Planning your vegetable garden
With the growing season fast approaching, I’ve been getting a lot of questions from would-be vegetable gardeners about getting started. The most popular queries focus on garden size, what to grow, and how much of each type of vegetable should be planted.
To help me answer these questions, I turned to my food gardening friend, Elizabeth Peirce, the author of numerous books, including Grow Hope: A Simple Guide to Creating Your Own Food Garden and You Can Too! Canning, Pickling, and Preserving the Maritime Harvest.
“I’ve always preferred small, well-tended vegetables patches to large, weed-filled ones,” says Peirce adding it can be overwhelming for newbie gardeners to care for a big garden. “If you have a 10- by 10-foot garden, there are lots of ways to maximize space like intensive planting, trellising, and succession planting.”
Pierce says these three concepts, as well as a whole lot of containers, sum up her approach to the perennial problem of not enough garden space.
You can dig and prep an in-ground garden or build raised beds from untreated lumber. In my backyard, I have 28 raised vegetable beds with most 4 by 8 or 4 by 10 feet. However you choose to garden, be sure to pay attention to the soil, incorporating compost, aged manure, or other organic amendments. I also lime my soil annually to maintain a pH in the 6 to 6.8 range.
Once you’ve decided on the ideal-sized garden for your yard and time constraints, it’s time to consider what to plant.
“I choose crops based on past evidence of their thriving in our challenging Maritime climate, along with so-called high-value crops that cost a lot to buy at the store,” says Peirce, noting those crops include fresh herbs, snow and snap peas, and heirloom tomatoes. “I also like things I can preserve like jalapeño peppers for salsa and paste tomatoes which we eat in pasta sauce, chilli, and soups.”
Peirce admits that nostalgia also comes into play and she gravitates to some of the crops she remembers from her grandparents’ garden; summer savoury, scarlet runner beans for succotash, and yellow onions.
She sources her seeds from seed-sharing friends as well as local seed producers like Annapolis Seeds, where she found the apparently indestructible tomato called Tribe’s Tobique, which is a New Brunswick heirloom
variety. “When it comes to vegetables, my watchwords are low maintenance, reliable, and productive.”
As an avid canner and preserver, Peirce aims to find a balance between fresh eating and preserving the harvest. This comes into play when she’s selecting what to grow. “I have a terrible weakness
for tomatoes and they dominate my edible landscape,” she laughs, adding that she grows varieties with fruits in all sizes, shapes, and colours. “I also make a zillion yummy things with pumpkins – soups, muffins, cakes, and stews – so I grow a number of those for winter storage."
She also loves making dill
pickles and gives up a good chunk of garden real estate to pickling cucumbers. “I trellis the vining plants to feed my family’s pickle habit, which would otherwise swallow up all the garden space.”
As a backup, Peirce recommends using farmers’ markets as crop insurance in case you don’t end up with enough cucumbers, squash, or tomatoes for your preserving plans.
A little prep now can go a long way to maximizing the homegrown harvest. To increase crop production, Peirce ‘rents’ garden space from her mom, who is located about 15 minutes from her home. She also makes her own compost and supplements that with mulched leaves. “We mow our autumn leaves to get them to break down quicker and then bury a layer of them as a slow-release fertilizer.”
Growing vertically is a sneaky trick to boosting yield. Peirce prioritizes pole beans over bush beans because they can be grown up and tend to be super productive. “I also plant a double row of shell and snap peas on either side of a chicken wire pea fence to maximize space. They don’t mind sharing.”
Find Peirce’s books at Halifax Seed and ElizabethPeirce. ca.