Well, hell, the building dates from around 1910, but I don’t know when the cinderblock south wall was first painted. I know the landlord uses non-toxic paints wherever possible (I do painting work for him occasionally), and he’s owned the building for 30 years, but, frankly, state route 55 runs past the property and we’re only a few miles away from heavy industry like the BP refinery and US Steel Works. We’re sort of screwed if there’s contamination because I’d suspect we could have just as much from airborne pollution as from building paint. Not that that stops anyone around here from gardening. Our well water does get tested annually (so far it’s quite healthy stuff) but I don’t know if the soil has ever been tested. I do know other tenants have gardened on the property and no one has had any health problems (other than the one who died of a drug overdose, but you couldn’t blame that on lead in the soil)
We don’t have kids, so that’s not so much a worry although obviously I wouldn’t want to eat lead myself, either.
you can have a basic garden without doing much of anything. Yes you can rent a rototiller but you dont have too. When im lazy (or broke) I put several layers of newspaper over the grass which then dies. Worms come up and eat the newspaper and bam! a garden. If you can afford it put good soil (from the flower bed maybe) just deep enough to plant seeds. Cant do the newspaper thing? take a shovel and dig one shovels width of sod two depths down, not too too hard. Place all dirt to one side put sod in bottom upside down and replace dirt. Plant seeds. every year dig a bit more.
Do use the square foot method where you plant densely enough that no weeds grow and mulch with almost anything around the edges to prevent the grass from coming in.Newspaper, grass clippings, bark, gravel etc. Since you have a bit of a flower bed then you must have all the tools needed, mainly a shovel. I have done a very productive garden with pretty much the cost of the seeds and water. Yes its nice to have all the toys and I admit I spend way too much on my flowers however farmer types have been making do for years without a lot of money. Since most of us are city type gardeners it seems we make it a lot harder then it needs be. Plants will want to grow. think old school, pretend you got lost in the bush and have to make do.
Broomstick: Not to imply that the advice you’ve gotten here isn’t any good (it’s all good), but you might want to check out www.davesgarden.com. Among other things, there’s a database of plants to help you and message boards to query other gardeners in your area. In just about all areas, all over the country, the people get together for something they call “round ups,” which is really just a plant exchange. People dig up stuff, or divide or package up seeds, or whatever and bring 'em to an agreed-upon time and place and then trade. Often, these gardeners are quite generous, and if you have nothing to trade, they will still give you plants, seeds, supplies… whatever.
Last year, I went to Gainesville and a guy who works at the Jacksonville Zoo gave me large bins of elephant poo. Makes the peppers grow like… weeds.
Also, if your local Target has a garden center, I’ve found they have the least expensive plants. You can get veg in 4" pots for about $2 each. (Or sign up at Dave’s Garden, attend a round up and get a bunch of freebies and free advice and help.)
Helpful tip: If you cover the beds over with another layer of newspaper you can do some very respectable weed control. Take recycled dixie cup and poke out the bottoms, tear a hole in the paper and use the cup as a sort of mini collar. Plant your seed in the mini-planter you’ve made, and BAM! no weeds, and perfect open spots for watering.
Oh, that is EXTREMELY helpful… I thought I was going to have a Google-slog to find the extension people for Lake County and there you handed right to me! Thank you!
Question about newspaper mulch – how do keep people from thinking it’s trash/litter? Yes, yes, I see you’ve got some neatly laid out sheets there, or some nicely shredded paper carefully tucked into the garden, but how do you keep non-gardening semi-comatose people (like one’s fellow tenants) from being “helpful” by picking up all that paper “blown” into the yard?
I have a factoid in my head that says that if you’re extremely motivated, and have lots of skinny, cheap wire coat hangers, you can untwist them with pliers and then bend them into croquet hoop shapes, and use them like giant hairpins to fasten strategically placed clumps of shredded newspaper to the earth. Never tried it myself, just one of those “Hey, kids, try this!” hints I saw go past, back in the day.
If they’re anything like the Macon County Master Gardeners, they will collectively talk your ear off at the slightest cry for help, not to mention coming over to your house to personally walk it and tell you exactly what to do to fix whatever.
Just the teeniest weeniest little leaves poking up this afternoon - but it’s here! Ah… the miracle of life!
May have to cover it over tomorrow night, though - expecting a light snow/frost. Hope it survives. Ah, well, a risk I took planting early… We’ll see just how cold tolerant it really is, I guess.
Well, the initial 30 feet of planting is coming up. One problem is that last year’s alyssum apparently dropped a bazillion seeds, which, since I don’t want them there this time around, are now in the “weed” category and threatening to strangle the spinach seedlings. When I went to weed that spot I discovered the ant’s nest when the ants took exception to my presence. This is almost as much fun as the time I accidentally sat down on a branch from one of the rose bushes. The alyssum sprouts are also swarming some of the other vegetable sprouts, and I can’t find the onions - I’m not sure if they’re late coming up or if I have to let things go a little bit longer so I can distinguish them from what else is growing there enough to properly weed the plot.
I started tearing up the sod in a one-foot wide strip along the back fence where I will be planting green beans/wax beans of various colors. I can manage a 10 foot strip by hand on a given day. The sod has grown back quite thickly over what used to be garden area. The soil back there is soft, and with a definite sand component but also very dark and earthy-smelling. LOTS of worms.
Recent purchases include a total of $3.41 for bean seeds (we eat a lot of green beans around here, and I got 'em in four different colors so I guess technically only some of the are green) and $4.49 for plant food. So that’s about $10.
