How to Grow an Organic Vegetable Garden

RON: Hi everyone, I'm Ron Corning with howdini.com for the Green Guide. You know, buying organic vegetables is great, but growing your own is even better. But how do you get started? Well Scott Meyer is with Organic Gardening Magazine, he's the editor. And he's joining us now with tips on how to get the ball rolling. Scott, thanks for being here.

SCOTT: It's great to be out in the garden with you today, Ron.

RON:  All right. First of all, Scott, why organic?

SCOTT: As you said, you get great produce, better than you can buy. But it's also just satisfying to be outside; the fresh air and the sunshine, and working in concert with nature to produce a great result.

RON: Nutritionally?

SCOTT: You get better food, and it's fresher and tastes better than any food you could buy.

RON: Yeah, a lot of chefs are going that way.

SCOTT: All the chefs know that organic food is the best kind of food. It's also cool; when you're talking about your garden, you're going to tell people, 'I'm an organic gardener; not just a gardener.'

RON: So take us through the first step.

SCOTT: You're looking for a place that gets full sun to grow those great summer vegetables everybody loves. That means eight to ten hours of sunlight a day at the peak of summertime. You also want to make sure that it has good drainage. That means the water doesn't sit there when it rains. When you leave water on the soil, sitting there, it can cause all kinds of other problems. So make sure the soil drains well. Just put a little bit of water on top, and if it drains away, you're great.

RON: In terms of the amount of space you need for the plot, what would you recommend? Some people don't have a lot of space.

SCOTT: You don't need a lot of space, and you also don't really want to start big. A lot of new gardeners make the mistake of planting too much and making too big of a garden that they can't maintain. So I recommend starting smaller, and working with a space that's about four by eight, maybe four by ten. The four feet width allows you to reach into the center of the garden to pull weeds or to harvest or whatever you need to do without stepping on the soil. You never want to step on it once you've turned it.

RON: So Scott has put together a garden cart that has all the materials and tools you need to get your garden plot ready, and I'm impressed with how little you need to really get started.

SCOTT: It's great. You don't need a lot of machines or fancy tools to get started. Everything you need is really available at your local hardware store or home center. Beginning with, really, a wooden stake. Wooden stakes, you'll find in any hardware store, and these are great for just marking off the area and giving yourself a feel for how big it is, and how it's going to work with the sun and the drainage.

RON: And this is a large-sized spade, right?

SCOTT: It's a large-sized spade, and it's different than a shovel because it's square at the bottom, and it has these foot spots here that you can use to push the spade into the soil. It's important that you get a sharp spade. Most of the tools that you buy don't have an edge on them; this one needs an edge so that you can cut through the sod and lift it right up. And then you have to sort of work that soil over, and this is what you need for that.
A fork, and a garden fork is the right tool for working that soil. You want one that has a wide spacing between the tines. You'll see some forks that are closer together for other purposes; you want this one because you're going to put it in the soil and break up the cods that are underneath where the grass was.

RON: So we're talking about the hardest way, which is to mark the plot, take the sod up, beginning working the soil. But there's another process that people might be able to begin, let's say earlier in the spring or in the fall, which doesn't involve any of that, and you call it lasagna, which is sort of layering. Explain that for people.

SCOTT: It's really an easier way to do it because you're not removing the sod at all. In fact, the sod is breaking down, and it becomes that organic matter that's feeding the underground microbes. In this method, you layer some things on top; newspaper, straw, grass clippings, shredded leaves - again, all natural things you have. The newspaper's very effective in killing the grass off, and then the other things start to break down and begin to create rich, fertile soil. In fact, you don't even need to work it with the pitchfork. In that case, you're just cutting holes into it, and planting right through it.

RON: All right. Let's talk about exactly what goes into the soil to get it ready for planting. What do you recommend there? Because we're going organic here and no chemical fertilizers or pesticides.

SCOTT: Absolutely correct. And one of the most important reasons to do that is because plants are fed in a, by the microorganisms in the soil, and those chemical fertilizers and pesticides, herbicides can kill them.

RON: Mm-hmm.

SCOTT: In an organic system, you're really nourishing those microbes, and they're doing the work for you. That really begins with compost. You can make it, or you can buy it. You work that into the soil, and again those microbes are working with them, they're breaking them down, and turning that into fertilizer for your plants.

RON: So when it comes to weeds, no chemical weed killers. How do you deal with it?

SCOTT: The gardener's best friend is mulch. If you keep the garden covered throughout the gardening season, it will keep weeds from coming up 'cause they're not getting any sunlight, and the weeds that do come up are going to pull out relatively easily. And also conserves water in your soil when you're doing this; mulch is a great helper. The materials that are best for mulching in an organic garden: grass clippings and straw or leaves. Those things are handy, and they break down and feed your soil as they go.

RON:  And this may be news to a lot of our viewers; that it's never too late in the summer to start, right?

SCOTT: It's not too late to start to grow the hot weather vegetables; you go to the garden center and find the plants full-grown there. So start with those green beans, plant from seed. You can do that in mid- to late summer, and all of the herbs are also well planted in mid-summer.

RON: What about the fall, moving into the fall?

SCOTT: Fall is a great time for gardening. It's a great time of year to grow the salad greens that everybody loves and are the easiest things to put on your table. Lettuce, spinach, kale; those are all great planted in the fall. Start those from seed, or you could start those from small plants.

RON: All right Scott, thank you. We appreciate it.

SCOTT: It was my pleasure.

RON: Scott Meyer is the editor of Organic Gardening magazine, and I'm Ron Corning with howdini.com for the Green Guide.