For Gardners: How to Plant a Veggie Garden

For a newbie gardener, I would suggest checking out some of the many Square Foot Gardening sites and getting a book on it. It's amazing what you can grow in a 4 x 4 raised bed.

You can also grow tomatoes, cucumbers, green peppers, jalapenos in large pots. I have grown all of these vegetables, plus Swiss Chard, Collards, onions, herbs, pole beans, string beans, sugar snap peas, yellow summer squash, zucchini, etc in 4 x 4 raised beds and some pots.

I did not use the recommended Square Foot Garden planting mix and just used garden soil for the beds or potting soil for pots and there is some expense in buying garden soil or potting mix, manure, tools, etc. I highly recommend using organic fertilizer as I have much better results with that over chemical fertilizer. And remember, manure is your friend! You almost can't have too much manure. You can buy it by the load or in bags from the garden center. When transplanting seedlings, make sure to add a healthy trowel full into the hole.

Then there are Earth Boxes that make vegetable garden pretty easy, but there is an investment in the boxes and the potting soil to fill them. You can use the boxes for years. Google them to find out what they are all about.

If you are wanting to actually dig a garden in the ground, get ready for some serious work and depending on your soil, it can take several growing seasons to get your soil into optimum growing condition by adding manure, mulches, etc. You will need a spot that gets a minimum of 6 to 8 hours of full if you are to have a successful garden.

You have to be prepared to water every single day at least once a day, depending on how hot it is. You have to be willing to pull the weeds and fertilize most plants every few weeks depending upon their requirements.

You plant lettuces, spring onions, spinach and sugar snap peas when it's still cold outside in the spring. Then when it gets warm well after the last danger of frost, you move on to your summer vegetables -- tomatoes, cukes, beans and peppers.

I recommend you start small so you don't get overwhelmed. Try a tomato plant or two. Grape tomatoes are wonderful -- you will have so many from one or two plants, you won't know what to do with them all. I wash them and freeze them whole for sauces later on or cut them in half and roast them with olive oil in a low oven. Make sure to have a place where you can stake your tomatoes and get the really large tomato cages because they will outgrow smaller ones. You have to be constantly tieing them up or they will break off in a storm.

I grew two Jalapeno plants in a half whiskey barrel last summer and ended up with a ton of peppers for poppers. They sell for $2.69 at the grocer store, so that was well worth doing.

The best cucumber plant I ever had I grew in an old plastic hanging basket up on my deck. The past few years, I've had no luck with them I think because where I planted them was at the bottom of a hill and it just got too humid there with no air circulation. They are also bothered by squash bugs as are yellow squash and zucchini. These bugs have been a menace in Maryland over the past few years.

Other than the squash bugs and cabbage worms on my collards, I had no serious pest problems and used no pesticides at all on my garden.

Try Googling the veggies you are interested in and starting with a few plants this spring and summer to see how it goes. This is basically how I started and you will learn something from everything you try to grow. I even started my own seeds under lights and I'm just self-taught because I was interested in doing it. Not everything will be successful every year. As someone once said, "All gardening is an experiment." So don't get discouraged if you have a crop failure one year. Just try, try again next time or plant something else. I wouldn't recommend planting corn or melons or other huge plants until you have a better grasp on everything. They take up a lot of room and need really rich soil. I've tried and failed with both of these.

Hope this helps! Good luck. Just have fun with it.

Good advice already...a garden takes education, time, effort, sweat, and good weather for what you are growing. Read, learn and experiment. Sometimes you win, sometimes you don't. But when you do... it is SO good!