Gardening: Lessons Learned
I didn't feel like putting pictures up today, so here are a few lessons learned from my gardening experience.
1) Learn what zone you are in. This is important for one simple reason. The zone you are in defines all aspects of gardening. Basically that's what you can grow, how you grow and when you grow it.
Kentucky is zone 6. Its basic growing season for outdoor plants starts about mid-April and goes until mid-October. Due to what are considered mild summers, Kentucky has one big growing season, with the opportunity to have a short fall growing season. The hard line dates are based around the earliest expected frost and the last expected frost after the winter season.
And thanks to the frost, you usually end up building a garden from scratch each year, which leads to my next lesson learned.
2) Learn when the earliest dates are to plant outside. I got the growing bug about mid-may, which meant my pumpkins were planted late may, early june. For pumpkins, this is pretty much on track. They are a long grower and need that extra time to start popping out pumpkins come september/october. For my peppers and tomatoes, I missed the growing time by at least 2 months. I started the peppers from seed and you keep them in doors for 8 weeks, then move them outside to begin hardening them for outside life. Basically at 10 weeks, they should be in their growing home out in the elements. My peppers didn't make it outside until early July, so they are just now (Late August) producing peppers. Had I hit the window properly, I would have had a continuous supply of peppers starting in June. I bought the tomato plant as a seedling and got it started mid-june. I started getting ripe tomatoes at the beginning of August and the plant produces 2 or 3 a week now.
3) Have an appropriate place to grow your plants. This one I didn't think through properly. My initial intention was to grow strawberries. Strawberries are a nice container plant because its small, easy to manage and transplant and can be very hardy in strange conditions. So I had planned to grow from seed the plants I would need and place them in a hanging planter.
When I couldn't find any strawberry plants or seeds (again, having missed the start of the growing season by at least 2 months) I settled on a plant that needed a lot of room. I didn't realize this until it had started growing and basically took over the flower beds as I snaked the vines around the existing vegetation. While I was quickly running out of room, I ran in to the last big lesson I learned:
4) Pest avoidance. Pests encompass more than just bugs. I'm talking ground hogs, rabbits, chipmunks, squirrels and birds. My house is surrounded by wild life. Now strangely, I don't live out in the woods or anything, the house is in a nice sub-division next to a major highway. There is a nice little pond across the street which seems to encourage small rodents. The most annoying are the chipmunks. These little critters love to dig. Which is strange because you dig at least 3 inches in to the ground and you are hitting clay. Some how these animals thrive though and with the soft soil I put in to grow my pumpkins, they had a field day.
So for next year's garden, I can't have anything planted in the ground. I could try and trap the rodents, but they would just come back since I would only be moving them to the field next door. And well, I'm not going to set traps that would "eliminate" them because I don't want to clean up the mess, nor am I that cruel of a person. So basically, its all containers, which with what I want to grow, is not a problem.
As for bugs, my tomato plant recently began having aphid problems. These small bugs like to eat the sap right from the leaves of the plant, leaving these little trails all over the leaves. These grow in to little holes and basically kill the leaf. Killing the leaf means the plant loses a part that's integral in to getting sun in to its system. The more leaves that die, the less fruit the plant produces.
Being a bit environmentally conscious and more the fact that I don't like the idea of going over board with insecticides near something that's supposed to be edible, I did a bit of research and found "Hot Pepper Wax". Its an insecticide that doesn't kill the bugs, but encourages them to leave based on the fact its derived from hot peppers. The stuff is fairly tame to us humans, and they even claim you could actually eat the stuff if you really like your peppers, although to us it would be rather bland. There is also a warning to not spray it in to the wind because of the danger of getting it in your eyes, and yes, it will burn.
I've only been using it for a week, and its been pretty effective. I have already seen a great reduction in the number of bugs crawling on my plants.
So to sum up, before you garden, you better plan it all out. I'm still a trial by error person, just because I learn better that way, so I'll still jump in to see what happens, but a better plan is forming for next year's garden.
And google is a gardener's best friend. If your state has a big agricultural school then more than likely they have created documents to help home gardeners. For instance, here's the link to Texas A&M's aggy school with home garden info:
http://aggie-horticulture.tamu.edu/
Hit the home and garden link for a bunch of documents on various topics. Texas gardening is quite an adventure it seems. The growing season starts early, with outdoor plants going in march. It seems to be a game of beat the heat as you try to finish up your initial harvest by June. Once summer hits, you aren't going to be growing much, just preparing for the second season come the end of August leading in to November/December.
These documents also go a long way to telling you what you can grow, when you want to plant them and gives important details as to what you can start as seeds inside and what are direct sow plants. And for me, the document about container gardening will be helpful because of the descriptions on the size of the containers and how many of each plant they can grow.
And the last online resource I would suggest:
http://www.burpee.com/
This is a commercial retail site that sells seedlings and seeds for a variety of plants. They've gone all out with their website to make it friendly to your particular zone. Once you enter your zip code, it'll tell you if plants are appropriate for that area along with information about when to plant the seeds. This is also the place where I found the Hot Pepper Wax insecticide.
I'm sure I'm missing a lot, but these were the big lessons that come to mind as I worked through my garden. I'm more prepared than I ever was, but there are always pitfalls.
