In this article:

• First Timer? Your First Year Challenge in Gardening
  
• Organic vs Chemical Gardening
• The Economy of Gardening
  
• What Makes Sense to Grow
• Pests. And More About Those Same Darned Pests.
• Tools
  

Probably in everyone's lives there are moments of wisdom when you have a chance to do something right.  I had a day like that decades ago just after I moved back to the country, with the idea of living at least partly on the fruits of my own labors--through gardening, fishing, and hard work of my own choosing.  I didn't have much money, so whatever I did would depend on what I had already, a few hand tools and enough money for seed and the time to do whatever made sense. 

I walked down to my new property, a stand of forest on a rocky hillside, with a few spots of good soil here and there on the limestone benches that underlay the trees and overgrown field, and I tried to put myself in the position I might have been in two hundred years ago when land there was free for those who had the courage to stay.  I tried looking around with those old eyes and judging my prospects in that place, and with that ancient outlook I realized that if I really was a free man with the right to live wherever I chose, I'd keep on going until I found good land.  But I wasn't in that position, and these days most of us aren't.  We have landed where we are for other reasons, and if we decide to grow food, whether for fun or for quality or out of necessity, we work with what we have.  That's the kind of gardening I've always done.

I've never had a good gardening spot.  There has always been something seriously wrong, either too much shade or poor soil or too much swamp--but I've usually tried anyway, and over the years I've had some good gardens and some bad ones.  It can be done.  In gardening as in business, location is everything.  If we all depended on our gardens for our food, almost none of us would live where we do.  Today most of us live where agriculture makes poor economic sense, and our task is a little different--we have to make our land work.  Every solution to that problem will be unique, but there is always a solution.

This year because of the hard times many of us are having, there are a lot of people who find themselves in a similar gardening situation to the one I had years ago.  I've had hobby gardens but that wasn't one of them.  That year I needed something to eat.  It's a different kind of hobby when you need the food, and I learned a good lesson from that first year--which is, don't count on a good garden the first year.  It might happen, and there are ways to give yourself and your produce the best chance possible, but gardens are slow things that improve over time.

Start out right by looking at the basics like sun and drainage.  If you know where you want the garden, take a look at that spot in the morning and again in the afternoon and watch where the shadows fall.  If that spot gets less than eight hours of direct sunlight a day, it's trouble.  Plants are summertime things and most garden vegetables need long periods of direct sunlight daily.  Plant in a shady spot and things will either struggle or just die off from fungal illnesses.  There are a few plants which prefer shade, but they aren't the ones in the supermarket.

Drainage is the next big issue.  If your garden to be is the last place to dry out after a rain and that's where your lawn mower wheels always sink when you cut the grass, drainage is a problem there.  You may be able to fix the problem, but if you don't you'll have trouble--seed will rot in the ground, plants that sprout will grow for awhile and then die out.  Plants drown if their roots stay underwater too long.

The third thing to look for in terms of environment is trees.  You can have a garden on the sunny side of a tree and do ok.  Or you can have one that does nothing.  That depends on the tree.  If you have heard the term "companion planting" that's the issue here--some plants get along well with some trees, and some don't.  There are two types to look out for in particular:  apple trees and walnuts.  Both put toxins into the ground around them, farther than the crown of the tree is wide, to discourage competition.  Those toxins are persistent--the effects can last as long as fifteen years after the trees are removed.  

Trees are also sneaky little thieves of fertility--they'll undergrow garden areas with long feeder roots that suck away nourishment intended for your garden plants.  Spring tilling will involve chopping roots here and there, every time you turn over the ground.  It's a little extra work but you do have to cut back the jungle.  I'd rather do that every year than cut down the trees.

Let's suppose that even after considerable thought and some realization of the problems involved, you still want to plant a garden.  Maybe you're like a friend of ours who joined the panic this year and bought six hundred dollars worth of heirloom vegetable seeds even though he lives in a third floor condo in Florida, or maybe you just want a garden.  There's always enough reason to try.  

So let's take a look at your dirt. 

