Growing your own Garden

We at Vital Veggies are often asked, "How do I grow my own veggies?", "How do I get started?", "Where should I place my garden?", "What time of the year is the best to start?"

These are all fantastic questions and can be quite daunting at the beginning, so we just set out to make it dead simple for you. Taking away many of the pitfalls, and providing everything you need from composts, fertilizers, soil amendments, soil tests and what to do if something goes wrong. We give you a helping hand, boosting you to the status of "expert" gardener, right from the start.

The step by step guide to starting a garden

At this point we are going to assume you want to grow things as near as possible, naturally and hence organically.

Garden site selection:The requirements here are related to convenience, available space, soil contamination if any and the sun. We will deal with each in turn.

• Convenience: Site the garden as near to the house as possible with the things you may want to access most regularly, closest. Plants that require more water or attention you may like to keep close at hand. For example, herbs that you use daily should be right at hand.
• Available Space: Think not only of your requirements today but also, what you may choose to grow into the future. A garden does not have to be all one contiguous piece but it certainly makes it easier for care and maintenance.
• Soil Contamination: This is not an easy one and may not be easily discerned even with a careful visual inspection. Quite obviously, a good sign that all is OK is if the area you are selecting grows something right now, even if it’s a healthy crop of weeds. If there are bare patches be very careful – avoid them. There is nothing worse than discovering your plants won’t grow or worse still, is for your plants to take up heavy metals that you ingest all because of site contamination. Again, if things look healthy in that site already, you are on the right path. If you are unsure, your local EPA may come to your rescue.
• Enough Sun: Yes, you want this, it is good, in fact you need a minimum of six hours a day direct sunlight to be successful growing veggies, some plants, more sun than others. Take account of how the sun changes position through the seasons, ranging from East to West and its angle in the sky. In doing this ensure you avoid obstacles that will block the sun as and when you will need it. Remember its ideal to have more than six hours of sun a day.
• Access to water: Most gardens require a water supply so a location with access to water is a preference.
• Soil Fertility: If you have a choice and you know some soil is more fertile than other pieces, choose the more fertile.
• Access: A location that permits ease of access for bringing in materials, working around the site and harvesting and composting will make your work easier. Nonetheless, if you have a roof top garden and that’s your only choice then there’s not a lot you can change.

All these considerations apply equally to a garden you establish yourself or with one established by the Vital Veggies team. Once you’ve choosen your site, let's get things moving.

Garden Site Preparation: You now need to prepare the ground. How you do this depends on whether you are using a raised bed with your soil, an in-ground garden or one of Vital Veggies selection of raised bed gardens

• Removing weeds/grass: Regardless of which garden bed option, you choose you will need to be sure you remove all weeds. We do not advocate the use of any chemical herbicides as these will be residual in the soil and we are going to work on the presumption you want to do everything in an organic way. Here’s a recipe that’s been tried and tested many times over. It’s based on vinegar, water and a little liquid detergent to get it to stick. Follow the directions and you’ll be in business!
• Bed preparation: If you are getting Vital Veggies to install your raised bed garden and fill it, you don’t need to do anything here. Should there be a concern regarding soil contamination it is best to insert a liner to the raised bed so it is kept sperate from the soil. If it can go straight onto the soil, the team from Vital Veggies will use a crowbar to open the soil up, creating a nice link between the raised bed and the earth below.
• Digging: If you preparing your own garden bed, you need to dig the soil breaking up the clods as you go. We recommend double digging which is a technique of digging to give a deep bed of friable soil. You’ll get the idea by watching this video
• Soil Testing It’s also at this stage, taking a soil test is strongly recommended. The thing about Vital Veggies soil is it’s been amended based on a soil test to ensure it has all major and trace elements suitably available. Without a soil test you really can be short changing your veggies, and even worse, starving them of essential nutrients. Doing this to your veggies means starving yourself of essential nutrients.
• Rock Dust: It’s also at this stage I’d be adding basalt rock dust to the garden and working it into the soil. Your application can range from half a kilo up to 5 kilo per square meter. Applying basalt rock dust is easy to do and quite safe.

If you did get a soil test, hopefully you had the help of someone to interepret it and they have given you recommendations as to what needs to be amended in the soil.

• Compost: Almost surely, you’d be wanting to add compost. Either your own or a commercial product at the rate of 25mm over the entire garden area and working that in. If you had amendments you wanted to do as in adding a source of calcium of some kind, doing that by mixing it with humates and then digging that in will also most definitely be beneficial.
• Humates: can be applied at the rate of 125 to 500 grams per square metre.

What you are looking for is a soft, fluffy, friable soil texture. When it is a little moist, you can squeeze a handful and it will stay clumped together.

With the Vital Veggies soil, all the above has been done for you and tested in a soil lab to be sure you’ve got the best we can offer you.

Now, you should be ready for planting, which is the next most enjoyable part of gardening after the eating of veggies.

Planting your veggies: Paying attention to the small details leads to success in gardening, no where more so than in planting. We prefer your plantings come from Vital Veggies because all our seedlings are planted and raised with great attention to detail; with love and care. You can choose whether it’s yourself that does the planting or Vital Veggies – it’s your choice.

• Planting Pattern: We recommend all plantings be done in lines, with successive lines being offset by half the inter-planting distance. Looking at this from the air it becomes a hexagonal planting pattern. You’ll get more veggies into a space this way. Also, we always supply plants, not seeds. This gives you a six or eight week advantage over planting seeds and allows you to grow at least an extra crop a year as a result.
• Companion planting: We want the best nature can give us so we companion plant all our gardens. What to plant with what is beyond the scope of what we can provide here. All organic gardening books discuss companion planting and there are many references on the web.
• Transplanting preparation: With all plants, we immerse the seedlings in a natural transplanting solution just to give them a small boost as they are planted. Then, in the base of each hole, we place around a tablespoon of basalt rock dust. We always use oversized pots but, should there be a root ball that is root bound then wave the entire root ball in a humic acid solution to free up, open our the bound up roots.
• Watering: We recommend all transplanted seedlings be watered and special attention be paid to ensure wilting and transplant shock is kept to a minimum.

Now you have your garden started, just keep an eye on it. Water it and depending on the plants, you can be harvesting veggies in 4 to 6 weeks, other things, may be longer. We suggest you check out our harvest guide.

One great virtue in gardening is patience. Most plants at first appear to sit still when transplanted. Remember that plants grow both upward and downward and not all at the same time.  Happy gardening!

Oh, and here’s a summary of the tasks we manage as we grow veggies.

All clients of Vital Veggies have complete freedom to choose what they do and what Vital Veggies has to do. And you can change that at any time simply by telling us.

At Vital Veggies, we have everything covered when it comes to growing Vital Veggies.