Chris Burrous: Everyone’s a farmer when it comes to their own backyard; try these tips on doing it Home Grown.
Fred Hoffman: Where can you find the healthiest, freshest vegetables for your family? Why, in your own backyard of course! Even if you don’t have a green thumb, you’ll have the greatest vegetable garden on the block. The key to any successful garden, location, location, location. Vegetables love full sun, give them at least 6 hours a day or more is better. When you build your garden, run your rows East West, that’ll take maximum advantage of the sun. And when you plant your gardens put the taller growing plants, like tomatoes, on the north end so it won’t shade out smaller growing plants, like basil or peppers.
A raised bed can be as simple as a mound of dirt, perhaps 16 inches tall and 4 feet wide. Or it can be fancy like this, made out of redwood or brick or whatever you have handy. One piece of advice when you’re building your raised bed, you can make it any length that you want, but the width is important, don’t make it wider than 4 feet wide, because you want to be able to reach across the middle to pull out weeds without falling into the bed. Soils in raised beds warms up quicker in the spring time, means your plants get off to a great start.
This is the best stuff that you can add to your soil, its organic compost and what organic compost does is it feeds the soil.To rotatil or not to rotatil, that is the question. What are you suppose to do with this load of compost you just dumped in your
Garden bed?Well, old timers used to rotatil, now the thinking is all you need to do is lay it on top and spread it out, and before you even think about planting, you need to think about water. In my opinion, the best irrigation system for your yard is a drip irrigation system. And my favorite is this, it’s called an in line emitter system. You can’t see the emitters, but they’re built into this pipe, and they’re spaced about one foot apart. They’re one gallon per hour emitters. On a drip irrigation system on every emitter as the water drips out, the water is going to spread out underground at a radius of 12-18 inches. So you want to space any irrigation lines about 18 inches apart so you have full coverage of a garden bed. Well it looks like our drip irrigation system is working and as it turns out, its dripping about every foot which is what we want, and you know, it’s time to plant.
One thing I like about a drip emitter system like this is the emitters are spaced 1 foot apart and it makes it really easy to figure out where to put the plant. For instance, tomatoes like to be about 3 feet apart, so I just count emitters…1…2…3. Well I’m going to show you a little trick; it’s a pretty little nifty trick that you may not know about tomatoes. First of all I’m going to plant it where the emitter is to be sure it gets water, and then I’m going to dig as deep as I can to get a nice deep hole, tomatoes will actually form roots all along this main stem here. So, I’m going to see how deep I can get this in. And, I can see I can get it up to about there. So what I’m going to do when I pop this out of the container, first thing I’m going to do is free up the roots. And you can be gentle, just loosen them up a little bit. And then I’m going to prune off the lower sets of leaves on these tomato plants. Now as I put the dirt back in, in time there will be roots forming all along where I buried it, and you’re going to have a stronger healthier plant.
Well we’ve fertilized regularly, we’ve watered regularly and yet the biggest task remains, and that’s to harvest all those beautiful vegetables you’re going to picking all summer. Gardening is fun for the family, and it’s healthy too, plant a vegetable garden today! And, if you don’t mind I have to finish up some planting.
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