Starting a Food Garden, or Thinking About It? A Local Expert Offers Tips

Local gardening guru Shira Friedman, who writes the blog In My Garden (Country Edition) and also contributes to HamletHub, is too busy gardening to write during peak growing season. So this week, HamletHub asked her for some last minute advice for beginners who are just getting started or even still thinking about planting a vegetable garden this summer. She says it’s not too late!

To learn more from Shira, catch her this Thursday, June 7, at the Westport Farmers Market for a Grow Your Own Food Q&A. She’ll be at the education booth from 10 a.m. – 2 p.m. in the Imperial Avenue lot.

I’ve heard a lot lately about “square foot gardening” and raised beds. What method of gardening do you prefer?

I recommend creating straight raised beds to have total control over the soil. If you’re at an old property and you don’t know what’s in the soil, or if there are chemicals in it, or if you put down chemicals yourself, raised beds are best. You can start from scratch and customize your mix. You can make it lighter and fluffier with compost with good microorganisms. Raised beds ideally won’t have as many weeds and they’re easier on your back when you’re down on your hands and knees.

If you just clear turf to create your garden, you’ll be fighting the grass all season. Grass will win in a survival-of-the-fittest fight with your tomato plants. There’s only so much nitrogen in the soil. Grass and weeds are competing with your vegetables for water and nutrients.

Raised beds also make it easier to keep things tidy. My total enclosure is about 400 square feet and I have gravel pathways between the raised beds to keep it orderly since it’s in the middle of my backyard. It’s utilitarian, but I want it to look beautiful. I plant a lot of edible flowers like nasturtium, calendula, Johnny jump ups, and borage.

What do you do to keep animals at bay?

There isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer. It really depends on your situation. A four-foot fence won’t keep deer out if they’re hungry enough. In Easton you really need a high fence.

I have 12-foot-high fencing, so the bigger problem here for me are the smaller animals—moles, voles, rabbits, chipmunks, bunny rabbits, and groundhogs.

Around the lower two-foot portion of my vegetable garden fence, I buried chicken wire at least a foot under the soil to prevent them from burrowing under it. It does a good job at keeping out all but a few chipmunks who dig lower than a foot. Those chipmunks are so annoying! They don’t just eat your tomatoes. They knock them on the ground, take one bite, and run away. They’re just destructive.

You can also make or buy products to repel animals that are safe for vegetable crops. I started using an organic repellent that smells horrible. You can also make your own. When I was in grad school we used to make our own with rotten eggs and hot sauce and pepper and vegetable oil to make it stick. The more it reeks the more it keeps the pests away.

There are also some repellents made from all-natural products that you can buy at gardening centers or hardware stores. You have to reapply them and you have to change it up because the animals get used to it. If you have a lot of deer browsing issues, I  recommend buying three different kinds of deer repellents at the beginning of the season and spraying a different one each month.

An old farmers' trick was to use coyote urine to repel deer, but around here you risk attracting coyotes who are looking for a mate.

If you have slugs eating your lettuce, you can bait them. Beer is a fabulous slug bait, though not ideal if your dog has access to the area. You can use a container the size of a tuna fish can and pour stale beer into it. The slugs climb in and don’t climb out.

Caterpillars are bad this year. Those you just have to pick off with your fingers.

I saw a lovely trellis at Terrain for $78, but that seems exhorbitant compared to the value of the tomatoes I hope to harvest. Can you recommend some creative ways to stake climbing plants?

Using your existing fencing is a great way to go. My raised beds go around the entire perimeter of the garden along the fence, and then I have a huge bed in the middle. So I use the fencing to trellis my peas and cucumbers. I use it for vining the flowers too.

People use all kinds of reclaimed things like old window frames, old lawn chairs. I have willow trellises that I reuse over and over. You can get very inexpensive bamboo stakes and tie them together like a teepee with twine for your cucumbers and peas.

If you’re growing indeterminate tomatoes—where all your fruit doesn’t come at once—you can use sticks and run string between them for the vines to climb on. You don’t need to spend a lot. You can have a great garden for very little money!

So, would you say that it is not too late to start a garden from seed right now and have produce this summer?

It’s not too late. I just re-seeded leaf lettuces and arugula. You can direct sow spinach, beets, carrots now before it gets too hot. And if you can find tomato and zucchini transplants your harvest might come later, but it’s not too late to put them in now.

And then in August you can start with fall sowings. For our area, come the middle to the end of August you can re-sow root crops like carrots and beets and all the greens and lettuces. You could harvest through November depending on how the night temperatures are.

If it’s your first vegetable garden, just start small. And if you wind up with more vegetables than you can handle, you can donate your surplus to Operation Hope in Fairfield. I donated 60 pounds of cucumbers there last year!

 

Shira Friedman is an Easton resident who teaches organic gardening classes locally and writes the blog In My Garden (Country Edition). Gardening questions? Send them to Shira at Easton@HamletHub.com.