Castor beans planted around the perimeter of the garden will repel moles, while borders of daffodil, narcissus, scilla, and grape hyacinth around flower beds will discourage mice. If used in small amounts, dead nettle (henbit), sainfoin, esparsette, hyssop, lemon balm, and valerian are helpful to all vegetables. Yarrow is a good plant in paths, as well as borders, as it will grow well even if walked upon. Planted as a border to the herb garden, it enhances the growth of essential oils in the herbs.
This simply means growing a quick-to-mature crop of some vegetable in ground you’ve reserved for a planting of a later or slower-growing crop such as tomatoes, or a member of the Cabbage family such as broccoli or cauliflower. While you are waiting, put in radishes, lettuce, or spinach as a catch crop.
Since climates vary greatly throughout the world, where you live should always be taken into account when you plan your garden. Maximum summer and minimum winter temperature should be considered, as well as annual rainfall.
For best success, try plants recommended for your area, making these your garden basics. This determined, you can then have fun experimenting each year with a few borderline plants those that do best in either a warmer or colder climate. Often, by providing shelter or otherwise creating a “mini” climate you may grow these successfully. Winter protection will help in the North, shade or a windbreak in the South. Some natural feature of your land, such as a pond, may enable you to grow something that your neighbor a few miles away cannot. (See Microclimate in this chapter.)
Mulching to keep the ground cool may be helpful for certain plants. Improving soil with humus often makes it possible to grow vegetables or plants that formerly were unsuccessful.
This is a disease caused by fungi, apparently present in the soil, that kills many young plants. It is characterized by collapse of the stems, or the seedlings falling over. It may occur before the seeds germinate or after the seedlings emerge. To avoid this, you can start seeds in a commercial soilless medium; but if you make your own potting soil in which seeds are to be planted, it should be treated to kill the fungi by steam-heating to 180°F for half an hour or more.
A simple method for the home gardener is dry-heating the soil in an oven. Place the soil 4 to 5 inches deep in a pan and bury a small potato about 1½ inches in diameter in it. Bake in 200°F oven until the potato is done and the soil is sterilized and ready to use.
This type of gardening, which stresses maximum use of the soil and first became popular in the 1800s, is largely accomplished by using raised beds. These may be any length but narrow enough to permit easy handling from either side. Raised beds have the advantage of improved drainage and better aeration. The soil does not become waterlogged in winter and as a result it warms up faster in spring and produces earlier crops.
Prepare the soil by loosening to a depth of 12 inches and removing all weeds. Add compost or well-decomposed manure as well as any other organic amendments (agricultural lime, gypsum, bonemeal, phosphate rock, etc.) that a soil test may indicate. Double digging is then done. This means that where the first spade-depth of soil is removed, a second spade-depth of soil is loosened before soil from the top layer is replaced.
If you are working with extremely poor soil, the bottom spade-depth may need to have additional incorporations of sand, compost, and loamy soil. All this sounds like a lot of work, and it is, but as the soil is improved each year, the work gets easier.
French intensive gardening is an ideal way to save space and to use companion planting effectively.
The benefit derived from this intensive gardening method is the increased number of plants that may be grown in a very small area. Perhaps in no other form of gardening is companion planting so important, since herbs and vegetables are so closely crowded together.
In general, the smaller vegetables and salad greens are best suited to this type of culture, but there is no law that says you can’t grow corn and pumpkins and sunflowers and cucumbers this way if you want to!
Vegetables frequently are classified according to their ability to survive frosts. The U.S. Department of Agriculture defines the differences:
Hardy or cool-season crops will survive medium to heavy frosts. Seed from this group (peas, beets, kale, etc.) can be planted as soon as the soil can be prepared in the spring, or in midsummer for a late-fall crop.
Semi-hardy vegetables will survive a light frost. Seed will germinate at relatively low temperatures, and can be planted 2 to 3 weeks before the last frost date. This necessarily will vary in different sections of the country.
Tender or warm-season crops (tomatoes, eggplant, bell pepper, etc.) are injured or killed by frost, and their seeds seldom germinate in cold soil.
