Dirt is the biggest thing, in my experience. My wife and I have attempted to start a garden at both our old house and our new one, and haven't been able to overcome the fact that we apparently have the world's worst soil, which has been referred to as "dead" by some experts. We can barely even grow grass. Or in some places, even weeds.

We've tried to mix in various things with the dirt to give it life and encourage the plants to grow, but with very limited success so far. So that would be step one! I hope that you make it further than we have.

 

That's what my wife has been doing. We have some pumpkins, melons, squash and beans all in pots that she started a while back. We also have some potato eyes that we've been keeping in a dark corner in the basement that might be ready to go into the dirt. Its warm enough to go outside now, but....of course, the whole global pandemic thing puts a cramp into running to Lowes to buy more soil and such. So, we're going to hold tight inside for a while and see what happens. Tomatoes grow really fast, so we're just going to start those outside.

 

Have you tried buying/adding earthworms? I had neighbors who complained of similar issues and did that with some pretty good success.

 

We asked about that, but were told that it wouldn't do any good. The soil itself is just too acidic and worthless. Apparently, parts of our county are known to be that way. Adding lots of fertalizer, and/or just replacing the dirt was the best choice.

 

I'm not a gardener but I've done some extensive research because it's something I'd like to do. If you take anything from my advice, you should run it through the web and double check me.

1) As Unlucky said, you want to have great soil. There is no magic recipe because all plants are different. I personally believe in doing it organically so that the plants can grow as they would in nature to a degree. Also lowers our footprint in the world. However, you're going to want to find out the correct PH levels for each plant and adjust your chose base soil accordingly.

2) Certain plants need more or less time in the sun. Make sure you know the area and how the sun hits it during the different seasons. You may not have the perfect spot for everything you want to grow, but you can do your best.

3) If you grow any vegetables, which I'd totally recommend, you want to swap out which spot you're growing in. I honestly forget the reasoning, but if you grow the same vegetables from the same soil repeatedly they say it causes issues unless youre resoiling after batches.

4) You may want to consider making your own compost. It's cheap, easy, and if you get into it at all you can try your hand at making new mixtures of different composted foods and whatnot.

5) Start small. 5 acres is a lot, so dobt overwhelm yourself. Get accustomed to gardening and grow it outward. If you try too much at once you might give up.

6) If you have money, you could always hire or consult professionals.

 

5 acres would basically be a farm, not a garden!

 

You have much bolder taste than I do, lol. Anything spicier than a green pepper is far too much for my mouth.

 

Oh I get it. I just have extremely sensitive taste buds, and am a very picky eater. I know lots of people like to eat things at varying degrees of spiciness, and to each their own certainly. I'm happy sticking to potatoes, carrots, cucumbers and romaine lettuce. I'm a mild, mild guy, lol.

 

My wife has had some luck growing spices in pots inside. She likes them a lot more than I do, and has grown basil and oregano.

 

I do a ton of gardening. have 7 flower gardens, 3 veggie gardens and built a big greenhouse. Important notes for my gardening:

• well aerated dirt - this is best accomplished by a raised bed garden. you can also use a ground garden, but I would suggest renting a tiller to open up the soil. can also be accomplished by a shovel, but it's a lot of work
• type of soil is important. if you have good topsoil, you can mix in a little compost and you'll be good to go. If you have crappy soil (like clay that is common everywhere) you need to mix in better soil and compost to get it to grow
• place your garden in reach of a hose so you can water in dry times
• One trick that has worked wonders for me when I grow my tomatoes, and I believe it also works for pepper plants. when you plant your plant in garden (presuming you are buying a plant or transplanting a good size seedling), put a cracked egg at bottom of hole (or pot if you are planting in a pot). this provides big boost of nutrients as the plant grows. I did side by side comparison of a tomato plant with and without the egg. the ones with eggs grew 2-3 times bigger.
• the biggest key for gardening: understanding the vegetative vs fruiting stages of the life cycle of a plant. vegetative stage (growth stage) requires different fertilizer (nitrogen rich) for growth. fruiting stage is when plant starts to flower and getting ready to reproduce (producing the veggies). requires different fertilizer.

 

corn is pretty hard without lots of land. also tricky knowing when to water them.
carrots and onions are easy, especially if you have a raised bed garden (aerated dirt). you just plant the seeds and harvest in fall. one of my dogs loves carrots and he'll actually pull them out of the ground to eat.
potatoes are not too bad to grow, but you also need more space.

