There are two main parts to this – the state of the transplant, and the state of the place you’re going to plant them into.

The ideal is to plant your young seedlings as soon as they are ready to grow out of their pot – before their growth is checked, but not so soon that they haven’t filled the pot with roots and the rootball falls apart. I have to admit that most of the time I don’t hit the ideal moment – my transplants almost always have to wait until they are begging to be out of their pots, poor things – but even so, most vegetables are fairly forgiving and you’ll still get decent results. Cauliflower and melons are two kinds that deeply resent being transplanted at the wrong time, though, so be warned!

You can check root growth by very gently and carefully turning the plant upside down and turning it out of its pot into your hand. You’re looking for healthy white roots visible on the outside of the rootball, and a rootball that holds together well.

Apart from the stage of growth, transplants grown indoors or in a greenhouse will need “hardening off” before being planted outside. That means, gradually letting them get used to the new conditions before you plant them. Carrying them in and out is a bit of a performance but better than seeing the whole lot keel over in shock if you don’t bother! To harden them off, give them a short time in good shelter to start with (shelter from sun and wind), then over a period of several days to a week, give them more and more time outside, and more exposure to weather. Watch for sunburn on tender indoor-grown leaves!

The place you’re planning to plant should have had the soil prepared previously so that any added amendments have had time to settle in and break down a bit, and the soil has done any settling it’s going to do. It should be nicely damp, but not soggy (especially if you have clay soil). It should also be warm enough for the species you’re planning to plant. Broccoli doesn’t mind being transplanted into cool soil, but peppers and tomatoes won’t like it at all, and basil will pout for days or even just die!

New transplants benefit from protection from the sun for the first few days. Planting suring a spell of rainy or cloudy weather is great if you can get it, but you can also plant in the evening, and/or use shade cloth or shading structures for protection. Gradually expose the young plants to more and more sun until they settle in and get used to the new conditions.

The physical act of planting is pretty straightforward. Make a big enough hole to take the whole rootball, pop plant out of pot, put in hole, “puddle in” with water if you like, firm soil round roots, next. Some fine points:

• Most plants like to be transplanted with the soil level at the same point on their stem as when they were growing in their pots. Exceptions are tomatoes and peppers, which will grow roots along any stem you bury (don’t bury leaves! pinch them off first), and broccoli and lettuce, which don’t mind having any leggy stem up to the first set of leaves buried. Leggy tomato and pepper seedlings can be much improved by doing this.
• Don’t leave the roots exposed to air for any longer than you have to. Make the holes first, then pop each seedling out of its pot and straight into the hole.
• Don’t firm the soil too hard, especially if you puddled in with water. Some air needs to be left in the soil, you’re just making it firm enough to provide good support for the plant.
• It can help to create a watering basin around each plant. Plant a little deeper than the surrounding general soil level, then scrape the extra soil into a ridge around the plant so it sits in a shallow bowl.
• If you didn’t add fertiliser or compost to the whole bed, most plants appreciate some compost or enriched soil mixed into the bottom of the planting hole.
• If you’ll need support stakes or structures, make sure you install them before the plants get big enough to need them, and before you’ll damage new roots by adding them.
• Some plants benefit from being “pinched out” (the top one or two sets of leaves removed) at planting time. This removes some of the foliage and makes it easier for the disturbed roots to support the plant’s water needs, and also makes it grow bushier. Basil plants are a good example of this.
• Pest protection may be necessary, from collars to Reemay cloth to chicken wire. Take account of the pests that you have to deal with in your garden, and take preventative steps – it’s much better than trying to kill the pests later, after they’ve damaged your plants!

Keep a close eye on your seedlings after planting, to make sure they have enough water, and protection from sun, wind or pests.

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First, take a look around the place you’re shopping, be it a local nursery, big box store, farmers market or even the supermarket. How do the plants look in general? Are they well taken-care-of? Do any of them badly need watering? If more than a very few plants are in bad shape, dried out, or dying, take your business elsewhere. You might otherwise find yourself taking home plants which have experienced severe stress before you bought them, and although they may look OK at the time, they’ll never grow as well as plants which have been properly cared for and grown on without being stressed.

Now look at the plants you want to buy.

