I made a spinach dish, the other day. Given today’s inflationary food prices, spinach has become a luxury, hovering around $5 a bag. Husband Ron to the rescue! He picked the spinach straight from the raised and framed vegetable garden he built last Autumn and planted three weeks ago.
As satisfying as it is to grow your own produce, having a vegetable garden can be a substantial money-saver as well as an organic delight. More about its construction later in this post.
It’s never too late to start your own veggie garden, whether in a frame such as Ron’s, in pots - or both!
In the Time Zone and at the Latitude where we live, our tardy Spring has finally sprung - as have Ron’s fast-growing crops of green onions, radishes, lettuce, red cabbage, kale, cherry tomatoes, spinach, garlic, cauliflower, and broccoli. Planted but shy, our Brussels sprouts will be ready to harvest in late Fall; our rhubarb (which - despite its use in pies and jams - is actually a vegetable), in summer.
Ron also plants basil, rosemary, oregano, chives, and parsley in pots and in raised ceramic planters.
In past years, he’s grown a variety of squashes, letting the shoots wind between the flowers and bushes of the main garden. Squash requires a lot of room (and water). We don’t want our framed garden overtaken by thirsty, runaway squash.
He planted four varieties of this year’s a summer squashes only this morning, all tucked between the flowering bushes of the main garden, where no one will know but us.
Zucchini’s fast growth is amazing to see: Forget to harvest it for a few days and you’ll later encounter “lurkers” - zucchini of a massive size - precisely what Ron needs and wants to make his famous Zucchini Relish.
Ron’s already learned a couple of smart tricks. Our local supermarket has been selling bunches of five small green onions (aka “spring onions”) at $3 and even at $3.99. That’s expensive! So here’s the smartest trick ever to get you started growing your own: Slicing off a little of the white part of the onion at the root end, poke it about an inch (2.54 cm) into the welcoming soil (more about soil in a moment).
In just a few days, the same little onion will poke its nose from the soil - and will soon start to multiply. You’ll have more than enough onions to share with friends, so be sure to share this trick, too. “Spring onions” really are just that: They like weather on the cool side. We have no idea if they’ll continue growing through the summer, but we’ll give it a try.
(This is the “royal we”… Although my pinkies never touch the soil, I’m skilled at pointing.)
We’re experimenting with radishes, done the same way. So far, nuttin’ - but other gardeners have succeeded, and so shall we! The same goes for Romaine lettuce: Planting lettuce from seed is easy; Ron wants to try something different.
With the root and stem trimmed from the lettuce and buried in the soil, we fully expect a small crop of Romaine as the weather warms up. Friends have done that: We don’t know if the same technique works with other varieties of lettuce.
Onto the construction of this garden: Ron’s framed, raised vegetable garden is modest: 10 x 4 ft. (3 x 1.2 m). Framing and raising a small veggie patch such as this makes planting, harvesting, and weeding far easier than squatting between furrows directly on the ground. The frame is also narrow enough to plant and harvest produce at the garden's center.
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| Three weeks after planting: Home-grown veggies! |
The area Ron chose for a framed garden was the former site of a huge old cedar tree that needed more water than our climate-changed, infrequent rainfall (or we) could provide. This tree was so dry, that its many dropped needles acidified the parched soil. We considered it a fire hazard, and its size blocked the sun our future garden might need.
And so it came down, leaving plenty of space and sun for the raised garden we desired. After digging out the tree’s extensive root system, Ron leveled the area, spreading and smoothing fresh soil over what had been a dusty, sloped carpet of needles. The goal: The raised garden he planned would be level, holding evenly distributed soil, plants, and water.
Before building the frame, Ron dug trenches to extend the existing irrigation system to what would soon be our new vegetable garden. Voilà! Timed to use the least amount of water with the least amount of evaporation, two raised sprinkler heads would soon water our crops automatically and efficiently with an early-morning 10-min. spray.
Ron then built the garden’s frame. It goes without saying that if you don’t have the multitude of skills Ron has (including single-handedly cutting down our giant cedar tree!), hire experienced help.
An important note: Our garden’s frame was treated with a wood preservative, as yours will probably be. It’s important to line the frame’s interior with corrugated plastic - available at the lumberyard where you buy the wood for your frame. This lining will prevent the preservative from leaching into the soil that nurtures your crops.
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| Corrugated plastic liner to protect your crops. |
Soil! I’m glad you asked. Preparing the soil of your edible garden is essential to your success. (Says Google: “Topsoil is the upper layer of soil. It has the highest concentration of organic matter and micro-organisms and is where most of the Earth's biological soil activity occurs.”)
Topsoil alone won’t keep your crops strong and healthy. Ron mixed three yards of topsoil (Ask Google: “How many bags of topsoil is that?”) with a couple of big bags of peat moss, a couple of big bags each of mushroom and steer manure, a couple of pounds (about a kilogram) of bone meal, and 4 c. (1 L) of fertilizer pellets (these resemble “little beads”).
You may have noted that my first paragraph correctly states that Ron built and framed this garden last Autumn. There was a reason for that. We live on the West Coast. Autumn storms regularly deposit mountains of seaweed on our beaches.
As do many local gardeners, Ron filled a construction-sized bag with this bounty, chopping and adding and digging the seaweed into his soil mix, where it rotted in the ground. (If you live inland, ask your local nursery about using commercially sold sea soil.)
Ron turned and turned and turned this mixture, initially starting in the wheelbarrow, after which (after dumping many barrow-loads into his framed garden) he mixed it within the frame.
Don’t rush this job. Thorough mixing requires patience and time - shifting and shoveling and lifting and turning before spreading and raking the soil smooth to prepare for planting in the Spring.
He’ll repeat the process next Fall, combining and spreading peat moss, mushroom and steer manures, bone meal, fertilizer pellets, chopped seaweed, and topsoil, in smaller quantities and as needed.
To minimize waste, Ron grows only what we can eat or freeze or share. We don’t grow potatoes, carrots, or celery - long-lived staples we buy in bulk when they regularly go on sale.
PS: And then, to put a smile on your face, there’s this:
XOXO
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