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S1E12: Vegetable Gardening for Beginners

Listen on: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Youtube!

CURRENT PROJECTS

  • Theresa: Made my scrap quilt sandwich, started a clay class!
  • Cecelia: Finished Sundae dress, working on DK Hibernal Sock still

Fun Question: What is your favorite vegetable?

  • Cecelia: Potato (so many ways to prepare!)
  • Theresa: sugar snap peas & snow peas

Different Kinds of Gardens

  • In ground
    • Pros: Super easy and cheap, will probably have to add compost to soil to make it good
    • Cons: can get weedy, may have poor soil
  • Container
    • Pros: great for limited space, can move for sunshine, 
    • Cons: expensive to purchase, need to water more often (beware of terracotta pots), need “container variety” of plants
  • Raised beds
    • Metal & cedar varieties (beware of treated wood)
    • Cons:
      • Expensive to fill
        • Fill bottoms with brown cardboard, egg cartons, leaves, sticks (not logs), sprinkle in compost materials
        • Top with dirt/compost
    • Pros: keep out weeds, higher up (easier to tend), can control soil quality
  • LOCATION: (JUST NEED SUNSHINE – especially for fruiting vegetables)
  • TRELLISING: plants need support
    • Pole beans
    • tomatoes/peppers
    • Squash (vining)

When to Plant

  • Cool Season (Frost Tolerant vegetables): spinach, peas (sugar snap peas, snow peas), lettuce, radishes
  • Warm Season: tomatoes, cucumbers, winter squash, summer squash, corn, peppers, eggplant

Seeds vs. Starts

  • STARTS (baby plant): (nursery, or grow in basement from seed)
    • Longer growing crops need to be planted from starts or if they don’t like heat
    • Tomatoes, peppers, herbs, kale, swiss chard, cabbage/broccoli/cauliflower
  • SEEDS into outdoor bed
    • Some plants make more sense to plant directly into the ground, some don’t like their roots to be disturbed and will not do as well if transplanted
    • Peas, beans, salad, kale, swiss chard, carrots, parsnips, winter squash, summer squash, bok choy

Favorite Crops/Easy Wins

  • raspberries/blackberries/strawberries
  • Sugar snap peas & snow peas
  • Swiss chard
  • Tromboncino squash
  • Tomatoes
  • Potatoes
  • Garlic
  • Leeks
  • Pole beans

Difficult Plants

  • Sweet corn – hard to tell when ripe and only have a few days to harvest
  • cabbage/broccoli/cauliflower – cabbage worms galore
  • squash/cucumber are hard to get going for me (chaos squirrels)

Saving Money

  • Make your own compost
  • Soil is expensive (lasagna gardening)
  • Get comfrey from a friend
  • Start from seeds
  • Be realistic about what you will actually eat out of your garden

Tending

  • DEEP waterings 1-2x a week for established plants, seeds will need water daily
  • Pick frequently – encourages more fruiting
  • If you see a lot of bugs, just cut down and throw in city yard waste

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