You want seedlings which are well rooted (not only just sprouted) so that the rootball holds together well when you take it out of the container, but conversely they should not be pot-bound (having been in the pot too long so the roots are constricted and circling round and round inside the pot). A clue is to look at the drainage holes in the bottom of the container to see if roots are growing out. The only way to tell for sure is to turn the seedling out of its pot and look at the roots – carefully, without damaging it, of course.

The plants  should be stocky, with strong sturdy stems and an appropriate distance between sets of leaves. If they are tall and lanky, and seem floppy, they can be rescued if they are your only choice, but if you have options, pass them up for better specimens. Top growth should be in proportion to the size of the container, neither too large or too small.

They should be the right color for their variety. Most vegetable seedlings should be deep green, not yellowish, not streaky, and not purplish-looking unless they are a red-leaved variety.

They should not be carrying flowers or fruit, unless you’re buying a tomato plant in a big pot which is big enough to give it enough root room for its size. Even so, transplanting it when it’s in flower or fruit will set it back.

Salad greens should be as small as you can get away with. The bigger they are, the closer they are to “bolting” – sending up a flower stalk and going to seed, which usually means the leaves no longer taste good.

Very few seedlings are organically grown, so if this is important for you, you either need to raise your own or find a supplier who does grow organically. Your best bet for this may be a farmers market stallholder or a local nursery. You might also be able to find a local organic home grower who would be willing to grow seedlings for you along with their own.

Once you get your carefully chosen transplants home, take care of them and, most importantly, get them growing in the ground as soon as you can. Making them wait around in their pots until they are potbound makes all your care in choosing them go for nothing!

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Which Vegetables Prefer to be Direct Seeded?

Root vegetables are the most obvious group here. Carrots and parsnips just don’t grow proper roots if you try to transplant them, so direct seeding is the way to go. I know of people who transplant beets, starting them in peat or newspaper pots which can be planted directly into the soil, but it’s easier to direct seed.

Beans and peas really prefer to be direct seeded although you can  transplants – they tend to grow a long taproot right away so toilet paper tubes can work.

The cucurbits (squash, cukes and melons) generally don’t like their roots disturbed so if you have a long enough season naturally, direct seeding works better – but for most of us, these plants need a longer season than we can give them with direct seeding, so transplants and careful planting are the way to go for cukes and melons. Squash can be direct seeded outside sooner, so they are a good candidate for direct seeding most of the crop, with a few transplants to get an early flow of fruits.

Salad greens grow well from direct seeding, and really have to be if you’re planting a patch of mesclun mix or mixed baby lettuce. Individual salad green plants can be done either way, direct seeding or transplants.

Vegetables which grow from tubers or bulbs like potatoes, garlic, and onions from sets, all get direct planted too.

Onions will grow from seeds but they tend to take quite a long time, so apart from spring onions, many people either use transplants or sets.

If you have a long enough season, you can even grow tomatoes, peppers and other warmth lovers from direct seeding – but most of us use transplants so that we get a worthwhile length of harvest.

Direct Seeding Preparation

Your bed preparation for direct seeding depends on the size of seed you’ll be planting. The finer the seed, the finer the soil surface on the bed needs to be. Carrots and parsnips also need the soil broken up to a fair depth in order to make good roots. The soil in the bed should be thoroughly damped to full depth and on the surface.

What seeds need to sprout well and grow is the right temperature, and the right amount of water and air. So, your soil needs to be warm enough for what you’re planting, damp, and not compacted. Ideally, it should be firm below the seeds (so that water can rise by capillary action) and loose enough above them to make it easy for the shoots to push through. You also want plenty of organic matter in the top layer to hold water and prevent the soil crusting over.

Planting the Seeds

My own method for small seeds is to soak the bed the day before, loosen the top layer with my “garden weasel” tool (see pictures at left), then press a groove into the soil with a 1×1 stick – either across the bed for short rows, or along the bed for long rows. This compresses the soil slightly. I plant my seeds in the groove by hand (I don’t find any of the hand-seeding tools to be any better than my fingers). I then either pull a little loose soil over them from beside the groove, sprinkle damp compost along the groove to cover them, or water gently without bothering to add a covering – tiny seeds will slip down into the soil crevices when you water.  I then tap gently along the row with the head of a rake to firm the soil.