The best soil test you can run is to go to your garden spot and turn over a spadeful of dirt. That will teach you a lot. If the shovel won't go in because there's a web of tree roots, relocating is a good idea. If it's just rocky, that's not so bad. Rocks actually contribute fertility to soil. It's the finer stuff we really want to study. If your soil is really good it will be black and loose, kind of like devil's food cake with worms in it. High in organic matter, full of living things, based on sand and clay or the remains of some ancient dust storm. You might even have rich soil based on volcanic ash--some of the best agricultural land is just that, a disaster ameliorated by time and persistent living things. Flood plains are the most popular places traditionally, refertilized and rebuilt layer by layer during the inevitable Spring catastrophes. Now that human engineering stops much of that the soil isn't so good, but at least your house doesn't wash away every year.

Chances are very good that you won't have soil like that. In modern housing developments the top layer of soil is often scraped away before houses are built. Many locations were forest land until just recently, and forest soils are often thin to begin with and virtually disappear down to the subsoil when the trees go away. Probably you'll have land that's partly subsoil and partly fill dirt, and if you plant corn in it without any help you'll get corn that is about a foot high. Most soil will need immediate assistance if you expect a garden from it.

The solution is pretty much the same no matter if it's clay or sand or something else: add organic material. As it decays, dead matter like tree leaves or grass and weeds that are plowed under becomes food for worms, who distribute fertilizer pellets on the surface and open up deep airways. Encourage life, and the soil gets better year by year.

The first year is tough, though. Unless you already have a lot of composted material or good manure from cattle, horses, goats, chickens and rabbits (but not pigs or dogs), there's a breakdown period to go through as the soil critters turn lawn debris, leaves, and other things like sawdust into real soil. Keep feeding the garden and it will get stronger. If you have a fairly large yard, you get a lot of organic waste from it--grass clippings, wood chips from branches, household garbage, newspaper and cardboard can all go under the soil in the garden. It'll just take time to break down and become dirt. Most people don't want to wait or go to all that work, they just till or plow and use chemical fertilizers to force a crop. That does work.

If you want to garden organically, without chemical fertilizers or pesticides, you need very good soil. You can use chemical fertilizers and still build the soil in the traditional way, focusing the output of your other land into the garden, but you won't be growing truly organic produce. Consider that organic yields are often a third the size of chemical farming yields--if you need food, you'll probably have to find a balance and do a slow shift towards organic, weaning the land from chemicals as you build its health.

You can take soil samples to your county agricultural agent, in most areas, and get a soil test with recommendations for treatments and warnings of deficiencies. Mine came back "soil not suitable for agriculture." I grew a garden anyway, using lots of organic material from other parts of my farm, wood shavings from my woodworking shop, and the by products of my flock of chickens. And now and then a pickup load of turkey litter and manure from a neighbor's factory farm. It's tough to overdo that manure part. Add all the compost you want, you still need either manure or a jolt of chemicals.

OK, you've picked a spot, you have a source of organic material, a plan for fertilizer or manure, and at this point no one can talk you out of this idea. It's time to turn the garden upside down. That's pretty much all there is to it, just take that top one foot of soil and up end it. You can do it with a garden spade if you aren't opposed to hard work, and actually it goes pretty fast if the ground isn't full of roots or rocks. Many people will be turning over sod, converting part of a green lawn into green edibles, and that's not too horrible. Just cut a trench a spade width wide at the edge of the garden and set the sod chunks to the outside. The next row you cut, turn the sod pieces upside down and set them in the first trench. Keep working and you'll have a garden instead of a lawn. It'll take a few weeks for the grass to die off and decay. Then you can bust things up a little more and plant. The garden will look kind of rough, but if you choose your crops right you can get results.

That's the hard way, and it's also pretty cheap--you can get garden spades at yard sales for next to nothing. The cheapest and easiest way, though, is to talk someone with a garden tiller into doing the job for you. If you're lucky you have a friend, neighbor or relative who owns a big tiller, likes that kind of work and will do it for expenses. That's not really uncommon. If you have to hire it done then you've started down a long road towards the most expensive food you ever ate or almost ate. There's a mathematical equation regarding this: less work equals more expense. The companion equation, that more work or more expense equals more food, does not hold true. More work or more expense equals gardening. Gardening may or may not include food as a result.

