Planting

I’ve been hearing an ugly rumor that people think it is too late to start a vegetable garden this year. Not true!

There are still loads of vegetable plants at nurseries and by this time they are a fairly good size, so you can get your hands on some pretty advanced tomatoes, eggplant, and maybe even squash. Depending on where you live and how big the plant is, you should probably choose ones that mature in less than 70 days. (Check the plant tag or ask.)

An herb garden is easily within reach - in fact, basil is a slow-starter and doesn’t reach its prime until later in June or July. Buy herbs like basil, chives, oregano, thyme, and so on, as plants (not seed) from your local nursery or other quality plant seller.

Lettuce, beets, beans, and carrots are all fast growers and can still be planted. In fact, you can plant these every few weeks through the summer, all the way up to July or August for a fall crop (at least here in Seattle). If you find lettuce and beets in plant form at a nursery, all the better - you’ll be eating them in no time. Beans and carrots will need to be planted from seed.

Plant onions to eat as green onions - green onions are simply an immature onion. Plant these as a bulb - sold in bags as “onion sets”.

If you have time and moxie, there is still time to rip out your lawn and get a garden in. We show you how.

If the prospect of converting your lawn or building raised beds seems overwhelming or unlikely to happen this year, do not fret: you can garden in containers this year. A container can be pretty and expensive or as cheap as a bucket found in your garage. Both do an equally good job - just make sure to drill or poke holes in the bottom for drainage, add potting soil (not dirt from the garden), and fertilize regularly (ideally with liquid fertilizer). More to come soon on container gardening. In the meantime check out Bucket Brigade - an Urban Land Army project that rescues unwanted buckets and turns them into vegetable containers.

So put on your boots and get out there! You can still have a first rate garden that would make your grandma proud. Just check out posts on fixing up your soil, how to choose seed and plants, and getting the garden in.

Three more things to plant and the Grow It Yourself garden will officially be in the ground.

Tomatoes, potatoes, and beans each have their own special trick and you will need some extra supplies here: vegetable fertilizer and measuring cup, bone meal if you have it, bean inoculant, and little shallow dish or container of some sort.

TOMATOES

We are growing 4 tomatoes:

Glacier. An early maturing, red and tasty slicer.

Sungold. An orange ping-pong ball sized cherry. An all-time Urban Land Army favourite.

Green Moldovan. A late-season striped green slicer with sentimental value.

Black Prince. A prolific sauce tomato that is almost black. A new addition to our repertoire with a solid reputation. Recommended for new gardeners.

HOW TO PLANT A TOMATO

Dig a hole deeper than you would think. Tomatoes benefit from being planted quite deep, actually, and will send out a bunch of roots from the buried stem. If your tomatoes are a little on the short and stocky side, like ours, dig a hole deep enough so that the stem is buried by an inch or two. If your tomato has a long stem, dig a trench 4 or 5 inches deep and set the plant in it or dig a hole straight down about 6 inches. Don’t be afraid to bury the stem up to the top set of leaves.

Make sure the soil in the hole is nice and loose so that the tomato’s roots will be able to spread out.

Add 1/4 cup of vegetable fertilizer to the hole - about a handful.

If you have bone meal throw in a handful of that too. (We thought we had some. We did not. Harumph. Bone meal, high in calcium, helps to protect tomatoes from blossom end rot, an infuriating little disease that can sometimes, but not often, occur. We might get some later and work it into the soil so we can sleep at night.)

Now, mix the fertilizer and the bone meal together in the hole.

Holding the tomato so that it is straight and sturdy, backfill the hole with soil, press down firmly, and create your little moat about 1 foot around the base of the plant.

Put the tag in. You’ll forget which tomato is which - we promise you.

POTATOES

Now, potatoes are a bit of a special case.

First, you need to cut the potatoes a day or so before you plant them. Cut them in half, making sure there are at least one or two eyes on each piece. It is from the eyes that the sprout, and then the plant, will spring. Leaving them overnight heals or toughens up the cut side.

Second, potato plants are covered up with soil as they grow - this is known as “hilling”. You will be mounding up soil in hills throughout the season so that only about 8 inches of the plant is visible at all times.

Now, since this is a raised bed and the soil is already a foot above the ground, if you started mounding up soil even more then you would end up with tall, steep, and ridiculous hills of soil by the end of the year. And, you would run out of soil for mounding.

So here’s what you do if you have a raised bed: dig a trench 6 to 8 inches deep. If you have room, pile the soil next to the trench and then you can simply push this soil over for hilling when the plant starts to grow.

However, if you want as many trenches as you can pack in and don’t have room to accommodate these piles - and you just want to do things the hard way - you can do what we did. Put the soil in pails, store them in the garage, and use it for hilling when you need it. A little weird, yes, but square footage is precious in a city garden and a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.

We planted 3 rows and 3 kinds of potatoes: fingerling (Rose Finn), yellow (Yukon Gold), and red (Forget The Name).

Before you put a potato in the ground, make sure the soil in the trench is loose. We gave each trench a quick once over with the garden fork.

Push the potatoes an inch or two into the soil sprout side up, cut side down, 12 to 18 inches apart.

The rows (trenches) should also be 12 to 18 inches apart.

When they are all in place, cover them with a few inches of soil…

…and press down firmly.