If you want a “patch” rather than rows (say, for salad mix or baby lettuce), then just loosen the top layer of soil over the whole area, scatter seed over it,  jiggle the soil about – with a weasel, rake, hand fork or your fingers – to get the seeds down into the soil, and water. One warning on this method: if you have weeds seeds in your soil (and who doesn’t?) they will come up along with and mixed into your salad. Picking them out after wards is a pain however you do it. You could de-weed your soil by solarizing that patch before planting and disturbing the surface as little as possible, or you could spread weed-free potting mix or compost over the broadcast seeds instead of jiggling them into the existing soil. Either method will reduce the weed load but not completely eliminate it.

Larger seeds like peas, beans and squash get a bit less careful handling. Peas go either in a pressed groove as above, or a wide band scraped out with a hoe, but I then press them deeper into the soil with a finger and cover them about 3/4″ deep in soil, and firm. For beans, in the past I’ve made individual holes with a finger or stick and the dropped the beans down into the holes and pulled the soil over, then watered. This year I have a LOT of beans to plant, so I plant to make a planting stick out of a piece of plastic pipe – to do this, just cut the bottom of a 3/4″ or 1″ pipe at an angle, thenstick that end into the soil to planting depth and drop the bean down the tube. The big advantage of this method is that you can do it standing up instead of kneeling or crouching, which as I get older and creakier I think is a very good thing!

Squash usually get planted quite far apart as the plants are so big, but you often want to plant several seeds at the same location to be sure to get a good plant at each place. For these I use the finger or stick hole method, making three holes an inch or two apart in the approximate place where I want the plant, and dropping one squash seed into each. A little compost in the hole on top of the seed, water, and there you go.

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Sugar Snap is a tall climbing or vining pea, and it needs a trellis, fence or strings to climb up. In my garden it will happily grow to 9 feet tall! Since I’m short and I don’t like having to pick my peas off a ladder, I clip them off once they reach about 6 feet.

Several other varieties of snap peas grow as shorter vines, 24 – 36″ tall. You’ll sometimes see them decribed as “bush” varieties but they are really short vines, and in my experience they still need some support. If you leave them to just grow on their own they will flop over eventually, especially if you have any wind in your garden. Bush varieties include Sugar Lace, Sugar Ann, and Sugar Daddy.

The big advantage of snap peas over regular shelling peas is that you get a lot more food off each plant, because you’re eating those thick, juicy pods as well as the peas inside.

Like all peas, snap peas like cool weather. When you plant them depends on your climate: if you’re in a cold-winter area where the ground freezes, plant in spring once the ground thaws and up to 2 months before your last frost date. In a mild winter climate you can sometimes get away with planting in fall and allowing the small plants to winter over, maybe with some protection. Here in the Pacific Northwest I plant my earliest batch in mid-February – not always successfully! – and then plant several more batches in mid-March, April, and even May in a shady spot. You can also grow peas in the fall, in theory anyway, but its a challenge getting them started in the end-of-summer heat so they will be ready to grow on and crop in the cooler fall weather. Temporary shading can help. In general, peas don’t mind some shade and will grow just fine in anything from part shade to full sun.

A fine seedbed and high fertility are not required. Peas are big seeds and have sturdy roots and stems, and they can deal with quite rough ground as long as it’s broken up a bit and weeds removed. They also fix nitrogen from the air as long as the friendly bacteria they use are present in the soil. If you’ve grown peas before in the spot you plan to use, the bacteria are probably already present, but you can use “garden inoculant”, a black powder sold where you buy your seeds, to supply them. Read the package and made sure the kind you’re buying is the right kind for peas, as there are different strains of bacteria for different legumes.

How much to plant? Depends whether you are growing to freeze as well as eat fresh, and how many people will be eating them. As a starting point for your calculations, I reckon to get 1lb of pods total over the harvest period, per foot of 3′ wide bed off Sugar Snap climbing peas. That’s with two 6″ wide bands of plants running along the bed, seeds sown about 2″ apart both ways in the band. You can see how that looks in the bed on the left, with the plants 4-6″ high. The harvest period for me is about 3-4 weeks. If you don’t want a whole lot at once, try several 3′ x 6′ patches planted at intervals of 2-4 weeks through the spring, to give you a continuous supply.