The most common way to go wrong with a garden is to choose too much to plant and too many wrong things. Established gardens are much different than first time plantings--soft aerated soil, with good tilth (structure), can yield crops that only struggle in hard, clumpy ground full of material that's still breaking down.

Corn is a crop that everybody loves, and a stand of sweet corn is often half the reason people have a garden (with half the garden devoted to it). Canned or frozen, it's even a good keeper, with true potential as a staple vegetable--but it needs rich soil, lots of nitrogen and water, and space. You need at least four rows or it won't even pollinate. It's a crop for maybe the second or third year when you have more ground worked up (gardeners tend to expand things) and can spare the best ground for hungry crops.

Melons, either cantelopes or watermelons, may be tempting, but they require deep sandy soil as well as plenty of fertilizer, and they sprawl as far as fifteen feet. Compact varieties yield smaller fruit in less space, but they are a summer time treat and not a staple food. Even the tricky crops are possible, and I've had luck with watermelons now and then in ground that's based on heavy clay, but it's a gamble. If you want food, there are better things available.

For poor soil, bet heavily on peas and beans. You could grow shell peas, which turn into a lot of hand work if you have a good crop, or you could grow sugar snap hybrids, sweet edible pod peas which combine the best of shell varieties with the flat edible pod types used in Asian dishes. You can eat sugar snaps at any stage, and you can eat the entire pod until it fills out and get tough. That increases yield and decreases work.

Peas play out early in the season as soon as the weather gets hot and muggy, usually falling prey to fungal problems towards the end of the crop anyway. Beans like hotter weather and take longer to mature. Green beans are prolific--but you have to love them or you may actually get stuck with too many to eat. I remember helping to can green beans when I was a kid, and hoping something would go wrong. We seemed to never run out of canned greed beans. Some varieties are edible first as green pods, and when they get more mature you can eat them shelled out, either green or dry. I wouldn't suggest trying to dry your own beans unless you save some for seed, because beans in the dry form are pretty cheap anyway. The legumes in general are a very good first year crop because they grow in poor soil, fix their own nitrogen supply through special nodes on their roots, and increase soil fertility for the next season.

Potatoes are another favorite of mine, one of those foods that has an entirely different flavor when garden grown. They do fairly well in new ground and poor soil, although to get a decent crop you'll need to give them a fertilizer boost. They need good drainage and full sun for the best crop. Lots of varieties are available, and even though experts don't recommend using potatoes from a supermarket as seed tubers, you can do that and save money. I've gone back to doing that, because I'm interested in unusual varieties that are just too expensive to buy through the internet. I can get better tubers in the specialty grocers for a quarter of the cost. Cut them into pieces with one eye and a good chunk of potato included, let them dry for twenty four hours, and plant with the eye up.

Tomatoes are one of those just have to have them crops, and they can be either wonderfully rewarding or total disappointments. They're another poor soil tolerant crop, but they need food. Be willing to dose them with fish fertilizer or a balanced commercial tomato food, or you'll get plants that look like they're doing well but just stop. Tomatoes need to be planted early, because in the midsummer they'll stop producing because of the heat--if you start them early, in peat pots, to give them a jump on the season, you'll have tomatoes early in the summer, a slow period when the heat is on, and a flush of new crop going into fall. Harvest the last green tomatoes just before the first frost and you can ripen them indoors, eating ripe tomatoes and fried green tomatoes well after the season ends.

Salad vegetables like leaf lettuce and radishes are a thing of the Spring, the first flush of radiant growth that comes on fast and goes poof. Green onions from onion sets will grow almost anywhere, but it takes some feeding and tending to get sandwich size bulbs. Carrots are not a good first year crop, tending to fork every time they hit even a tiny obstruction and very prone to nematode damage in heavy clay (they leaves wormholes filled with "dirt"). Trim out the damage and you don't have much left. If you grow carrots, grow the nugget variety, small and round and out of the garden quickly.