 

on a related note. for those living in small spaces with unfavorable yards for growing, the aerogarden works pretty well, especially the bigger units. hard for me to grow lettuce outside because of the billion rabbits on my property (which is adjacent to wetlands). Use the aerogarden for lettuce. I also use it to get many of my flowers and veggies started before I transplant outside. On Leap day this year, they had a 50% off sale that made it worth buying. It's an investment, but I'll never have to buy the small potted veggies again that I use for starters in my garden. The tiny unit they sell for spices works, but not nearly as well.

 

I live in a large space with a yard unfavorable for growing anything, lol. This will be our third summer here, and I'm delighted to have some sort of various grass and weeds covering about 75% of the dirt!

We've looked into the raised box gardens, but are worried about the wood rotting. Have you had to deal with that? If so, what was your solution? We get a lot of rain some years, and its generally pretty humid.

To this point, my wife has had her greatest success growing flowers in the mulch that surrounds the house. Some species seem to really love it. Beyond that, things have been pretty bad. This was going to be the week that she took time, with me as her forced labor, and really made an effort to start the garden anew for the year, but the global situation has put an end to that. So we'll probably focus on just fixing up the natural plant life that's already here this season.

 

I bought the treated wood for box gardens. (2 x 8's). climate is pretty harsh in New ENgland. Imagine I'll get several years out of the boxes. they are already 5-6 years old and still strong.

alternative is just a raised bed with no box, that's what I just built this past week. For those of you with crappy soil or clay, plants can certainly survive in that, but if you're starting a new garden, I'd suggest doing 50/50 mix of topsoil and clay and till together. allows roots to better grow but also get used to the acidic nature of clay

 

I tried a number of fruit trees when I lived in Texas and couldn't get them to last past a year. I would do some research to see exactly what you need and actually invest in things like soil tests if you want a good shot. Also be aware that some fruit trees don't grow fruit unless you have other trees nearby that can cross pollinate.

 

Probably not a bad idea. Ultimately I have no idea what I did or didn't do to kill all of mine. Over/under watered, didn't treat them for winter (it was in Austin, Texas, so not really a big thing), bad soil, etc. The overall land there was garbage though, so I'd lean toward that.

I am semi-interested here in Michigan, but the variety isn't as available due to the weather. Focusing on year 2 of our garden - this time with labels so we know what we planted where and don't need to play the "weed or vegetable" game. :tongue2:

 

trees are tricky to get them past the first year.

• research which fruit trees do well in your area (very few up here in boston)
• find a sunny spot that is in area you can water when needed
• if you have crappy soil, dig extra wide hole and mix in good and bad dirt 50-50
• planting depth and making the right crown of soil over root ball is something I've seen make a big difference. want soil to cover root ball and also to slope down from the trunk to the edge of the root ball so water drains to edges of roots and not stick around the trunk where it will rot

 

I've noted that Lowe's always offers a one year money back guarantee on trees that they sell. I wonder how hard it is to actually get the refund, assuming that I would keep my receipt.

 

Good advice. I know the "soil" in the Austin, Texas area was horrific. About a half inch of dirt, then hard clay for 2-3 feet then clay just loaded with rock. One of the reasons trees don't grow tall in that area. I actually rented an augur to make a bigass hole and filled it with dirt. I didn't mix good/bad though, and I probably didn't slope it correctly. Honestly, pretty much everything that could go wrong seemed to! :headwall:

 

I actually did that - I took the dead tree back in and got either a refund or credit, can't recall which. They can look up purchase history pretty easily, I returned a number of things without a receipt and they were quite good about it, no hassles and often got a straight refund to my card over store credit.

 

I try not to buy trees or shrubs from lowe's/home depot anymore, especially later in the year. their trees tend to be in the pots a lot longer and get rootbound. not healthy and makes it harder to thrive. plants and flowers tend to be in better shape at the box stores, but for the bigger more expensive items, I go to the local nurseries.

if you do buy a rootbound plant, you can easily cut and loosen the roots to give it a better shot to grow normally

https://www.thespruce.com/how-to-tell-if-your-plant-is-rootbound-847788

 

Most landscaping supply yards will deliver. A yard of good soil from one of these places is 1/4 the price of buying bags of dirt. I spend about $35 for a full size pick up bed full of dirt every year and then there are local stables everywhere that give away composted manure so I mix a load of that in. I usually get my dirt ready and my garden cleaned up and organized in March around St Pattys and that lets it get all happy before the plants go in. If you don't compost regularly you can just use grass clippings to continue to mulch and feed your garden. As long as you don't use pesticides or chemical fertilizers on your grass anyway. Keep a pile next to the garden and add it when its getting dry and brown.