1) Learn what zone you are in. This is important for one simple reason. The zone you are in defines all aspects of gardening. Basically that's what you can grow, how you grow and when you grow it.
Kentucky is zone 6. Its basic growing season for outdoor plants starts about mid-April and goes until mid-October. Due to what are considered mild summers, Kentucky has one big growing season, with the opportunity to have a short fall growing season. The hard line dates are based around the earliest expected frost and the last expected frost after the winter season.
And thanks to the frost, you usually end up building a garden from scratch each year, which leads to my next lesson learned.
2) Learn when the earliest dates are to plant outside. I got the growing bug about mid-may, which meant my pumpkins were planted late may, early june. For pumpkins, this is pretty much on track. They are a long grower and need that extra time to start popping out pumpkins come september/october. For my peppers and tomatoes, I missed the growing time by at least 2 months. I started the peppers from seed and you keep them in doors for 8 weeks, then move them outside to begin hardening them for outside life. Basically at 10 weeks, they should be in their growing home out in the elements. My peppers didn't make it outside until early July, so they are just now (Late August) producing peppers. Had I hit the window properly, I would have had a continuous supply of peppers starting in June. I bought the tomato plant as a seedling and got it started mid-june. I started getting ripe tomatoes at the beginning of August and the plant produces 2 or 3 a week now.
3) Have an appropriate place to grow your plants. This one I didn't think through properly. My initial intention was to grow strawberries. Strawberries are a nice container plant because its small, easy to manage and transplant and can be very hardy in strange conditions. So I had planned to grow from seed the plants I would need and place them in a hanging planter.
When I couldn't find any strawberry plants or seeds (again, having missed the start of the growing season by at least 2 months) I settled on a plant that needed a lot of room. I didn't realize this until it had started growing and basically took over the flower beds as I snaked the vines around the existing vegetation. While I was quickly running out of room, I ran in to the last big lesson I learned:
4) Pest avoidance. Pests encompass more than just bugs. I'm talking ground hogs, rabbits, chipmunks, squirrels and birds. My house is surrounded by wild life. Now strangely, I don't live out in the woods or anything, the house is in a nice sub-division next to a major highway. There is a nice little pond across the street which seems to encourage small rodents. The most annoying are the chipmunks. These little critters love to dig. Which is strange because you dig at least 3 inches in to the ground and you are hitting clay. Some how these animals thrive though and with the soft soil I put in to grow my pumpkins, they had a field day.
So for next year's garden, I can't have anything planted in the ground. I could try and trap the rodents, but they would just come back since I would only be moving them to the field next door. And well, I'm not going to set traps that would "eliminate" them because I don't want to clean up the mess, nor am I that cruel of a person. So basically, its all containers, which with what I want to grow, is not a problem.
As for bugs, my tomato plant recently began having aphid problems. These small bugs like to eat the sap right from the leaves of the plant, leaving these little trails all over the leaves. These grow in to little holes and basically kill the leaf. Killing the leaf means the plant loses a part that's integral in to getting sun in to its system. The more leaves that die, the less fruit the plant produces.
Being a bit environmentally conscious and more the fact that I don't like the idea of going over board with insecticides near something that's supposed to be edible, I did a bit of research and found "Hot Pepper Wax". Its an insecticide that doesn't kill the bugs, but encourages them to leave based on the fact its derived from hot peppers. The stuff is fairly tame to us humans, and they even claim you could actually eat the stuff if you really like your peppers, although to us it would be rather bland. There is also a warning to not spray it in to the wind because of the danger of getting it in your eyes, and yes, it will burn.
I've only been using it for a week, and its been pretty effective. I have already seen a great reduction in the number of bugs crawling on my plants.
So to sum up, before you garden, you better plan it all out. I'm still a trial by error person, just because I learn better that way, so I'll still jump in to see what happens, but a better plan is forming for next year's garden.
And google is a gardener's best friend. If your state has a big agricultural school then more than likely they have created documents to help home gardeners. For instance, here's the link to Texas A&M's aggy school with home garden info:
http://aggie-horticulture.tamu.edu/
Hit the home and garden link for a bunch of documents on various topics. Texas gardening is quite an adventure it seems. The growing season starts early, with outdoor plants going in march. It seems to be a game of beat the heat as you try to finish up your initial harvest by June. Once summer hits, you aren't going to be growing much, just preparing for the second season come the end of August leading in to November/December.
These documents also go a long way to telling you what you can grow, when you want to plant them and gives important details as to what you can start as seeds inside and what are direct sow plants. And for me, the document about container gardening will be helpful because of the descriptions on the size of the containers and how many of each plant they can grow.
And the last online resource I would suggest:
http://www.burpee.com/
This is a commercial retail site that sells seedlings and seeds for a variety of plants. They've gone all out with their website to make it friendly to your particular zone. Once you enter your zip code, it'll tell you if plants are appropriate for that area along with information about when to plant the seeds. This is also the place where I found the Hot Pepper Wax insecticide.
I'm sure I'm missing a lot, but these were the big lessons that come to mind as I worked through my garden. I'm more prepared than I ever was, but there are always pitfalls.