Snap peas need support.

Short vines like Sugar Ann, Sugar Daddy, Mega or Sugar Lace can make do with “pea sticks” – these are twiggy branches 2-4 ft long, pushed into the ground between the plants for them to cling to with their tendrils. Don’t wait too long to do this! The ideal time is when the seeds have come up and the plants are an inch or two high, but haven’t started to cling to each other.

Climbing snap peas are tall but not terribly heavy. They do cling to strings with their tendrils but I find they don’t cling tightly enough to stay up reliably – I run strings along the row at several heights as the vines climb, to hold them back against their supports. My own support structure consists of cedar 1×2 A-frames across the beds every 4 feet, joined by cedar 1×1 or 1×2’s at top and bottom of the frames running along the bed which have nails in, then strings run up and down between the nails. (This all-purpose structure works for beans, tomatoes and squash too).

In this picture the strings are wrapped around the top and bottom bars, but nails work much better – it’s faster and easier to run the strings in the first place, then to pull them off to compost, vines and all, at the end of the season.

What else can I tell you about growing snap peas… oh yes, pests and diseases!

Slugs and snails can cut the seedlings off as they come through. The best defence I’ve found is a copper strip round the whole bed, but you can use whatever normally works against slugs and snails in your area.

Birds are the most damaging pest in my garden. The first 2 years, no trouble at all. The third year: birds discovered the seedlings and pulled out all except two in an entire 20′ x 3′ bed! I replanted, and this time covered the bed with chicken wire to keep the birds off. That worked (garden fleece like Reemay works too), but you have to be careful of two things – one, that the birds can’t get under the netting at any point, and two, that you take the netting off before the peas have grown through it and started clinging together with their tendrils. In that case you have to leave the netting on the whole season, it’s hard to weed between the peas, the peas and weeds get tangled up in the netting and it’s a big mess to get it off at the end.

The only other problem I’ve had is powdery mildew which develops at the end of the harvest season in the summer heat. If it wasn’t for the mildew the peas would set a whole new crop of flowers and pods, but once the mildew takes a good hold the new pods are not fit to eat.

Other than that, snap peas and any other peas (I grow snow peas, shelling peas and soup peas for drying, too) are easy to grow, yummy to eat and altogether very satisfying.

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• What you like to eat (and how much of it, and when)
• What grows well in your local climate
• What will growi n your specific conditions
• What’s most worthwhile to grow at home

What You Like to Eat

Obviously, there’s no point growing vegetables or fruit that you and your family won’t eat! Even though radishes are quick and easy, if your family doesn’t like them, don’t grow them.

Consider, too, how much of something you can eat before it goes past its best, especially if it can’t be stored. Salad greens are a good example. Things like lettuce and spinach can and should be planted multiple times in small batches to give you a new supply every few weeks.

What Grows Well in Your Climate

There are several things to consider here: temperatures, water, and length of growing season.

Temperature: some crops need a certain amount of heat or cold to succeed and unless you can give it to them it’s a waste of time and space to grow them. You can increase heat available to some extent using a greenhouse or other covering techniques, and cool things down a bit using shade, but there’s a limit to what can be done.

Rainfall / Water available: How much water do your plants have available, as natural rainfall or irrigation (city water, stored rainwater or well/lake/pond water)? Intensive growing beds need extra water applied in most climates in order to produce well. If you have little water available for irrigation, you can choose less water-hungry plants, space them far apart to give them a larger area of soil water to draw on, use mulch, use sunken beds or basins to hold water, or even use netting to catch mist.

Length of Season: non-hardy food plants need frost-free weather to grow, so the length of time between your average last frost date in spring and average first frost date in fall is critical. Vegetable growing books and seed catalogs often give “days to maturity” which you can compare with your growing season length. You may be able to extend the growing season earlier in spring and later in fall using row covers, cloches, tunnels, cold frames, greenhouses etc.

