If you’re worried like I am about rising food prices this year, learning how to grow a vegetable garden can be a terrific way to lower your produce bill.
Now, I know what most of you are thinking: But I don’t know the first thing about planting a vegetable garden!
I hear ya.
Until recently, I used to raise tomato plants because, after all, there is nothing better than a homegrown tomato. Unfortunately, a combination of poor gardening skills, ravenous squirrels and other hungry critters produced a very disappointing harvest of fewer than two dozen tomatoes. So for the past several growing seasons, frustration led me to stop gardening. But I’m dusting myself off this year and getting back on the gardening bandwagon again!
With that in mind, we’re now smack-dab in the middle of vegetable-planting season again, which has me wondering if I can do something to increase my homegrown tomato yield so much that it doesn’t matter how many veggies the critters run away with this summer and fall.
Hey, I’m sure I’m not the only brown thumb out there who wonders about the best location for planting my veggies, how far apart they should be, and how long they need to grow. And these answers get even more complicated when your planting a garden with multiple veggies!
So, how do you plant a garden that actually yields a cornucopia of veggies large enough to reduce your produce bill?
The good news is, AnglianHome has put together a nifty little green-thumb cheat sheet for people like me that is loaded with tips to help you grow — and successfully harvest — the most popular garden vegetables this summer.
In fact, this cheat sheet will show you everything you need to know to plant a successful vegetable garden including:
- The best time to plant
- How far apart to plant seeds
- What vegetables needs propagating
- What veggies need to be in a greenhouse
- The optimal container sizes for planting veggies in pots
- Distance to thin seedlings out to
- Germination & maturation times
- Which pests to look out for
- What veggies work best together
- When to harvest!
The only thing it doesn’t tell you is how to keep the wildlife from eating it all! Then again, if I follow these tips, I’m hoping there will be more than enough tomatoes this year. For me and the squirrels.
Who knows, if I’m really lucky, maybe I’ll even have enough to share with my neighbors.
Photo Credit: The Marmot; Infographic: anglianhome.co.uk
We have a small vegetable garden in our house. We made sure that the plants are have enough space.
We do a lot of camping throughout the summer, and there are multiple stretches of 3-8 days where we aren’t home. Vegetable gardens need to be tended to regularly, so we figure our chances of success are pretty slim with our schedule. It certainly is something we’d love to do with the right opportunity.
My issue is the critters. It’s bad enough that I have a brown thumb. Then toss in the wild animals who pilfer what little I do coax from Mother Nature and it’s almost not worth it!
Len,
I hear ya.
My solution to squirrels is a .22 with 4x scope. May not work in an urban situation, but go to the hardware store and buy large rat traps, bait with peanut butter. Or make a box trap (google “rabbit box trap) if you’re squeamish about killing the bushy tailed rats.
We have more problem with deer…..set out plants, next morning you have stubs. IMPOSSIBLE to raise sweet potatoes. Had to build a tall fence around our gardens to keep then out, then add height to the gates because they would simply bound over any 4′ tall opening !
Thanks for the tip, Andy. My late uncle Chuck had a mini crossbow that he used on the squirrels that were ravaging his garden. He’d sit on the back porch and fire away at them.
Have you considered self-watering containers? Or do what my neighbor does, which is tell us to pick her tomatoes/ strawberries/ whatever while they are gone. We never do, but we could!
Interesting charts, Len, but that ‘Mange Tout’ threw me until I realized they’re snow peas. 🙂 We follow the ‘Square Foot Gardening’ method, and have good success in a small plot. We also have a fence around that plot to keep the deer, squirrels and rabbits away (and this year we’ll be adding a mesh roof to keep the hail from destroying our veggies!)
Yeah, I should have explained that one, Lauren. I had to look it up too!
Re: the fence. I was told the squirrels will just dig under barriers like fences and chicken wire. Is that not true?
We’ve never had a problem with squirrels or any other critter getting into our fenced garden area, Len. But then we have lots of tasty flowers and shrubs growing OUTSIDE the fenced garden area, so they don’t really need to ‘come into the garden’ to graze!
For deer, my mom places shiny pinwheels in the ground. The movement and shine are supposed to scare them…I am like you, can’t grow anything so i support my local farm stand.
This is a really great chart. I have a black thumb. I have successfully grown some things, like parsley and tomatoes. The gophers got my parsley.
This year I will probably try tomatoes in a pot again (we have sandy hilly soil, so pots or raised beds are it.) I randomly won some self-watering containers (and built one also), so that’s what I use for my tomatoes. Added bonus is that we can fill them with water before a vacation and they usually survive.
I’ve tried potted tomatoes too. I actually had better luck with yield. Maybe, I should try that again.