Radishes you don't pick will quickly put up flower stalks--the tops of those stalks are good eating if you snap them off before they get tough, or you can let seedpods form and pick those while green and tender. Brassicas like cabbage, broccoli, and kale are a later crop--kale needs cool temperatures and may not be worth much until fall, when it could start to recover and be one of the last winter vegetables you have. All the brassicas suffer terribly from infestations of the European Cabbage Moth--little green caterpillars that literally swarm over them unless you spray or use some sort of mesh barrier. If they get into curly kale, forget it. Flat leafed varieties are your best bet. Collard greens grow fast, give a good yield, and are out of the way before the bugs get going. You may be able to plant again in August for a fall crop. Spinach is another hot season leaf crop with fewer bug problems.

Some southern vegetables you might consider, even if you live north of the Maxon Dixon line, are sweet potatoes (leaves and roots are good eating), okra (often yields a useful crop even if the plants don't thrive) and yard long beans. Yard long beans are the Asian long pea you often see in stir fry at Chinese restaurants. They love hot weather, and as long as you pick the beans before the seed matures inside, they keep producing.

No one should forget zucchini, unless no one in your family eats zucchini. Give the plants plenty of room and full sun--crowded and otherwise stressed plants won't set fruit. Plant at least half a dozen to ensure pollination. Work up the soil for these hungry but benevolent plants thoroughly, mixing in aged organic matter and manure. Pick the squash when it's small, only a few days after the bloom falls off, for best flavor and best yield. Giant zucchini are nearly inedible and suck away all the plant's energy.

The list goes on, and that's part of the problem with new gardens. People take on more than they can handle, that first year. Pick a few things you know you'll eat, make sure the varieties are appropriate for your area, and don't waste a lot of space on corn or melons. Don't plant more than a few heavy feeders, and make sure you give them the extra care they'll need.

If you have extra seed, or decide you've overbought and don't have the time or room to plant everything you wanted to try, put the unused seed packs in a ziplock bag and store them in the freezer. They should be just fine next season, and possibly for a few more.

Gardening goes wrong in so many ways that every year I have moments when I think I shouldn't even try again--then Spring comes and I do, because it's something I like. I like a reasonable amount of hard labor, with some results I can eat. Some years it's feast, and some years it's famine. Some years I've been too angry at the problems to go out and pick. I remember one of my old neighbors who used to grow sweet corn every year in one of his good fields, and every year on the night before he decided to harvest, the raccoons would go through the field and take the best, or sometimes all, of the corn. One year he got so mad he retired.

Economically it makes better sense to buy produce at your local farmers' market, and let people with good farms do the work. Chances are, you'll step into the gardening vortex anyway and be pulled in, and if it doesn't work this year you'll be looking ahead to the next season and mulling over what you can do right next time.

A fence is a good investment. Gardens are little oases of fertility, filled with succulent vegetation that your wild neighbors may not even recognize as food the first season. My farm garden wasn't discovered until the third year, when an itinerant groundhog moving out on his own for the first time discovered the little patch of promised land and spread the word. I tried coexisting, but that doesn't work with a critter that walks down every row and takes one or two bites out of everything, periodically grazing everything down to ground level, vanishing from the area until you've nursed the ravaged landscape back to health, and then coming back to do it again. Rabbits can be trouble, but a good wire mesh fence will keep them out. Deer may visit, but are scared off by human hair and dealt with by a number of other useful tricks. Groundhogs are different. I personally would rate their intelligence level as limited but focused, and in particular specialties superior to mine. I built fences that were buried eight inches deep, with the wire mesh turned outward for a foot at the bottom, and four feet in visible vertical height, the last foot of the mesh loose so if the groundhogs grabbed ahold to climb over they couldn't get a secure grip. That actually worked for most of one season. Then I met the old Silverback of the clan.

I'd gone down to check on things, knowing everything was secure and safe, and he was squatting in the middle of what used to be the sweet potatoes, fat and happy. Looked like he weighed about thirty pounds, and if I'd had any sense I'd have leapt upon him and fought him with my bare hands right then, a cage fight in the garden with only one of us leaving alive. But I didn't. I chased him out through the garden gate and looked for a hole in the fence or some other way in. I didn't find one.

Over the course of the summer Silverback destroyed everything, repeatedly and systematically, and even though I tried every approach and every trick I knew, I could never get a shot at him. He was sharp-eyed, knew my routine precisely, and was smart enough to know when I had the rifle and when I didn't. I looked for his trail, because groundhogs are creatures of habit and always make a path to their own door, but I couldn't find it. He beat me fair and square that year, and I called it quits and abandoned the garden, or what was left of it, to him.