What Will Grow in Your Conditions

As well as the general climate in your area, the specific place you plan to grow in has conditions which will affect what you can grow and how much. These conditions include:

• Containers or in-ground
• size of area (start small!)
• hours of sunshine / shading
• vertical space (trellising increases what you can grow in a small space)
• windiness (you may need a windbreak, screens, or stakes)
• your growing skill
• soil quality and pH

Let’s look at some examples of how your conditions will affect your choices.

Tomatoes

• What kind do you like to eat? Cherry, beefsteak, roma, low acid, unusual colors?
• Do you want to save seed? Then you need non-hybrids
• Are they to eat fresh in salads or sandwiches, make sauce with, can, freeze, or dry?
• Do you need varieties which do well in heat (many kinds stop setting fruit over a certain temperature) or cool temps (many will never ripen if it’s too cool)
• Do you have a short season? Pick varieties with a low days-to-maturity and start them indoors

You can get tomato varieties which will grow into plants of any size from 8″ tall bushes for small pots, to 12′ tall vines which need sturdy trellises, stakes or cages. Tomatoes are supposed to need at least 6 hours of sun a day – but I’ve grown them on an East-facing patio where they got less than that and still produced some fruit.

Peas

• What kind? Traditional shelling peas, snow (sugar) peas, snap peas, or peas to be dried for soup?
• Climbing peas or bushes: you can get anything from 18″ tall to 8 feet and up.
• There are no hybrid peas, and they almost never cross varieties naturally, so you can save seed very easily.
• Some kinds are meant to come ripe all at once for freezing or canning batches. Others crop for several weeks to give you a steady flow for the table.
• Peas like cool weather so they are great to plant early (and will even overwinter in some climates). They crop in the summer. For later planted peas you can give them a shady area to protect from heat. Starting peas in midsummer to crop in the fall is more difficult, but can be done.

How Much to Grow

To start with, it makes more sense just to grow stuff and see what happens under your conditions. Once you have some idea, then you can predict how much you need to plant to get a certain harvest amount at a certain time, for fresh eating and to store. There are some books and sites which give yield figures, but to be honest the ranges are so wide, and the possible growing conditions so various, that they are not very useful.

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Assuming you’ve already found a location with the needed sun and water access, the first question is, what’s already there?

In many cases, the answer will be “grass”, whether manicured lawn or shaggy rough turf. There are three main ways to turn a grass area into a raised bed, and I’ve tried all three.

1. Use machinery to till or plow the whole area, grass and all. This has the advantage that you can immediately use the soil that the grass was growing in, although you’ll often want to add amendments to improve it. Most books warn that the grass will grow back and be a pernicious weed, but I haven’t found this to be so when tilling up my very rough grass with a Mantis tiller. Yes, some grass does regrow, but if you pull out the obvious still-rooted clumps after tilling, and keep the bed weeded at least for the first year, I’ve found it to be easy to handle. Tilling through sod can be fairly easy, if slow, or close to impossible depending on your machine – some just won’t do it. The Mantis does a fine job but it’s slow. After tilling , you’ll need to remove weed and root clumps, add amendments, and shape the bed.
2. Skim off the turf and compost it, then dig the soil underneath by hand or using a machine. I found “skimming” to be physically demanding and time-consuming, and it took quite a lot of soil away with the grass. If you plan to do any considerable area, renting a turf-lifting machine would be a very good idea. Removing the turf and any weeds embedded in it does reduce the later weeding load, though. Digging the soil below can be done by single-digging, double-digging, or machine tilling. With this method you can usually incorporate amendments as you go rather than adding them afterward.
3. Use “lasagna gardening” or sheet composting methods to create beds on top of the existing soil/grass/weeds. This works especially well when your “soil” consists mostly of rocks and smaller rocks, as mine did in a previous garden. Six inches of leaves, grass clippings, sawdust, horse manure and a little soil on top grew an amazingly productive (but very weedy, from the horse manure) garden in its first year, as you can see from these pictures:
   
   Using this method to create a few small beds or one medium sized one is quite easy. When you start trying to create an entire large raised bed vegetable garden this way though, digging, hauling and spreading trailer-load after trailer-load of organic material gets to be a good deal of work. It’s also hard to find enough volume of material. A lasagna bed doesn’t need amendments added since it’s made of “amendments” in the first place! The weedier your starting area is, the more newspaper or cardboard you should use as the bottom layer of your bed.

