Saturday 8 August 2009

Necessities Of The Home Vegetable Garden.

When finding the place for the family vegetable garden it is better to put away once and for all the old notion that the garden "patch" must be an ugly patch in the home surroundings. If thoughtfully planned, carefully planted and thoroughly applied care, it may be formed a gratifying and harmonic feature of the general schema, adding a tint of comfortable homeliness that can ever be produced by bushes, borders, or beds.

With this fact in mind we will not be restricted to any part of the premises merely because it is out of sight at the rear of the barn or garage. In the general medium-size property there will not be much choice as to land. It'll be necessary to consider what is to be had and so do the real best that can be done with it. But there will likely be a good deal of selection as to, first, exposure, and secondly, convenience. Other things being equal, take a place near at hand, with easy access. It might appear that a deviation of simply a few hundred yards may imply nothing, but if one is relying largely upon spare minutes for functioning in and for controlling the garden and in the growth of lots of vegetables the latter is nearly as critical as the other. This matter of handy approach will be of such greater importance than is in all probability to be at first given. Not until you have had to make a dozen time-wasting jaunts for forgot seeds or instruments, or gotten your feet soaking wet by getting out through the dew-drenched grass, will you take in to the full what this may mean.

Exposure.

But the thing of first importance to consider in choosing the patch that is to generate for you happiness and flavoursome vegetables all summer, or even for numerous years, is the exposure. Pick out the "earliest" position you can. Obtain a patch pitching a little to the south or east, that appears to view sun early and maintain it late, and that looks to be out of the direct path of the chilling northern and northeasterly winds. If a building, or even an old fencing, protects it from this direction, your garden will be helped on marvelously, for an early beginning is a great ingredient toward success. If it is not already fortified, a board fencing, or a hedge of some low-growing shrubs or young evergreens, will append really greatly to its usefulness. The importance of featuring such a protection or shelter is completely undervalued by the amateur.

The soil.

The chances are that you will not see a position of errorless garden soil available for utilisation anywhere upon your place. All except the really worst of soils can be got up to a real high degree of productiveness, particularly such as reduced areas as family veggie gardens want. Large tracts of ground that are near pure sand, and others so heavy and mucky that for centuries they rested uncultivated, have often been worked, in the course of merely a few years, to where they render each year great crops on a commercial basis. Indeed do not be deterred about your territory. Particular handling of it is often more crucial, and a garden- plot of ordinary shabby, or "never-brought-up" soil will make practically more for the physical and careful gardener than the richest position will produce under average methods of refinement.

Ideally the garden soil is a "rich, sandy loam." It can't go overstressed that such soils typically are made, not found. Let's analyse this description a bit, for here we get to the start of the four primary factors of gardening food. The others are cultivation, moisture and temperature. "Rich" in the gardener's vocabulary stands for full of plant nutrient; more than that, and this is an item of critical importance, it means full of plant food available to be used straightaway, all ready and spread out on the garden table, or rather in it, where developing things can immediately make use of it; or what we term, in one word, "available" plant food. Practically no soils in long- inhabited residential areas remain naturally rich enough to grow big crops. They are formed rich, or kept rich, in two ways; firstly, by cultivation, which assists to modify the raw plant nutrient stored in the soil into available forms; and secondly, by manuring or supplying plant nutrient to the soil from outside sources.

"Sandy" in the sense applied here, means a soil bearing sufficient particles of sand so that water will pass through it without leaving it pasty and sticky a couple of days after a rainfall; "light" enough, as it is called, so that a smattering, under routine circumstances, will collapse and drop apart promptly after being squeezed in the hand. It's not essential that the soil be sandy in show, but it should be crumbly.

"Loam: a rich, friable soil," states Webster. That barely embraces it, but it does distinguish it. It is soil in which the sand and clay are in particular ratios, so that neither greatly predominate, and normally darkly colored, from cultivation and enrichment. Such a soil, still to the untrained eye, but by nature seems as if it would grow things. It is extraordinary how quickly the entirely physical visual aspect of a piece of well cultivated soil will convert. An illustration came under my notice last fall in one of my fields, where a strip holding an acre had been two years in onion plants, and a small bit sticking out from the middle of this had been made for them for precisely one season. The remainder had not took in any extra manuring or cultivation. When the field was plowed up in the fall, all three divisions were as distinctly noticeable as is they were separated by a surround. And I acknowledge that next spring's crop of rye, before it is plowed under, will display the courses of demarcation precisely as plain.

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