Ive only got about 400 sf of garden but I've got dwarf fruit trees and a queen size bed frame strawberry patch (literally, it was a queen waterbed frame) I plant snow peas and early lettuce and spinach from seed After Easter. Peppers are hard to grow here so I get starts from our local food bank, they have a nursery and a greenhouse to help support themselves, and I grow those in 5 gallon black buckets to help keep soil warm. Soil temp is big. If you put your plants in when the soil is too cold they wont flower and you'll have low yields.

Raised beds, at least 6" above ground, mine are 12 make for good drainage and higher soil temps. Have to have those in the NW to grow anything.

I grow peas and lettuce and spinach. Green beans, zucchinni and yellow squash, plum tomatoes and some beefsteaks, bell peppers were good for the first time last year and chili peppers. I roast and dry the chilis and grind my own chili powder and flakes, make pickled green beans and can tomatoes. The rest I usually only get enough to eat fresh salads and add extra veggies to soups and sauces.

Time and money investment I probably break even, may be cheaper just to buy it but I enjoy it, my youngest likes helping me with it so it has lots of value on top of the food.

We used to have a couple dozen rose bushes and big flower beds too but I got rid of most of those. If I can't eat it I'm not wasting time and money growing it.

 

Yeah, my wife gets so mad at me that I don't want to eat the things that come out of the gardens of people that we know, but it all just doesn't look and feel right to me. I need the stuff from the store.

 

I just used some old cedar fencing to make mine. Lasted five years so far. Lots of people use railroad ties around here too. Or you could use landscaping bricks and pavers. I find that stuff free all the time on Craigs list, people giving away their extras or tearing out old flower beds and stuff. If you aren't worried about it all being perfectly matching you can build a big garden over time, free. You can even find free dirt, just might not be high quality but if you mix it with free manure it can still work well.

Can you tell I'm a cheapskate? I hate paying retail for anything. I'll buy secondhand every time.

 

if it's grown/harvested correctly, tastes so much better from garden than most stores. at least with the veggies that I grow (tomatoes, peas, jalepenos, mini-cucumbers)

 

How are the gardens going everyone? We've harvested a lot of strawberries, raspberries and cherries just coming in. Snow peas Spinach and some green beans in 3-4 more weeks. Dried some basil and oregano, other herbs coming along. Tomatoes and peppers have plenty of flowers and some babies already. So far one of our best years. Horse poop for the win!

Snails got to my peppers and the green beans early, slimy little bastards. Coffee grounds and copper wire for natural repellents, spraying the plants they are currently after with 50/50 diluted leftover coffee and water. They don't like caffeine. Got the kids trying to catch and relocate a frog or three to the garden, they eat slugs and snails.

 

My wife's green peppers, tomatoes, and squash all seem to be growing pretty well. The squash just had big yellow flowers on them this week, and the actual tomatoes just started appearing on the plant a couple of days ago. Unfortunately, most of the other plants either died or were eaten/torn up by wildlife. Including some that aren't even vegetables.

 

I got an Aerogarden to give me something fun to distract me.

It pretty much worked. Now I am considering a Gardyn when I finally pay off my credit cards.

it is easy to use, plus kind of fun to watch grow.

Plus now I need to use a lot of basil and Thai basil. Turns out basil tea is pretty good.

 

Dry the extra stuff. Just chop it up with a knife, not a food processor. leave it spread on a paper towel for about a week and store in a glass jar. Or if you have a dehydrator you can dry whole leaves

 

That is a good idea. I have just been putting it in the freezer.

 

If you want to get really crazy, chop it kinda fine and mix it with some kosher salt or your favorite rock style sea salt etc. in a big enough jar you can shake it up every couple of days and let it get happy for a month or so, and you've got Basil or dill or hot pepper salt, just load a grinder.