BEANS

We are growing 2 kinds of beans: Scarlet Runner Beans called ‘Golden Sunshine’ and pole beans called ‘Bingo’.

Trust us on this one: inoculating your beans is worth it.

What’s inoculant? Inoculant looks like silty brown soil and contains Rhizobium bacteria, which are necessary for converting nitrogen into a form that beans (legumes) can use.

The benefits? Improved soil fertility, stronger root systems, and way more beans, people. Way more beans.

Inoculant comes in a little package, something like this (no brand endorsement here, just what we happened to get):

How to inoculate your beans:

Get a shallow bowl and dump your beans in it. Add a very small splash of water, just enough to wet them.

Shake the inoculant over the beans so that they are covered in the stuff.

Give it all a shake to completely coat the beans.

Plant in a straight row in front of a trellis/pole/suitable bean structure an inch deep and 1 or 2 inches apart. Cover.

THE GARDEN IS IN!

Up next: Watering it in

No more messing around - the plants are going in.

Here, we’ll go through the finer points of planting and the special needs of some of our plants.

Herbs

We start with chives, and an advanced move.

I already had some chives out front, so instead of procuring new ones, I divided the Mother Plant. Dividing a plant, or breaking it up into smaller parts - means that you can get two plants from the original one, or three or four or five, depending on how big the original plant is and how much you want to break it up. You can divide chives, you can divide daisies, or any other perennial plant that comes back year after year. (You can read more about dividing plants here, if you like.)

Easy: We dug up a clump of chives and then, grasping them by the base of the plant….

…gently pulled them apart.

This was a big clump and we could have easily broken it up into several more small clumps, but we just called it good.

The Finer Points of Planting

Using either a garden knife, trowel, or your own paws, dig a hole. You want a hole that has loose soil around the sides and the bottom so that your plant’s roots can plunge through and spread itself around. So dig around and loosen it up a little bit. The hole should be wide enough to accommodate the plant’s existing roots, and it should also be the right depth: the base of the plant should be level with or slightly below the top of the ground.

Like so:

Put the plant in the hole and hold it up straight by the base, then fill in the hole with the soil you dug out. Press down gently on the soil around the plant so that the plant is firmly in there and standing tall.

Since you’ll have extra soil now - the plant is taking up the space where the soil was - form it into a circular moat around the plant so that water will stay put and not run away from the plant.

By the way, these chives are going to flower soon - that’s what those little purple balls are about. They will open up and look pretty, then the stem with the flower on it will get tough and eventually dry out and we’ll remove it. Then new chives will keep growing.

For plants that are in a pot, like this thyme, here’s how it goes:

(Make sure the soil in the pot is well-watered prior to planting.)

To remove the plant, grasp it gently by the base…

and tilt the pot, squeezing the sides and pushing on the bottom to loosen the plant.

Once it’s out you’ll want to make sure the roots are loose and not all bound up tightly and wrapped around each other. In this case, the roots are in fine form so we just squeeze the sides of the soil a bit and gently nudge and separate the roots at the bottom.

We wanted to locate the thyme next to the bricks because it is low-growing and looks pretty spilling over the sides.

Here is the parsley (Italian/flat leaf), planted about 8 inches apart. The plants will eventually bump into each other a bit and create a nice big mass of it.

Basil

This looks like there are two plants - and sometimes you are lucky and do get more than one plant in a pot - but this is one plant with two stems.

Lettuce

We got a mix of red and green leaf lettuces and wanted to separate them into 4 blocks of different colours and types: one green loose leaf, one red loose leaf, one green romaine, and one speckled red romaine.

So we separated them into groups, gently pulling them apart.

Planting lettuce is quick - since these were small plants we just needed a little hole. If you have a garden knife, just stick it in 4 or 5 inches, pull the soil back, stick the lettuce in, and press down on the soil. Once you get the hang of it, you can really cover ground fast.

Seed, too!

Lettuce grows quickly and doesn’t live through the entire season, so if you keep seeding you can get a few crops of it. We wanted to eat some soon, so we put in plants that would be full grown in a few weeks, but we also want to have more lettuce once these were done, so we sprinkled each block with seed. These will start coming up in a week or 10 days and be full grown in about a month-and-a-half.

Take a pinch and sprinkle them around…

…then sprinkle a bit of soil on top, so that they are covered by 1/8 to a 1/4 inch of soil.

You can check your seed pack for exact planting depth if you want, but a good rule of thumb is to plant seed twice as deep as the thickness of the seed.

Lettuce blocks done. These will fill in and should look pretty great when they are full grown. Romaine lettuce needs more room than loose leaf, so we put 6 of these plants in the blocks, and 10 to 12 of the loose leaf.

Green Onions

These can be planted close together - 1 or 2 inches apart - and we thought they’d look cute in clumps and squares around the lettuce blocks.

A handy thing to do with green onions and lettuce: when you pull out a green onion, pop a new lettuce plant into the hole.

Plant the onions about 1 inch deep - the first knuckle on your finger is a good measure. Just push them in.

And cover them up, of course.

Tip:
When you are seeding, wait until you have put all your seed in before you cover them up, so you don’t lose track of what you’ve put in, and where.

Halfway there!

Up next: Putting in the tomatoes, potatoes, and beans.