In the winter when I was walking through the garden gate wondering if I should try again the next season, the wind caught the corner of a plastic tarp I'd folded and laid on the ground, stored there since I'd used it to cover strawberries during a late Spring frost. Under the tarp was a groundhog hole. Silverback had really outsmarted me, dug a secret tunnel under the fence and come up underneath the tarp. I couldn't find his trail because he was walking on mine.

I left the garden to him. After a few years, even if you declare war, the groundhogs become established well enough that their tunnels connect underground in a warren system you'll never decipher, and then the only thing you can do is move the garden. I'm living in a new place now, solving the problems of gardening in a swamp, and somewhere Silverback's descendants are gathered in their warrens, poring over intelligence reports and devising scuba gear. Eventually they'll show up.

I have plans of my own.

You'll need tools.  Even if you study low maintenance methods like deep mulching, you still have to carry in the mulch and spread it out.  There's no escape from the work.  The only person who has ever come up with an alternative to work is Masanobu Fukuoka, who had an enlightenment experience regarding farming, in the years following WWII, and spent the rest of his life digging holes and burying trees and trying to figure out ways to create a self sustaining landscape with minimal human intervention.  I recommend his books to everyone.  It only takes about forty years of hard labor to achieve his results, and then you die.  But it's true, the thing he realized while standing on the docks way back then, "Life, death, two sides of the same coin--hahahaha!"  When you garden, you grow to understand things like that.

You'll still need tools.  You have two main approaches, hand tools and machines.  You can do without machines but you have to substitute hand labor, which is sometimes as efficient. 

Plows are the tools of commercial farmers, not gardeners.  The gardening equivalents are heavy duty tillers.  Front tine tillers drag you and the machine forward unmercifully, and strive as much to rip your arms from their shoulder sockets as they do to till the soil.  Rear tine tillers drive forward on their own wheels, dragging counter-rotating tines behind them.  It takes a lot of the strain off the human body that guides them, but it gives misleading results.  It looks like you're digging deep, but you're usually throwing up a shallow but fluffy layer.  No tiller goes as deep as a plow.

Cultivators are smaller front tine tillers, usually with no wheels at all, and are not designed for anything but churning the top of the soil.  You can use them to rip out weeds between rows, if you're careful and lucky.  You can also use them to till a few inches deep, if you are stubborn.  They tend to clog quickly and also to leap uncontrollably into the air in harder soils, instead of digging in.  They are not entirely useless, but would work much better in styrofoam than they do in dirt.

If you buy machines, buy the best you can get.  If you can't afford the best, look in local want ads on and off line for people who do the work for pay.  It's often the cheapest and fastest way to till a large garden.

Hand tools still make good sense.  A spade will go almost as deep as a plow.  A hatchet will cut out roots with a few chopping strokes that you'll be beating with a shovel edge for an hour.  The only thing a tiller will do if it grabs ahold of a good root is leap forward with or without you, or get stuck.  A maddock is good for breaking up coarse ground; a hoe is good for tilling and chipping out weeds; a rake is essential for smoothing over seedbeds and covering furrows.  If you have really hard ground, like much of what I've worked with, a pick is really useful.  A pitchfork is a necessity if you make compost from yard waste, and in a good garden it's sometimes all you need to quickly churn up a seed bed and get ready to plant.

You can get hand tools very cheap at yard sales, but usually you'll find old tools that are worn out, with aged handles about to break.  Replacing old handles isn't cheap, which is why the tools are at the yard sale.  Be skeptical. 

New tools often have fiberglass tube handles.  Several companies give them lifetime warranties but they don't hold up to hard work and you'll be bringing them back for replacement a lot.  Wooden handled tools cost more but last longer.

The only guaranteed way to have a good garden is to be elected president, or be married to whoever was, and start one behind the White House.  If it fails, somebody will come in late at night, probably clad in ninja uniforms and dropping down ropes from silent black helicopters, and replace what didn't work with specially engineered vegetables that look great and give those who eat them special psychic powers.

The rest of us live in the real world.