The local grocery store is selling 40 lbs bag of top soil. I’ve considered getting a couple for back by the fence there there are a couple dips in the ground.
I do have an actual question , though - watermelons like water, correct? So if I (hypothetically) had a spot in the garden that tends to accumulate rainwater due to drainage that would be a good spot, yes? I’m not talking a puddle that lasts for days, it’s just an area that’s slightly lower than elsewhere so it stays damp longer than anywhere else.
STOP! Watermelons do NOT like to be soggy! They love the heat, and while they will suck up lots of water in the process of growing the melon, they’ll die in soggy patches. They like a hill made of nice sandy soil mixed with lots and lots of manure. Thin your melons to two or three a hill and let them go nuts. If you want big melons, don’t let them set fruit until the vines are seven feet long or longer.
Melons will do ok if the area drains, and doesn’t stay saturated. My weed for the year is the forget me nots I planted last year and went to seed. I realized that was the case last fall. I looked through the pictures last year and realized that i need to get the tender plants started in trays now. I can haul them inside if a frost is likely.
My main daffodil bed is at peak flower now, and I estimate something around 400 flowers blooming in it now. The peony plants popped up yesterday. In a month I’ll have them in flower for the third year. I’ll have hundreds of iris blooms too. This year the iris are going to be thinned after the blooms finish. I am going to have more food plants this year, because alas I need more food too. I just may throw some corn in the squash bed , so the corn hill method will show if I do.
Hmm… the spot I had in mind doesn’t stay soggy, just damp. I was sort of hoping I could use the melons to sop it up. Maybe, though, I should mound up some soil in the back where it’s sort of sandy and grow them there.
Talking to a couple co-workers (yes! I have a job! Part time, but still…) apparently there’s a problem with getting melons to actually produce melons around here. They apparently grow just fine as plants, but producing fruit is problematic. Well, worst that happens is I have some ornamental vines and I’m out 30 cents for the seeds.
If you really want to do it on the cheap, and with less effort than organic, a 40 lb bag of 13-13-13 fertilizer is about 10-12 bucks, and ought to last you quite a while for your garden.
As for varieties,
Beans and peas grow like weeds and are very productive. Same for squashes and zucchini.
Bell peppers, at least in my experience, are reasonably prolific, but I can’t seem to get them very large.
Hot peppers do just fine, especially if the summer’s a tad cooler than usual (meaning mid-low 90s).
Broccoli, spinach, lettuce, and cabbage are all winter/early spring crops.
Kale is well-nigh indestructible- I highly recommend it. It won’t die if it gets really hot, and it seems to laugh at Dallas winters. It’s nutritious and you can plant a LOT from a packet of seeds.
Never able to accomplish that, myself.
I hate you.
Lots.
Broomstick, I’d hold off on shelling out for “topsoil” until I got a chance to sample that actual product. Purveyors of this sort of thing will sometimes bag up the most un-soil-like substances that you can imagine, and happily flog it as “top soil”, apparently with no detriment to their consciences. See if you can discreetly poke a smallish hole in one of the bags and make sure you aren’t just paying for:
[ul][li]peat moss.[/li][li] clay.[/li][li] composted steer manure.[/li][/ul]
Not that there’s anything wrong with buying bags of peat moss or manure, but they won’t fill in a low spot the way actual topsoil will.
If you have to choose, go with the composted steer manure, because it absorbs water faster and easier than peat moss, which can take forEVER to get wet, and meanwhile it’s back there in the low spot blowing away in the spring breeze.
Also be aware that if for some reason you should luck into some actual topsoil, it’s bound to have its own ecosystem of weed seeds that come with it, relict of whatever suburban development future front yards it was scraped off of (that’s where bagged topsoil comes from: when the developer puts up new houses, he bulldozes off the topsoil, bags it, and sells it). So be ready for teeny aliens which you will avoid yanking because you will assume it’s something you planted, but which along about the beginning of July turn out to be, say, burdock, or Canada thistle.
Actually, peat moss is exactly what the soil around here seems to need. Areas that have had peat moss worked in are noticeably more fertile than the rest of this place. “Blowing away” is not a problem because the water table is so high everything stays moist, and it seems to mix well with the sandy stuff that is the natural soil around here (about 12,000 years ago where my home is was, in fact, a large beach).
Anyhow, I’ve bought from this place before - their labels have so far been accurate as to contents. Most likely, I’d put it along the fence line where there is a noticeable dip in the ground running parallel. The really big, large dip I have piled all the weeds/pulled sod/last years grass and weeds into and it will become the compost pile. I think I can get away with that, and over time it WILL fill that hole with real dirt.
I hope $4 for 120 lbs of topsoil is a good price, 'cause that’s what I paid. Very handy I had a pickup truck to bring it home with, as getting that in and out of the trunk of the car would have been a pain.
Total for purchases so far: $14.02
That bagged topsoil was just that - good old black dirt.
I have expanded the garden by 40 square feet. This has been hard work, as it is breaking sod with manual tools. Also got the OK for a compost heap, which gives me somewhere to put yard and some of the kitchen wastes.
If I decide to grow greens in the fall I may need to buy more seeds.
For a little variety in your beans, take a look at Chinese long bean. I had good luck growing them in southern Minnesota, in pots ('cus I don’t have an actual garden). It’s a climbing vine, and the pods grow upto maybe 18". I found they seemed best at about 12". I’d cut them into smaller segments to eat. It was amazing watching those grow. You could see a difference in size, between morning and that evening. There was a bunch of pods put out at first, and then a smaller but steady supply up until the frost killed them in the fall.
