It’s Matt’s and my first season putting in a garden at the Lunencastle, and I’m proud to report that we’ve already made quite a few mistakes. The best kind of learning, I think, comes from finding out what happens when you don’t follow garden books exactly and take risks.

But here are some mistakes the garden books were right about:

1. Not killing off grass before repurposing the lawn. Our goal was to turn a large swath of our front lawn into vegetable garden - a space that we wouldn’t have to mow and which would produce food. What we should have done is kill the lawn first. I’m not talking chemical herbicides; it would have sufficed to layer newspaper over the ground and cover it with leaves for a season, thus depriving it of light. The resulting soil would have been enriched with the newspaper and leaves, and would have been easier to till. As it was, we had to rent a rear-tine rototiller - the most heavy duty type - at $119 a day to tear through sod.

Additionally, what soil we tilled up that we did not plant now is being covered with landscaping fabric, which costs approximately $25 a yard more than discarded newspapers and leaves would have.

Links to do it right:
Lawns to Gardens CONVERT! at You Grow Girl
How do we convert lawn to vegetable garden? at Yahoo Answers
Converting lawn to garden organically at The Portland Alliance

A related poor decision was…

2. In-ground, rather than raised bed, planting. We should have tested the soil last season, learning that our soil is weak on nutrients and very sandy. Instead we found this after we had rented a rototiller to tear up 600 square feet of lawn.

Given poor soil, the best alternative would have been raised beds filled with a mix of commercial garden soil and organic matter. That might have been a more expensive option, but renting a rototiller wasn’t cheap, either, and our vegetable yield from this poor soil remains to be seen. Additionally, raised beds warm up before in-ground beds do, which can extend growing time.
We will be enhancing the soil throughout the year with organic matter (mostly leaves), granular sulfur (to increase acidity), and some fertilizer (just enough to restore the balance of nutrients in the soil). We also plan to plant a cover crop such as winter rye in the fall to further enrich the soil. Hopefully we’ll have rich loamy soil in another few years.

Links to do it right:
Raised Beds on the Cheap at The Dollar Stretcher
The seminal work on a particular type of raised bed planting, Square Foot Gardening

3. Starting too late. Here in New England, we have a relatively short growing period. Tomatoes and peppers are usually the most vulnerable, being sun-loving, cold-sensitive annuals with long growing times. It’s usually advised that you start these plants indoors. But we did not plant our seeds indoors until the first week of April (I blame InterCon and the Festival of the LARPs, which distracted us through March), and they did not get transferred to the garden until the last week of May. It remains to be seen if we’ll have these before fall frost.

We also did not get our green vegetable seeds (lettuce, spinach) in the ground until mid-May, which means that they run the risk of bolting - getting bitter and going to seed rapidly - in the summer heat.

Links to do it right:
A Beginner’s Guide to Vegetable Seed Starting at You Grow Girl
When to Start Seedlings at Care2 Healthy and Green Living

4. Not hardening off transplants off properly. “Hardening off” is the process by which you gradually introduce those sensitive seedlings that have been grown indoors to the wide world outdoors. Ideally, you bring the plants outside, in a sheltered place, for longer and long each day, but we just kind of cruelly shoved the flats out onto the porch with a wave and a prayer. Not all of them made it. The habaneros were hit especially badly - I don’t think we’ll be harvesting any of them this year.

Links to do it right:
Hardening Off Seedlings at Veggie Gardening Tips
Hardening off Transplants at Washington State University

6 Comments »