Where to begin? Your First Steps to Gardening!
In my opinion, there are two pivotal make or break moments to every journey; the decision to begin and the decision to press on. So, let’s look at how to help with that first moment in the context of gardening! The decision to begin really does look vastly different for every gardener, so let’s look at a few scenarios that may help give you some ideas on how to start your journey! Hold on to your sun hats, this is going to be a lot of information!
There are a few healthy rules of engagement to begin your garden, the first of which is to start small! Now, since small is not a quantifiable term, let’s say that looks like a single garden bed! I would say that a healthy starting point would be a 4x4x2 (4 ft tall, 4 ft wide, 2 ft tall) all the way up to a 6x3x2 (6 ft long, 3ft wide, 2ft tall) bed! Now, if you have a strong back and legs and don’t mind some bending and squatting to keep your calves solid, you could even opt for a one foot tall bed. And for my no land girlies out there, starting small could look like a 36 cell hydroponic system (VEVOR sells a great one online, not a sponsor, I just really appreciate their quality and cost). You could even go the microgreens and sprouts route if all you have is counter top space. I would start with a 2 mason jar system for sprouts or with a 2 tray system for microgreens. Remember, starting small will help you develop a consistent habit of gardening.
The easiest category of plants to start with are salad greens and herbs! One of the biggest benefits to these two categories is that they don’t need any pollinator interaction for you to get a harvest, so they work well both indoors and outdoors! If you’re planting indoors, just make sure to have some indoor grow lights to mimic the sun for your leafy greens and herbs to grow well! Your grow lights don’t have to be some fancy plant lights, I have a set of LED workshop lights that came in a pack of four for $32 on Amazon. Any light with 5000k or above will work! If you’re working with soil, opt for a good quality organic potting soil! These have a good blend of moisture retention and drainage to keep your plants happy. If your planting outdoors, make sure to cover your crops with insect netting that is pinned to the ground! Keeping your leafy greens and herbs covered will keep the pests away!
The second healthy rule of engagement is don’t garden out of fear! Gardening out of fear will only bring frustration, and frustration will lead you to quitting. I know that these last few years have been an eye opener for a lot of people concerning food supplies, finances, natural disasters, global shut downs etc. With that being said, fear is a terrible fuel for any endeavor. If you are moving into gardening out of fear, I encourage you… take a breath, and take this journey one step at a time. The thing about fear is that it spoils small success. Let’s say that for your first time, you are able to grow 5 heads of lettuce really well, but you were hoping to grow 10, that fear settles in and turns that small success into a frustrated “It should have been more” mentality which sucks the life out of what a garden can be. Fear can also drive people to neglect thorough research for the sake of just getting started. That leads to making mistakes and wasting time and valuable resources. Just a quick disclaimer, I will never hide what I know, so please, always feel free to ask any questions! I will answer them as soon as I’m able to help steer you towards success! Your garden should be a place of peace where you can be out in creation, enjoying the return for all of the work you have put in! Don’t let fear rush you into making mistakes or not being able to enjoy your success!
The third rule of engagement is sow generously! The more seed your sow, the better the harvest. Using seeds also saves you money compared to buying seedlings… speaking of seeds, feel free to check out the date for our next seed swap =) Was that a shameless plug? Yes! Anyways… since we are starting with lettuces and herbs, sowing generously looks like emptying a whole packet of lettuce seeds into your garden bed… I know that sounds traumatic, but hear me out. How much does one of those spring mix salad boxes usually cost where you are? For us, we’re usually looking at $5-$7 at our local grocery store, and that doesn’t always mean it’s going to be organic. One packet of lettuce seeds (Which usually ranges from 180-250 seeds) costs between $2-$4! That one packet of seeds will completely fill your 4x4 or 3x6 garden bed, and you’ll even be able to cut salad from it 3-4 times so long as you leave about two inches of the plants closest to the ground intact! You’re looking at a big salad bowl full of greens 9-12 times or more! If you instead were to try spacing out your salad green seeds according to the packet, then poke all of those individual holes, you’d actually have a harder time getting a full harvest! There are a lot of details I could go over with choosing your varieties of greens and where to get seed and what I’d recommend, but it’s almost time to cook dinner, so I have to move on!
Some plants like greens, actually do better all crowded up against each other. This leads me to my fourth rule of engagement, ignore the plant spacing rules on your seed packets! For the sake of time, this will be the last rule for this post (Those venison steaks won’t cook themselves!) Plants actually help each other out in many ways! Some herbs produce smells that pests hate , some legumes help to pull nitrogen to the soil keeping it close for the crop after it to use, and all plants help to keep the ground from drying out by providing shade to the soil. This is why, the further apart your plants are, the more they struggle to fight off heat and pests. Since we are specifically talking about greens and herbs for step one, another advantage to having densely packed greens also means that your reducing that pressure from harvesting because you have so many more plants to distribute that harvest across. Harvesting when there are a lot of plants together actually encourages your greens to bounce back and produce more leafy growth. And once they are established, there is very little that lettuce greens can’t survive. There was one year I had a groundhog mow down an entire thriving bed of lettuces! He must have been a gardener because he left their cores alone and 2 weeks later, it looked like nothing had ever touched that lettuce bed! Nature is so cool!
Anyways, to recap…. the first four rules of engagement are…
Start small! Lettuces and herbs are your gateway plants!
Don’t garden out of fear… it turns little successes into “not enough” and setbacks into frustrations that will lead you to quit.
Sow generously… seeds save you money!
Don’t follow the see packet spacing rules… you’ll waste valuable garden space and your plants will struggle!
I hope this post helped a bit to give you some direction… our next post will be about the budget gardener! Let’s look at how to garden without breaking the bank!
Until next time, keep growing!
-Mailonie Nash