If you have soil already, whether growing grass or weeds,  and you are physically capable of digging it, I recommend using it rather than layering on top UNLESS you have pernicious weeds like bindweed, Japanese knotweed, Canada thistle etc to deal with. In those cases, the lasagna method will give you a head start over the weeds.

What if your chosen area isn’t in grass?

If it’s already growing annual or perennial plants, apart from pernicious weeds, you can treat it the same as grass.

If you are dealing with brush, shrubs and small trees, first you may want to reconsider your choice of site. If you have no choice, you can cut down the brush to ground level and lasagna over it, or dig it up (roots and all) and dig or till. This is a LOT of work and if your site slopes you may have trouble with erosion unless you build terraces.

Some people may only have a paved area (concrete, asphalt or mortared paving blocks) to build a raised bed on top of. While this situation may seem disconcerting, it can be done. Your main concerns will be drainage and getting enough soil depth for good growth. First, can you break up the paving at all? Allowing water to drain through will help a lot. Maybe you can rent a jackhammer! Whether you can do that or not, you’ll need to allow weep holes in the downhill side of your bed surrounds, and several inches of drainage material (rock, pebbles,  sand etc) as the bottom layer of the bed. A layer of landscape cloth over top of the drainage layer will slow down the process of soil particles clogging the gaps. You can then lasagna-garden over the top, or add bought topsoil or compost. Either way you’ll need fairly high constructed sides to your bed.

You may wonder why I’ve only now mentioned bed sides. That’s because in many situations you won’t need them, but can simply slope the sides of your bed down to the ground around it. Constructed sides have pros and cons, as do un-contained beds:

It’s up to you whether you build sides or not. In many cases you can build beds without sides first, then add sides later if you want to.

To plant small seeds in your new bed, you’ll want to cultivate and rake the top to a fine seedbed. Otherwise, you can leave it fairly rough for large seeds or transplants. The ideal, if you have the time, is to plant a green manure or cover crop for the first season – but you can certainly grow food in a first-year bed.

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Weedy beds

If the weeds are soft growth of annuals, they don’t spread by runners or roots, and they are not setting seed, you can safely dig them into the ground, either by hand or using a tiller. If you do this, you’ll need to wait a couple of weeks before planting so that the weed growth can partly rot and the micro-organisms have mostly finished their jobs and freed up the nutrients they use to do it. if the weeds are really small you may be able to get away with hoeing or using a “Weasel” tool.

However, weedy beds like this are pretty rare in the real world! Mostly our weedy beds have some perennials like dandelions, creeping or runnering weeds like crabgrass or morning glory (bindweed), or annuals on their way to world domination by way of mega-seed production. In this case you’ll need to get the weeds out of the bed and either into the compost pile or, in the case of real nasties like bindweed or (horrors!) Japanese knotweed, to dry out completely in the sun before composting. Don’t even think about tilling the real bad guys, you will just encourage them and spread them around. If you have a serious problem with penicious weeds, in the long run it will pay you not to plant the bed this year but to solarize, mulch or covercrop the weeds into at least partial submission.

Everyone has their own preferred weeding tools. For dealing with a whole weedy bed, I prefer a digging fork to drive deep, lift a big chunk of soil, and shake it with the fork to loosen the weeds and break up chunks all in one go. Then I pick out the weeds by hand. You can also use a hand fork or trowel to dig out the weeds, but that doesn’t loosen the bed very far down (but also doesn’t bring up weed seeds from deep down – your choice). For just a few weeds, one of the many long handled stand-up weeder tools may be enough. However you do it, get them all out of there.

Compacted beds

First question is, why is the bed compacted? Was it walked on? Does the soil compact very easily? Heavy rains or sprinkler use can also compact the soil to a surprising degree. Work out why your bed is so compacted, and then once you’ve rejuvenated it you can take steps to prevent or at least reduce future compaction.

To loosen a compacted bed you may need to resort to machinery like a tiller or rotovator, you may need to double-dig it, or it may just need re-loosening to a single fork’s depth. While loosening the soil, try not to physically turn it over – the more you can preserve the natural soil profile the better for your soil life.

