JW: So you want to grow a garden—“Part Two!” Recently we talked about planning your garden, what to grow, how much to grow--and today we'll talk about preparing your garden. I'm Judy Wagley. This is “From the Ground Up!” Recently, my guest Andrew Curtiss from Show-tiss Farm in Shepherd talked about planning our gardens when we want to start a garden. And what happens next? Well, we've got to prepare the site. Andrew, thanks for joining me today for “From the Ground Up!”
AC: It's great to be here, Judy.
JW: So we planned our garden. Now let's prepare our garden. And those are two different things.
AC: So preparing your garden, you're going to want to select a site to grow the garden that gets 8 to 10 hours of sunlight a day. You don't want to be on the west side of shade trees because you're not gonna get any morning sun. You want your plants to get morning sun and then to get 8 to 10 hours of sunlight throughout the day.
JW: Is there a way to determine what site is going to get that amount of light?
AC: Yeah. So you'd walk your yard or walk your area and you would look for trees. You would look for buildings that are going to cast shade in the morning and you will get an idea pretty quickly on where the shadows are, and you want to be in a spot where the sun is shining in the morning.
JW: 8 to 10 hours a day of sunlight. OK, that's the optimal site. What's next?
AC: Yeah. So next you're going to select the spot you want to grow. A lot of gardens happen in yards that are no longer going to be mowed and kept, and people turn them into a garden. And when you select your site, you're going to have to deal with the weeds and the grass that are there, and you're going to have to find a way to terminate that crop. Now you can do that chemically with a chemical burn down. I don't personally like that. I think we should keep chemicals out of our food supply. But the best way I found is called solarization where you would use a tarp and you lay it on the grass and it will suffocate the grass, and the heat from the sun underneath the tarp will kill that top layer of weed seed and the weeds that are there growing.
JW: How long will that take?
AC: Six to eight weeks roughly, so you would want to do that about the 1st of April. If you had that done by mid-April, you'd be looking at a good bed of black dirt there by Memorial Day when you'd want to plant. So next, after you've done that, you're going to want to make soil amendments. If you ever walk a farmer’s market and you see these giant heads of broccoli, and if you try to grow broccoli and yours are the size of--maybe a tennis ball, I get this question all the time. “Why doesn't my broccoli get big?” Well, it's one word, it's fertilizer. It's food. If you didn't eat for a week, you're probably not going to grow, but when you eat regularly, you grow well and your body functions the way it was designed. Plants are the same way. So we want to make sure we have a good organic fertilizer in the soil for those plants to feed off. I once heard the saying that things that grow quick are sweet and things that grow slow are bitter. And when you provide a plant with the opportunity, the right water, the right food, it'll grow quickly and you'll have excellent tasting vegetables.
JW: We're going to add that fertilizer to our soil--even before we plant anything?
AC: Absolutely. Yep. We add it at the beginning of April and we incorporate it into the top few inches of soil. And then after we've prepared the soil bed, we'll go ahead and plant our vegetables there.
JW: What about different methods like raised beds or straw-bale gardening? There's a lot of different methods.
AC: Yeah, absolutely. There's so many ways to grow vegetables. So raised beds are very popular right now. People will grow them with two by sixes. You can use treated lumber. I personally wouldn't use treated lumber because of the chemicals that are used to treat that lumber. But cedar or white pine will last you a few years. You'll just plan to replace it. And so like mine, I'll, I'll use raised beds and I'll replace them probably every five to six years. So I have that built in, in my plan. And then you fill that with a quality compost or a quality topsoil.
JW: And you're all set!
AC: Yep, you're good to go and ready to go. And then it's about preparing and selecting your plant varieties and getting ready to go.
JW: Any more expert advice as we plan and prepare our garden for spring?
AC: I think the thing is to have fun. Don't let the garden become stressful! It should be a place where you enjoy your time, your time with loved ones and people around you, and an opportunity for you to just enjoy creation.
JW: And I think then that the food that you grow will just taste that much better!
AC: Absolutely it will!
JW: Andrew Curtis from Show-tiss Farm in Shepherd. Thanks for joining me today for “From the Ground Up!”
AC: It's great to be here.