Both in the garden and in the orchard, honeybees are an important agent of pollination. They are particularly attracted to the often inconspicuous flowers of herb plants.
A hive of bees is a good weather indicator, for if drones are forced out of the hive during fair weather, it is a sign that cold, wet weather is imminent. When hiving a new swarm of bees, rub the hive’s inside with lemon balm, which the bees like. A smoke from jimsonweed (datura) calms the bees when a hive is opened.
This is really the heart of companion planting, for the idea is to have two or more different vegetables growing on the same piece of ground, or in the same row, providing diversification. And this idea need not be confined to vegetables. Flowers and herbs can happily bump shoulders with each other. In fact, they should.
If your garden is small and you don’t want to have empty spaces between your peas and bean rows, intercrop with broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbages, cauliflower, kale, or even radishes or carrots. After the early peas and beans are out, the slower-growing vegetables have all the space to themselves, and you have room to walk again. This may make things a bit cramped at times, but if you have little space and a short growing season, it’s well worth trying. Of course, to be successful you must keep up the fertility of your soil.
I like to keep a sort of “floating crop game” going in my own garden, making small plantings of quick-growing vegetables that sprout readily from seed, such as lettuce, radish, spinach, celery, cabbage, kale, chard, collards, and other greens. Staggered plantings mean fresh supplies coming on all through the season.
Plants that will help each other are put together as often as possible, either in the same row (for instance, marigolds with bush beans) or in adjacent rows. Lettuce and onions do well together, so I pop in a lettuce plant each time I pull a green onion for the table. I plant onions close together and pull every other one, letting the remaining onions mature for dry onions. In my climate even eggplant and green peppers benefit from a bit of shade, so I plant these together in a row next to okra.
Many vine crops, such as squash, cucumbers, and pumpkins, grow well with corn and may even protect it from raccoons. The corn is helpful in protecting vine crops from wilt. Many early crops do well following spinach, which is rich in saponin. (See Saponin in the Soil Improvement chapter.) Early spinach also may be intercropped with strawberries.
Many vegetables are pretty enough to put in the flower beds. Parsley between bulbs provides an attractive background in the spring. Tomatoes can grow with roses and at the same time protect them against black spot.
Chive clumps are another attractive planting for the rose garden (see Chive in the Herbs chapter for benefits). They grow larger each year, late spring bringing a pincushion of lavender blossoms that last for many days.
Hardy amaryllis, a member of the Lily family, sends out long strap leaves in early spring. After the leaves ripen and die, the ground is bare until August, when a sturdy stem emerges to grow quickly and bear fragrant pink lilies. A lettuce planting between the bulbs contrasts with the flower, making it far more beautiful.
Some vegetables have been especially hybridized for oramentation in a flower planting. Flowering cabbage and kale come in colorful shades of red, white, and green, yet have excellent flavor. Plant them with the same herbs (mints, thyme, rosemary, sage, hyssop) as the garden varieties.
In garden intercropping, try not to put a plant that needs light where other, taller-growing plants will shade it, nor a moistureloving plant with another that is greedy for water.
Just follow the general rules: asparagus with tomatoes; beans with carrots or summer savory; beet with onion or kohlrabi; members of the Cabbage family with aromatic plants or potatoes or celery; leeks with onions, celery, or carrots; turnips with peas.
Remember also the dislikes, and do not plant beans with onions, garlic, or gladiolus; beets with pole beans; the Cabbage family with strawberries, tomatoes, or pole beans; potatoes with pumpkin, squash, cucumber, sunflower, tomato, or raspberry.
A microclimate — a small area with special growing conditions — may result from an unusual natural feature on your land, such as a pond that moderates air temperatures. Or you can create a microclimate yourself by varying your plantings, adding a hedge, or covering a fence with vines. A hedge makes a permanent windbreak, but rows of tall corn will grow quickly and serve the same purpose for a season: to shade, protect, and limit air circulation for tender plants. So will vine plantings, such as grape, and also cucumbers (though these must be kept well watered during the summer, particularly if they take the western sun).