A hard pan is a special case of compaction. It’s a very compacted layer of soil below the top layers, and may have been caused by tilling to the same depth repeatedly using a power tiller, or previous plowing. You may also have a natural hardpan lower down in the soil profile – I have one about three to four feet down below a layer of pure sand. If your hard pan is near enough the surface to cause problems (water not draining, plant roots not able to penetrate it) it’s worth breaking up if at all possible, which may take a crowbar or a tractor with a deep chisel plow.

Mulched Beds

Congratulations on having mulched the bed last fall! That gives you a real head start with bed preparation. You can dig or rake in the mulch if it’s not too thick, it’s well decomposed already, and it’s a soil builder. Otherwise you may need to rake it off. Underneath, the soil should be mostly weed-free and loose.

Feeding the Soil

Once you have a loose, weed-free bed, what next? Think about any additions or amendments you may need to add to the soil. If you have enough compost, a layer on every bed every year is a wonderful thing – even a 1/4″ layer will help. If you have a limited amount of compost, save most of it for newer or less-well-conditioned beds which need more organic matter. As well as compost you may want to add lime (if your soil is acid or there will be lime-lovers in that bed this year) or organic fertilizer of some kind. I believe that manure is best added to the compost pile so it’s always well-rotted when applied to your beds, but you can add old or composted manure direct to beds which won’t be growing food items that will be in direct contact with the soil. Lettuce – bad. Pole beans – good. Fresh manure always needs to be aged or composted first, or added to a bed you’re going to plant in green manure or other non-food items. You can also feed your soil with pretty much anything you’d normally put in a compost pile. Chop it up, bury it, or mulch it on top of the soil – it will break down sooner or later even if it doesn’t look very pretty for a while.

Finishing the Bed

What else needs to be done? It depends what you plan to plant in your bed, what kind of a bed it is, and how fussy you are. If your beds have sides, raking the soil out reasonably flat is a good next step. If you have raised beds without sides, like I do, they probably got pretty messy if you dug or tilled them, and they need reshaping. I pull all the loose soil off the paths back up onto the beds, then rake out the tops reasonably flat and even. For direct-seeding large seeds (beans, peas, squash etc) or planting transplants, the bed is probably now ready. For direct-seeding small-seeded plants, though, you need to make a seedbed.

Making a seedbed

Small seeds like carrots, lettuce etc., and things which are a little picky about conditions or take a long time to come up, need a bit more preparation to give them a nice fine seedbed. My favorite tool for this is my “weasel” which when worked back and forth does a great job of breaking up lumps, throwing up stones or remaining weed clumps to be picked out (it’s amazing but there are always a few left), and creating a nice fine surface layer to plant your small seeds in.

Future articles will cover the many ways to plant seeds or transplants in your beautiful freshly-prepared beds!

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1. Preparing a New Raised Bed Vegetable Garden
2. How to Grow Vegetables: Direct Seeding Outside

But not full on, growing food in order to eat. Some people have continued to do it, of course, but to the larger culture it seemed like too much hard work and even too expensive, when you could buy vegetables so cheaply at the supermarket.

Over the last few years that has been changing, with the rise of local food and “100-mile diets”. This year, with the acceptance of climate change as real even by governments, rising food prices, and the recession/depression making many people feel very insecure, we seem to have reached a tipping point and now, suddenly, everyone’s doing it.

Michelle Obama on the White House lawn is only the most visible and media-hyped example. Seed producers and garden centers in Seattle are seeing business up 20-30% this spring. Our Seedy Saturday here in little Powell River, BC had a 28% increase in paying visitors and we sold nearly 1200 packages of seed as well as all the trading and swapping. The National Gardening Association in the US projects that the number of homes growing vegetables will jump more than 40% compared to two years ago.

Whatever the reason for any one specific person – you? – to start growing food, it’s all good. You can grow something wherever you are, even if all you have is a window-box or a balcony, and every time you eat something from your own patch, you’ve made a concrete, practical contribution to improving your diet, reducing food costs, and reducing food miles and transportation-related greenhouse gases. It doesn’t have to be expensive, either – you can scavenge, swap or yard-sale everything you need if necessary – and you’re helping the environment by re-using stuff if you do, so go to it!

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