MAY 3, 2004

Planning the garden

Things are starting to take shape in our spring garden, and they are happening, as they always seem to, quite suddenly.

The garden plan this year involves several improvements to last year's. Last spring we more or less exclusively grew hot peppers and okra, with some gourds and watermelons thrown in to keep things interesting and some cherry tomatoes to keep our fingers busy. All watering was done by hand — rainwater from a cistern was delivered to the bottom of the garden via a garden hose, and at the high half of the garden was hauled in by the gallon in plastic jugs. It was, as might be imagined, quite time-consuming.

This year the garden's dimensions will be a little tighter, but we're putting our rows much closer together, so in the end the "garden" in our garden will be much bigger than it was last year. The total size is about an acre, with 1300 row feet in rows 40 inches from center to center, where we have already planted some tomatoes and hot peppers for our own use, and to which we will add a lot of okra to sell at the farmer's market, plus additional cash crops of corn, sweet potatoes, bush beans, gourds and sunflowers. We had planned to do a smaller garden, what with Jenni seven months pregnant by the time things start producing in June, but have planned to install a drip irrigation system instead. So our heads have been filled with visions of quarter-inch tubing, hose connectors, tiny little water-dripping heads, and the expense and logistics of getting it all deployed.

Our thinking regarding row spacing is this: We've decided to listen to our neighbor, who has been growing a great (small) garden of his own for many years. Last year we spaced our rows fully four feet apart from the edges of the rows, and raised them a good six to eight inches off the ground; the former allowed us easy access with hoses and such, and the latter saved many of our plants last year when we had near-flooding rains. (The lead producer of tomatoes at our local farmer's market lost nearly everything because his plants sat underwater for a week.) But most years, our neighbor argues, you're better off starting out with rows nearly at ground level, and hilling them up as the plants mature. That way they get the full benefit of the moisture that's in the ground. He also scoffed at our former method. We had spaced our rows out because we had more ground tilled than we had the time or means to plant; but with closer rows, the plants created a canopy of vegetation between them that blocked out most sunlight, keeping weeds down and helping keep moisture in the ground. I had recently looked at a packet of okra, and knew the planting instructions said to plant in rows three feet apart. "What about okra?" I said. "Can okra be planted that close?"

He looked at me in disbelief. "With okra, it's pretty much a requirement," he said. "You just don't plant okra any further apart than that."

I later realized that I hadn't noticed that spacing from the center of rows was probably what the seed packets intended, since that meant you were spacing from the plant stems, and thus getting a true measure of the distance between plants. Because of the way I had piled up our rows before, too, the rows themselves had been much too wide, and left us with too much space to keep well-weeded; adding this to the fact that we were measuring from row edge to row edge, we probably had our rows spaced about six feet apart. That means that this year the paths between rows are decreasing from about four feet to about ten inches — giving us about twice as many rows to plant. Our neighbor made the rows for us himself with the tracks of his tractor. This method immediately struck me as far superior simply because it saved me about two days' worth of digging.

We did learn one interesting thing from our unusual practices. Since we don't own a tiller and aren't fanatical about weeding, wide rows allowed us to let grass grow between the rows and keep it mowed, which kept weeds from going to seed, and thus from spreading much into the rows. And while weeding is said to be crucial because weeds suck up moisture needed by plants, we found that a thin "cover crop" of grass between the rows kept the ground much more moist for much longer than bare earth. On the face of it, this is an obvious fact. It isn't so obvious to large-scale farmers who use pesticides to keep their fields for row crops, and even their orchards, weed-free, then water heavily to make up for the moisture loss from the bare soil. It has made us rethink the gardener's attitude towards plants that colonize the bare earth we create when we garden. When clover comes up, for example, we don't weed it out until it is mature, because we know it fixes nitrogen in its roots and frees it up for other plants to use, as do certain wildflowers and, for all their nuisance, mesquites.

As soon as our 1500-gallon cistern is empty, Jeremiah swears he'll build a platform to raise it up a couple of feet, which should solve our water pressure problem. But that problem will only be increased by replacing 200 feet of hose with 2000 feet of tubing, so we have a couple of old pumps we will try to run the water through. It's important to get this resolved before the majority of the seeds go in the ground, because that early stage is the hardest time to keep the field adequately watered, and when the plants need the most stable and controlled supply.

Interested fellow gardeners, dirt-stained or vicarious, can download a PDF (ca. 9 MB) of our garden plan.

If you missed our last post, make sure to click on "previous" on the menu below to read about how we're preparing to be parents.

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Some may have noticed that we announced plans to link up with Amazon.com to sell books and other media, and have invited a usurper onto our virtual nap mat instead. We stumbled upon a Powell's link on another website, clicked through to the home page of a bookseller we are well familiar with (Powell's has huge, wonderful bookstores selling new and used books in lower Manhattan and Portland, Ore.) and quickly learned just how much more they offered to their website partners than Amazon.com does.

Powell's pays its affiliates better, doesn't blackball other third-party advertising on its affiliates' sites, and is the kind of bookstore that reminds us why the bookstore as a physical place is such an important and valuable thing. Add to that the fact that their pricing is entirely competitive with Amazon's, that their selection of used and rare books is better and more reliable, and that they offer the kind of recommendations you expect from an independent bookseller full of people who love to read, and you may not miss that one-click shopping.

To get you started, take a look at one of our favorite features Powell's offers: Our recommendations bookshelf.