April 6, 2011
How to plant a garden and what do I need to add at planting?
Where can I get information on how to plant a garden? Most extensions bulletins are available on line, so the trip isn’t even needed. If you are truly interested in gardening attend a Master Garden Meeting and set a goal to be a Master Gardener. Keep reading The Garden Doc for additional information throughout the year. A few weeks ago I wrote about when to plant. Read that first. What do I plant was also written a few weeks ago.
How to plant a garden? Remember to lay out the garden on paper leaving plenty of room for plants to grow. Carrots and beets, don’t take much room, potato plants can individually take about 9 sq ft., squash and pumpkins may have vines that run for 20 or more feet, pole beans will grow well over 6 feet high. Lay out the garden so one plant doesn’t shade or get over run by another plant. Leave the room at planting. Plant the seeds with this rule of thumb; plant to a depth 4 times the size of the seed. This means corn and beans should be planted about 1 to 1/12 inch deep potatoes about 6 inches deep but in a hill, small seeds like carrots about ¼ inch deep. Cover with loose soil. The biggest problem during the growing season will be weeds. Remember hand weeding takes a lot of time. You may want to keep the garden a manageable size.
What do I add when I plant my garden? If you have a good soil and it is moist, add nothing. Just plant and let the soil and nature do what they are supposed to do. If you need fertilizer, see below. There are some interesting new products on the market that you may be interested in trying. Plant Starter from Advanced Biological Marketing is a micro organism mixture that may benefit plants by colonizing the roots with good microorganisms. I bought a package at Menards. These organisms can live in a symbiotic relationship providing nutrients to the plant and in return get sugars from the plant. Because they colonize the plant roots they may protect the plant from deleterious microorganisms that may cause plant disease. Inovate is a product that provides miccorhizae that do the same as above. The only place I know to purchase this item is at Summer Winds Nursery in Arizona and Colorado
Another type of product used extensively is humic or fulvic acid. There is a lot of scientific evidence that these products work, but they don’t work in all circumstances. If humic acid is over applied it can limit plant growth. The American Society of Agronomy holds a meeting once a year jointly with the Crop Science Society of America and the Soil Science Society of America. The meeting in Pittsburgh Rene Scoresby , formerly of LignoTech, a Borregaard company, showed a long list of studies that indicated a 5 to 10 % yield increase could be obtained using humic acid. The conclusions showed, each soil type would need the ideal humic acid rate figured out, and that soils with problems usually showed the best response to humic acid. Some of the data presented was produced by the USDA and Universities, others by private researchers with nothing to gain from good data. For a gardener 1 quart is about the right amount, but each humic acid source has a different concentration.
Next blog will be about fertilizer and how much to use.
Do you have any tips on container gardening on an east facing balcony in a northern climate?
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