Organic Vegetable Gardening

With food and gas prices steadily increasing, incomes uncertain, climate change and peak oil just around the corner... many of us are ramping up our organic vegetable gardening and food growing, adding food to the flowers, or indeed starting a new garden or re-starting an old one.

If you're looking to make a real dent in your grocery bill, or to become more self-reliant, there's more to it than buying a few tomato seedlings at the big box store and plopping them in the ground.

Part of the rationale for many people who want to grow food is to know what they are eating, and to make sure it's as clean and healthy as possible, with as few extra non-food ingredients as we can manage. That means growing naturally and organically, and it's very practical. After all, before the rise of artificial pesticides and fertilizers in the 20th century, everyone gardened that way!

Get rid of the weeds and give your new veggie plants the best start

What state is the bed in now? Weedy, compacted, mulched since last fall? Let's go over what you need to do to prepare beds in different states.

Weedy Beds

• Soft annual weed growth - dig it in with hand or power tools.
• Perennial weeds or annuals going to seed - remove the weeds and compost them
• Pernicious weeds - ideally mulch or cover crop for a season to discourage them. Never till!

Compacted Beds

Why is the bed compacted? Find the reason and fix it. Then...

• Loosen it using hand or power tools
• Or, if you have a hard pan, you may need to use deep digging or power plowing with a subsoiler to break it up.

Mulched Beds

Great job mulching at the end of last season! You can dig in the mulch, rake it off and compost it, or pull it apart to plant if you're planting large seeds or transplants.

Once you have a weed free, loosened bed, by whatever method, think about adding soil amendments, then rake and form the bed as much as you need to for what you'll be planting.

For more detailed information about this whole process, and more articles on organic vegetable gardening and food growing, visit Garden Homesteading.

These are the books I own and refer to myself, or recommend to beginner gardeners who need a good place to start.

For New Gardeners

Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew. If you are a total newbie, this is a complete system that will get you going. Mel tells you every little detail and if you follow his instructions, you will succeed. Do this for a while, then expand into your areas of most interest, and try different methods!

Gaia's Garden by Toby Hemenway. This is the best beginner intro to Permaculture, a design system and way of thinking about how we as humans interact with the land around us - and a very eco-friendly gardening method. If you roll your eyes at Mel's super-specific and tidy square foot gardens, this may be for you!

Beyond the Beginner Books

The Resilient Gardener by Carol Deppe. This is my all-time favorite and most-referred-to book. Carol is extremely practical, and shows you how to create a garden that won't collapse and die if you look away for a day, a week, or more. Focuses on corn, squash, potatoes and duck eggs as crops for self-reliance, but much more general gardening info too.

The Permaculture Handbook by Peter Bane. This is a big book with a lot of information in it, but my favorite part is chapter 6, "A Garden Farming Pattern Language", which organizes and systematizes many aspects of permaculture and gardening that I knew but hadn't formulated yet.

I write more about organic vegetable gardening and growing other food at my Gardening and Homesteading website.