It’s the new year, you’ve been stuck inside for months, and all of nature seems to be sound asleep. Believe it or not, now, today, it’s time to put that winter coat on and get the garden! So stay tuned because today’s post is all about how to start a garden!
Planning your Garden
I usually start planning my garden around November but January/February is a perfectly good time to start this process.
Start Your Garden Journal and Other Lazy Things…
Grab a journal and a cup of your favorite beverage, park your lazy boy in front of a south-facing window and get ready to sit on your butt for a day. For a brand-spanking new garden your very first job is to find the sun!
This is also a good time to knit, hand sew, or any other number of handicrafts.
Observe your yard. What areas of your yard are not impeded by the shade of a tree, wall, or fence from about 10AM to 5PM? This sunny spot will be the home for your garden.
Draw your yard in your journal and map out the areas that are sunny.
See how much room you have for your garden. Sadly this is where the laziness ends.
At this point you’re going to have to pry yourself up out of your lazy boy and go outside. Measure your sunny spot to see how much room you have to plant. This way you can next choose what you will grow.
If this is your first year of gardening I would recommend take it slow and only pick a couple of plants to get your feet wet. Some easy plants to start with are things like tomatoes (I recommend buying tomatoes as plants instead of starting seeds your first year), zucchini, peas, and potatoes.
Each year I sit down with my garden journal and map out the layout of my garden and draw out where I will put each plant. You should set your garden on a crop rotation so that you do not deplete it over the years. Writing a little chart in a journal makes it easy to remember where you have planted things year to year.
Preparing your Garden Soil
Now is the time to start preparing your soil! Don’t wait! Preparing your soil is an ever present part of gardening and something I am positively passionate about!
It is also an extremely easy thing to do.
No-Till Gardening. Seriously, the ground needs its skin people.
No-till gardening is a miracle of nature. The earth is a living breathing organism and when left to its own devices will produce a beautiful crop for you. When opening your soil for planting LESS is always more.
What to do about the grass? Deep mulch, Ruth Stout, and other garden alchemy.
Deep mulch is my very favorite method of no till gardening. Perhaps it is my favorite because it is so, stinking, easy! Seriously.
There are different methods of deep mulching a garden. Here are a couple of the names they go by:
- Deep Mulch Gardening
- Ruth Stout Gardening
- Back to Eden Gardening
- Wood Chip Gardening
There are many different materials used for deep mulch gardening:
- hay
- wood chips
- pine straw
- leaves
- yard waste mulch
- grass clippings
My absolute favorite method is the Ruth Stout method, which, simply put just means piling up a whole lotta hay and then sticking seeds in it the rotting lowest layer of hay.
For your amusement here is a video of us bringing a hay bale in our mini van last year to open a new garden spot.
The down side of the Ruth Stout hay garden that we experienced this past year was the tics and the mosquitos. They like to breed in the hay. I plan to try out some organic pest control and see if we have a better time this year.
Wood chip gardens, in my experience, seem to be a less buggy option but the downside is that they take years to establish since they take longer to break down. If you would rather go the wood chip rout I reccomend starting with a layer of news paper directly on the ground, then a layer of mushroom compost, and then finally your wood chips.
When you go to plant in a deep mulch garden you simply brush away a the mulch enough to plant the seeds. Here is a video showing how simple it is to plant potatoes. This was the first year we had put our hay down and it had only been in place for a few months. We got the biggest potato harvest yet with the hay garden.
NO-NOs of Deep Mulch Gardening
- NEVER EVER EVER EVER till the mulch into your soil!!!!!! Nothing will grow there if you do!
- Don’t cover small seeds back up with mulch, they need some breathing room so just keep the small area of soil where the seeds are exposed until the plants are tall enough for the mulch to sit nicely at their feet.
- Don’t cover the crowns of strawberries or rose bushes with mulch, they will die.
So you’ve got a tone of weeds, eh? Soil Solarization can help with that.
If you have a lot of weeds to deal with a good method to kill them without spraying toxic chemicals right on the spot where you are about to grow the food that you plan to eat isto use a process called Soil Solarization.
Water the dickens out of your weed ridden soil and then cover it up with clear or black plastic sheeting during the hottest four weeks of the year. This will essentially cook any and all plants and seeds that lay in the soil giving you a fresh start. You may have to put your planting off until the following summer because to properly cook your soil you will want to cover your plants
The only downside to this method is that it puts your garden bed out of commission for a few weeks in your growing season but it is an amazing re-set button if you need one.
Farmers Almanac & Farmers Almanac Calendar
I am so excited to share with you that this year I am trying something completely new to me but old to the garden world. I am planning out my seed timing using moon phase planting guide mapped out in The Old Farmer’s Almanac.
Planting by the Phases of the Moon
It might sound a little out there but from what I gather just like the moon affects the tides the moon can also affect seed germination. If you plant seeds at the right time it is somehow supposed to help them.
I’m not totally certain that there is any science behind this, leave a comment below if you have any more info about it. What I did think was particularly helpful about this method was that it is basically a by the date schedule for me to get all my seeds planted.
Whether or not the moon actually helps seeds grow, the rough times in the almanac ARE the right times in general to start each seed. The chart ensures that you are starting your seeds at the right time for your zone.
In addition Farmer’s Almanac is filled with hilarious old stories and sayings. It is truly something to connect us to a cheery time-gone-by.
Calendar
By using the moon schedule I can then go to my calendar and right in each day what I will be planting. This way I will know exactly what to plant when as well as not feel overwhelmed trying to plant everything at the same time.