Oh Len! I wish you could hang out with my mother-in-law. I tell you having a mother-in-law who is a gardener is the ultimate symbiotic relationship. She helps me raise my children, keeps an eye on my husband (her son), and gardens. We take care of them financially and pay for health insurance and they have their own wing of the house. We have a typical southern california front yard and about 6000SF lot but we got tons tons tons of food. OMG it is amazing. I think you have to befriend a true gardener because it is an art form. We have rain barrels and use bath water, and we fertilize with our two bunnies! Their poop is the ultimate organic fertilizer. Its so awesome. I’d send you some if you were our neighbor. Our front yard is like this crazy lovely food paradise and our neighborhood is still a laid back old surfing town vibe that no one minds, and the neighborhood kids love it. I’m trying to learn from her now and am propogating succulents and sprouting potatoe buds. Our tomatoes are crazy productive, not to boast or anything.
I know … gardening is quite technical — especially when it comes to maximizing yields. I had no idea bunny poop made good fertilizer! I’ve got plenty of that in my yard, We have lots of bunnies in my neighborhood too!
We have a big vegetable garden and have invested very little money in it. We fertilize with free used horse bedding from a local stable and composted garden and kitchen waste. We mulch heavily with leaves, with bales of spoiled hay (free or very cheap as the animals can’t eat it), free bales of straw and cornstalks off the curb after Halloween and Thanksgiving when the neighbors discard their Autumn yard decorations. Luckily none of us have to worry about learning how to garden as it is incredibly easy to learn and Mike Bloomberg can teach ANYONE to garden successfully in under one minute. Bloomberg said, in 2016, “I could teach anybody — even people in this room, no offense intended — to be a farmer. It’s a [process]: you dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn.” Later, he contrasts the nature of that work with that of the “information economy”: “[…] The information economy is fundamentally different because it’s built around replacing people with technology and the skill sets that you have to learn are how to think and analyze, and that is a whole degree level different. You have to have to have a different skill set, you have to have a lot more gray matter.” Frankly I feel a lot more secure depending upon our 45 year old organic garden and America’s farmers who are incredibly educated and talented in their field, so to speak, than on having Mike Bloomberg pop in some seeds and harvest my food. Home gardening does NOT require a big investment. All our very fine hand tools are either free off the curb on past trash days or bought for pennies on the dollar at yard and estate sales. If you want to garden without even plowing, tilling, digging except with a hand trowel, look up “Ruth Stout No Work Gardening”. I’d advise skipping the part about gardening totally nude but the rest works like a charm. When our 50+ year old tiller died (I sold it to someone for $25. for a garden sculpture / plant stand which was a neat trick as I didn’t have to lift it onto the truck to take to the scrap yard to sell for maybe $2. in scrap metal to get rid of it!) we went totally to Ruth’s year round mulch method and never had to turn over the soil again. We raise so much produce that we HAVE to put out a small table in the front yard to sell off the excess every year.
This is a neat article and I encourage everyone to garden. If it’s your first year start SMALL, 5′ by 10′ or 10′ by 10′. Don’t try to grow everything! Put in tomatoes, sweet peppers (both from plants), zucchini and cucumbers from seed and even though I like organic get a small container of zucchini dust to put on the zucchini plants at the base before they start to flower and redust after rain to stop those darn squash bugs! Plant radishes and LEAF lettuce. If you have some potatoes in the kitchen which are starting to sprout, cut them into pieces, each piece must have an eye or a bit sprouting. Let them sit on the counter for two days to harden and then plant the pieces and raise potatoes. Put in some onion sets and maybe a few marigold plants for flowers and their insect repellent qualities, MULCH heavily and enjoy your success. If you’ve got critters you’ve got to fence. Plant rhubarb (don’t eat the leaves) and NOTHING will eat those plants. You’ll have rhubarb for decades to come. Same thing with asparagus. You can’t harvest either of these until the second year after planting. START SMALL!
Check with your local county Ag agent about what grows best in your area, and when to plant it. I had to start leaf lettuce in October, and grow it until March. If you just picked the outer leaves, they’d keep producing like crazy. You’d have a big yield from a couple of dozen plants.
Squirrels are well, it depends on where you live. You can get so-called humane traps and bait them with feed corn. You can get a Jack Russell Terrier. Man had one, and it killed every squirrel that entered the yard. Cats are known to kill squirrels.
Personally, I’d like to live in the part of Texas with year round squirrel hunting season. I could sit outside all day, and pop them with a .22 semi-automatic. I hate squirrels. Although if prepared and fried right, they’re delicious.
Chicken of the tree!
Ask any redneck you happen to see, “What’s the best chicken?”, Chicken of the Tree.
😂 😂
I just remembered a squirrel repellant. I do not know if it’ll work in your garden or not.
Now for those who don’t know, if squirrels get in your attic, they’ll gnaw holes, tear up the insulation, and even gnaw the insulation off your electrical wiring. Yes, they can cause your house to burn down.
A woman had squirrels in her attic. Someone told her if you put Old Spice Cologne up there it would get rid of them. So, she filled up little water balloons with it, and tossed them through the opening into the attic.
She said it worked. “On a warm day, the house smelled like a meeting at the Moose Lodge.”. lol