Mulch can be almost anything that retards loss of moisture from the soil, but organic mulches, many of which also add nutrients, are considered the most helpful. These include chopped bark, buckwheat hulls, cocoa shells, coffee grounds, corncobs, cottonseed hulls, cranberry vines, evergreen boughs, grass clippings, hay, hops, leaves (particularly oak leaves, which repel slugs, cutworms, and grubs of June bugs), manure, peanut hulls, peat moss, pine needles (great to increase stem strength and flavor of strawberries), poultry litter, salt hay, sawdust, seaweed, stinging nettle, straw, sugarcane residue, tobacco stems, and wood chips and shavings. Particularly comprehensive information is found in The Mulch Book by Stu Campbell. (See Suggested Reading.)
There is much to be said about a sawdust mulch, both for and against. Mulches like sawdust are particularly susceptible to spontaneous combustion, fresh sawdust can cause a depletion of soil nitrogen, and it is not good to use in summer because earthworms will avoid it.
On the good side, it is claimed by many authorities that blueberries mulched with sawdust will develop a larger, more fibrous root system and as an end result have a far higher yield. It is considered good mulch for raspberries and should be put on immediately after transplanting. Mixed with animal manures or poultry litter, it makes an acceptable mulch for many plants and shrubs where either one alone would not work well. Shavings or sawdust used for animal bedding makes an excellent mulch.
The type of tree from which the sawdust comes also has a bearing on the situation. Unweathered pine sawdust will decompose very slowly, so give it a bit of time to weather and turn gray before using. Sawdust from hardwood trees will rot much more rapidly than pine, spruce, or cedar, especially if weathered before using. Studies now show that the tannins and terpenes in sawdust that gardeners often fear really do little if any harm to the soil. (See The Mulch Book in Suggested Reading.)
Experienced garden writers take it for granted that everybody knows what pH is all about. If you don’t, relax; it isn’t scary at all.
The pH of anything simply indicates its active acidity or alkalinity, expressed in units. The term is generally used in horticultural science to indicate a condition of the soil, and it’s important to know, because many plants thrive only when the pH value of the soil closely approximates the optimum for their particular kind.
Soil acidity may be of two kinds, active and potential. It is a state in which the concentration of hydrogen ions (H+) exceeds that of hydroxyl ions (OH-). When you have an exact balance of H+ and OH- ions, you have neutrality. When the OH- ions exceed the H+ ions, you have alkalinity.
Active soil acidity represents the excess of H ions over the OH ions present in the soil solution. It is expressed in pH units on the pH scale. On this scale, 7 represents neutrality; higher readings indicate alkalinity and lower ones acidity. It is rare to find a soil with greater acidity than 3.5, or with greater alkalinity than 8.0. You should note, however, that the relationship between the figures is geometric. Acidity at pH 5 is ten times as great as at 6, and at pH 4, one hundred times.
What can you do about it if a soil test shows too much one way or the other? To neutralize acidity, the gardener adds lime, preferably the agricultural type. Gypsum or sulfur can be used to correct an alkaline condition. In my opinion all soils, but particularly alka-line ones, benefit from the use of compost or humus in the form of decomposed organic matter. A green manure crop plowed under also helps.
Shade is sometimes the decisive factor in companion planting. Nature does not arrange plants in long, straight rows, as we often do in our gardens. Try radishes in a foot-wide bed with no thinning. Put fast-growing lettuce such as ‘Buttercrunch’, ‘Simpson’, or ‘Oakleaf’ between cabbages, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, or even tomatoes, which will shade the young plants while they are growing. The lettuce will be up and out of the way when the slower-maturing plants need the room. You’ll have a double crop on half the ground and with half the work, and you will also find that the taller plants give the lettuce just enough shade to keep it coming on crisp and sweet right into hot weather.
If you interplant early beets with late potatoes, the shade of the growing potatoes will benefit the beets, keeping them tender and succulent right into warm weather.
Plant melons between your onion rows, and by the time the onions are harvested the melons will be taking over the ground. While the vines are growing, the onions will protect them from insects.
After you harvest your early corn, let the stalks remain a while to shade a planting of fall cabbage, beans, peas, and turnips. When the fall garden is well established and the sun less warm, remove the cornstalks and use them for mulch right on the ground where they grew.
