and mark the line with a trickle of ground white limestone, which is available at garden centers.

• For a round garden, use a hose or rope to lay out the area, adjusting the position to create a smooth curve.

• If you want several individual beds separated by permanent paths, outline each bed independently with string, sticks, and limestone so you don't waste time improving soil that you'll never use. But if you think that you may change your garden layout from season to season or year to year, work the entire area within the outline.

2. Clear the surface by first removing plants, weeds, brush, and rock. If necessary, mow the site to cut back the grass and weeds close to the surface of the soil.

See the section "Killing weeds and aggressive grasses," for details on removing weeds.

3. Dig out the roots of small trees and tough weeds with a hoe, shovel, or pick ax.

4. After the vegetation is manageable, remove any sod.

See the section "Stripping sod" for details on how to do this.

Killing weeds and aggressive grasses

If your garden area contains a lot of perennial weeds — weeds, like quack grass, that come back year after year — or if you need to clear an area of a warm-season lawn composed of vigorous grasses (like Bermuda grass), make sure that you first kill these weeds or grasses. You can pull out or mulch out seedlings (see Chapter 15 for more on mulches and weeding), but many aggressive weeds and turf spread by underground roots as well as seeds; these underground roots can haunt you for eons.

If you have an existing garden, you have to be diligent about weeding, or you may need to start all over again with tilling and removing as much of the weed's root system as you can.

You can kill weeds and aggressive grasses two ways:

Hand dig and sift:
For a small garden dig up the earth and carefully sift the soil, removing sod and root parts that may come back next year as weeds (see the tip on sifting compost at the end of this chapter).

Apply a covering:
An easy, chemical-free way to clear your garden is to cover it with clear or black plastic, cardboard, or even old rugs. After a month under these impermeable coverings, existing plants die from the lack of sunlight. You must plan ahead to use this method, and it may not look pretty, but it works like a charm — especially on annual weeds. For perennial weeds, you may need to dig out their roots, too, after applying the plastic.

You can buy plastic in rolls at hardware stores or home improvement centers; check department stores for old pieces of cardboard and carpet stores for old rugs. Use the thickest plastic or cardboard you can find — it should be at least 2 millimeters, but 4 millimeters is even better.

Controlling weeds and grasses by applying a covering to your garden area is easy. Just follow these steps:

1. Spread the covering over your entire garden area, securing the edges with spare rocks, bricks, or boards.

Let neighboring pieces overlap by several inches so no light can penetrate. If you're using old rugs, place them nap side down.

2. After a month, remove the covering and strip off any grass or weeds.

Use a shovel to cut off any grass or weeds at the root level (just below the soil surface). If they aren't too thick, rototill them into the ground.

3. Wet the area and wait about 10 days for weeds to sprout.

Leave the covering off; you want weeds to sprout. You should get some growth because you haven't removed weed seeds.

4. Use a hoe to kill the weeds.

Hoeing the weeds down is sufficient to kill annual weeds, but if you have perennial weeds, you need to dig out the roots. Check out the National Gardening Association's Weed Library (
www.garden.org/weedlibrary
) for help identifying the weeds in your garden.

For an organic approach to killing weeds and building your garden soil, try a no-till layered garden technique (see Figure 14-1). It's like making lasagna. The season before planting, lay down a 3- to 4-sheet-thick layer of black and white newspaper over the garden area. Water the paper to keep it in place. Cover the newspaper with a 6-inch-thick layer of hay or straw. Top that with a 1- to 2-inch-thick layer of compost. By the next planting season, the layers will have killed the grass and most of the annual and perennial weeds in your garden. You can hand pull any tenacious perennial weeds that survived. Earthworms will have munched up much of the newspaper turning it into valuable compost. You can plant your seedlings right into the mulched layers, and they'll grow like weeds (even better).