Since I am on this Farmer’s Almanac kick I went ahead and bought The Farmer’s Almanac Calendar to be my 2021 garden and everyday life calendar. It too is filled with old sayings and tips for the garden based on the month and season.
I am loving it so far and the garden images remind me to keep focused on my seed schedule. Any calendar will do though.
Other Resources I Love for the Garden
This year I also went ahead and added The Old Farmers Almanac Vegetable Gardener’s Handbook to my little garden library. This is a great companion book to The Old Farmers Almanac because it goes into a lot more detail about each plant. In addition it gives great incites on troubleshooting should something go wrong.
The New American Homestead by John Tullock is another one of my favorite books. New American Homestead is a Tennessee (zone 7) specific book that a wealth of information for gardening in the south. It has been one of my main references for the last ten years.
Buy Your Seeds/Plants, or Collect Some From a Friend!
You’re obviously going to need seeds or plant-starts if your are going to have a garden. Now that you have decided what to grow it’s time to start buying your seeds.
Seeds
Buy your seeds by January or February. You need to buy seeds for plants that you will sow directly into the soil and for plants you plan to start indoors in pots.
Here is a list of my favorite places to find organic and heirloom seeds:
If you are friends with any gardeners or farmers ask around to see if they have any seeds they have saved themselves. My next door neighbor and I love to share seeds at the end of each growing season.
Saving seeds is a big part of gardening. It is how all of the above stores are able to exist and I feel it is an integral part of life on earth. I strongly encourage you as your garden grows to let some of your plants hang around and observe how they create seeds. To watch a plant’s entire life cycle is to truly be a gardener.
Seed Potatoes
Seed potatoes are not actually seeds but potatoes that have been let to sit and grow eyes. Each little eye on the potato will become a new potato plant. If you are ordering online you will want to order in January or February but expect your seed potatoes to arrive in early March. I tend to go to our local greenhouse nursery in early February to buy our potato plants.
Some people simply use potatoes from the grocery store which is an option but it is a gamble because they often have been exposed to disease and come from farms where lots of anti-fungal sprays are used to keep the crops healthy.
When you plant grocery-store potatoes in your backyard they are not ready for a natural life, free of chemical sprays. Therefore you might get a diseased crop. Therefore, I stick to potatoes that were cultivated for the backyard garden via seed stores and nurseries.
Plants
If starting your own seeds in the first year seems like a little too much plan to buy seed-starts in late spring. You can find seed starts at your local nursery. Or you can make a day of it and find plants at your local farmer’s market!
Planting your Seeds
Now that you have your calendar ready it is time to have everything ready for your seed starting adventure!
Direct Seed vs. Seed Starts
Some seeds like to be planted directly into the ground, this is called direct seeds
Other plants need a longer growing season and consistently warm temperatures. To accomplish this make seed-starts indoors in winter and early spring.
The farmers almanac and virtually any garden book will tell you what seed needs to be direct seeded or transplanted from starts.
Seed-Staring Soil
If this is your very first garden and you are only planning to plant a couple of things a bag of potting soil and some seed starting cups. Coco Loco is a potting soil that comes highly recommended by Farmer and YouTuber Justin Rhodes. His channel is a great resource for not only gardening but also raising animals.
Since I am doing a relatively large garden I went ahead and bought the three basic components for making soil in bulk. Here are two excellent videos I found for a recipe to make your own.
Make your “Green House”
The next step in starting your seeds is to find a sunny place to put them. A window, green house, or indoor space with an artificial growing light will work.
I used to plant all my little starts in front of our south facing sliding-glass door. For people without small children this is a perfect solution. For this mom of three it is a disaster! My littlest kids just think it is a sandbox so this year I had to get clever.
My mom came to the rescue and bought me this cute little greenhouse perfect for our deck! Now my little seedling have a place all to their own away from curious fingers!
Plant Seeds in Pots
Once you have your sunny and warm indoor spot its, finally, time to fill pots with soil and plant your seeds.
Most packages will tell you how deep to plant seed. If not a good rule of thumb is to plant your seeds the same depth as they are wide. If you plant a seed too deep it will not be able to make it to the surface.
Seed Tapes
For some of your direct seeds an awesome winter project is to make seed tapes, especially for seed that are tiny and hard to work with.
To make a seed tape get some toilet paper and pull the two ply apart so you have a single ply length of TP.
Make a simple glue with water and flour. I used the wooden end of a match to dab a tiny dab of glue on the toilet paper. Dab the glue on according to the FINAL seed spacing requirement. The final seed spacing requirement is how far apart each plant should be AFTER you thing out or remove plants that have grown too close together.
Then on each glue spot you put a seed or two, fold the toilet paper onto itself and you have a seed tape!! When it comes time to plant you will simply lay this seed tape on the ground and lightly cover it with soil. Planting done! No bending over struggling to get seeds in there right place, and no over seeding which will cause crowding.
Planting your Garden!
The last step is to transplant your seed starts and seeds into your garden. If you opted to go with a deep mulch garden simply brush back the mulch in the spot you will plan, dig a hole, or shallow trench for your seeds or seed tapes, and plant.
The cool thing about deep mulch gardening is that you rarely need to water, if at all. It is a great method for desert dwellers and rainy zones alike since the mulch soaks up water like a sponge and releases it and holds it via osmosis. Here in east Tennessee I actually only water if we have severe drought. In a normal season there is just no need.
So let me know, is this your first time gardening? How does your garden grow? If I missed something please let me know in the comment section and happy gardening!