Many of the mints take kindly to shade and may be grown under trees. Sweet woodruff also likes shade and makes an excellent ground cover, while retaining moisture for other plants that give it protection from the sun. Tarragon and chervil like partial shade, too.
This technique will enable you to make the most of a supply of compost or fertilizer. Heavy feeders such as broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, celeriac, celery, chard, cucumber, endive, kohlrabi, leek, lettuce, spinach, squash, sweet corn, and tomato should be planted in soil newly fertilized with well- decomposed manure.
Follow these heavy feeders with light feeders such as beet, carrot, radish, rutabaga, and turnip, which also like finely pulverized raw rocks and compost.
Legumes, the third group in succession planting, include broad and lima beans, bush and pole beans, peas, and soybeans. These soil improvers collect nitrogen on their roots and restore it to the soil.
Why do most annual plants die in the autumn? It is possible that seeds inside mature fruits such as soybean pods send out hormones that cause plants to yellow and die even before nights cold enough for freezing cut them down.
Gardeners for years have known that if faded flowers are picked before they form seeds, the plants will continue to produce more flowers. Pansies are a good example. Among the vegetables, okra will continue from early spring to frost if the pods are kept picked before they harden.
This idea has been tested on soybeans. Growing pods were plucked from one side of the plant only and allowed to remain on the other. The side with the mature pods and seeds turned yellow and died, while the other remained healthy.
Vegetables that occupy different soil strata often make good companions. Among these are asparagus with parsley and tomatoes, beets with kohlrabi, beets with onions, leeks with vine plants, garlic with tomatoes, carrots with peas, and also strawberries with bush beans.
Many combinations like this are possible, enabling the gardener with little space to virtually double the garden’s yield, and at the same time improve the health and flavor of the vegetables planted together.
Do not put together plants that are competing for the same space and light, such as sunflowers and pole beans, or plants whose root excretions react unfavorably on each other, such as carrots and dill.
Gardeners in areas that have a long growing season may find both a spring and fall garden possible. In the fall here in Oklahoma I can grow cauliflower, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, collards, lettuce, radishes, and English peas, and they are practically insect-free. Some of the vegetables that require a long growing season to head up are a complete failure for me if planted in the spring, because of the hot midsummer conditions. I cannot give you exact dates; this has to be worked out by area according to where you live, but is well worth trying experimentally.
In many places, early-planted squash is more likely to withstand borers, which lay their eggs in July. Where I live, we have a rule: “Plant squash and cucumbers the first day of May before the sun comes up and they will be free of beetles.” I find that fall-planted squash often escapes insects as well.
Radishes and cabbage may escape root maggots by careful timing. The Hessian fly’s attacks on winter wheat may be avoided if the wheat is sown after the first week in October, when the fly is no longer active.
South Texas cotton farmers have found they can control the pink bollworm without insecticides by carefully establishing deadline dates for both planting cotton and destroying the stalks after harvest.
Observe when insect infestations are worst on certain crops, and plant either earlier or later than you have in the past.
If you have a fenced garden, here is an opportunity for both beauty and increased productiveness. Many plants take kindly to climbing. Cucumbers (such as Burpee ‘Burpless’) grow longer and straighter when trained on a fence. Scarlet runner beans climb rapidly and make a beautiful as well as a tasty display. I plant these with my chayotes, which bear good-tasting and attractive fruit in September.
Morning glories and pole beans do well together, and rambling roses are happy with gourds. When the roses are gone, the gourds will bear attractive blossoms and fruits without damage to the roses. If you grow the birdhouse type of gourd, these will be a bonus for your garden, dried and hung the following season to attract birds.
You might follow Oriental practice to relieve the somber dark green of pines by allowing clematis to grow into the trees, particularly the white-blooming type that forms huge panicles of scented flowers in late fall.
If you don’t have a fence, try a tepee or wigwam made of four or more poles fastened together near the top and with soft wire or twine tied from pole to pole. The growing plants are trained to the poles by tying loosely. When they reach the top, pinch out the growing point of each plant, causing them to produce side shoots. This system is very good for vining squash. Soon the wigwam will be covered with a mass of attractive flowers, bright green leaves, and squashes.