Did you all check out Gardening for Beginners Part I? If not, you can CLICK HERE to catch up. In the first post I covered: basic terminology and information you should consider/know before starting a garden, how to map out your garden, how to prep your garden, and what tools and accessories are essential for gardening.
This post covers: starting seeds indoors, planting, tending your garden, how to protect your garden from animals and pests, when to harvest, and how to dry out herbs. I also included a couple pickling recipes at the bottom of this post.
Now that you are familiar with the basics of starting a garden, let’s dive right into starting seeds, indoors.
1: Starting seeds
It is is important to know when your area normally has its last frost. The last frost will dictate when you should start seeds indoors. CLICK HERE to find out when the last frost is expected in your area.
Your seed packets will tell you if it is recommended to start seeds indoors vs. directly sowing into the soil. Follow those directions! You should also reference your hardiness zone. wrote all about hardiness zones and how to find your zone in part I of this series HERE.
Note, you’ll start the seeds indoors well before you sow. Also, it is important that you space the plants as outlined on the seed packets. If the seeds are planted too close together, it could prevent the plants from growing as expected.
Tip: If the seed packets do not provide the number of seeds to plant, I usually plant 3-6 seeds together.
When starting seeds indoors, use biodegradable pots or cardboard egg cartons to start your seeds indoors. If using egg cartons make sure to poke holes in the bottom to allow proper water drainage.
I found THIS ARTICLE on starting seeds in an egg carton to be helpful.
Put the biodegradable pots on a sunny window sill for the seeds to germinate. For those wondering what germinate means, it is defined by Merriam-Webster as: to begin to grow or sprout.
Once you have all your indoor seeds planted, use a water bottle to mist the top of the soil every day until it is time to transplant to the garden. I recommend a water bottle instead of adding water directly from a faucet because the water pressure could cause the seeds to drowned and prevent the plants from germinating properly.
2: Planting
When it is time to transplant your indoor seeds to the garden make sure you space them correctly. Read the seed packets to know when you should transplant.
I’ve read articles where people have used muffin tins to make impressions in the soil. I’ve never done that, but I think it’s a great idea!
If you are using biodegradable pots or cardboard egg cartons to start the indoor seeds, you can plant the entire container when they are ready to transplant. The container will breakdown in the soil. I recommend planting the entire pot to prevent the chance of disturbing the seedlings.
When planting I gently glide my finger down the soil to create a small trench. I place 3-6 seeds following the proper spacing on the packet. Then lightly cover the seeds. You don’t want to plant them too deep. It can cause the seeds to not germinate properly. Once the seeds are covered, water the rows.
3: Tending the garden
Now that you have the vegetables/fruit/herbs planted you will need to water consistently. The goal is to keep the soil moist.
If you are worried about over/under watering, invest in a moisture meter. They are inexpensive and will save you the hassle of guessing. I especially recommend the moisture meter if you are new to gardening. I found THIS ONE on Amazon and it has gotten really good reviews.
Tip: water your garden in the evening.
Watering during the daytime, especially with humidity, can cause excess moisture, creating fungal diseases such as powdery mildew. This is a common disease for cucumbers. I know this because my cucumber plants were infected with powdery mildew last summer. The cause was a mixture of watering during the day and overwatering. If you want to grow cucumbers and you are worried about fungal diseases, buy silver slicer cucumber seeds. Silver slicer cucumbers are resistant to powdery mildew.
Tip: If leaves on the plants start to turn yellow that is a sign that they are getting too much water. If this happens, skip watering for a couple of days.
For vine plants such as cucumbers or tomatoes, use a trellis to keep the leaves off the soil. Allowing the leaves to lay in the soil is another factor as to why my cucumbers were infected. You want to water the roots not the entire plant.
I used 5 – 1×2” to build a simple trellis for our cucumbers and tomato plants last Spring. See picture below.
This year I plan to make a more sophisticated one by incorporating twine. I am still working on it, so I don’t have a photo.
I did find THIS trellis tutorial on Pinterest and think it is well written and easy to follow. You can also purchase them at your local hardware store. The smaller ones are fairly inexpensive. I paid less than $10 for THIS ONE from Lowes.
4: Protect your investment
I lost my entire crop of strawberries last Spring to rabbits. By the time I figured out what was happening and built a pen to protect them, only three strawberries made it to our kitchen.
If you are doing a raised bed, I recommend building raised bed covers to prevent rodents or pets from turning your garden into a buffet. I found THIS tutorial on Pinterest if you need an idea.
The garden bed covers protects from animals, but not from the bad bugs. I say bad bugs, because there are good bugs too. I talk more about the good bugs below.
Planting marigolds in and around your garden is a great way to protect it from pests and attract bees and butterflies. I found THIS article to be very informative on how and where to plant marigolds. Marigolds are especially helpful with slugs, aphids, and nematodes. Nematodes are attracted to tomato plants and will devour your harvest. See THIS post for more information on the benefits of marigolds.
Ladybugs are what I consider the good bugs. They are helpful in keeping the bad bugs away. If your garden doesn’t attract them naturally, you can buy ladybugs in containers. Ove seen them at my local nursery. If buying them in a container, you will want to put them in your garden at night. Ladybugs don’t fly at night, so the dark will give them time to make a home in your garden. That is exactly what you want them to do to so they can protect your vegetables.
If you want to go the organic chemical route to protect your plants, I recommend Neem Oil. There are so many organic pesticide options available. It might be a little overwhelming. I recommend reading reviews to find what you think will work best for you. If you are willing to use a non-organic chemical I recommend BONIDE Garden Dust or Sevin Ready-To-Use Bug Killer. Both come in a spray option. I like the garden dust best because I can actually see what it covers.
If you plant basil or have Boston ferns around your garden, expect to encounter a Japanese Beetle problem. They will devour a variety of plants. There are Japanese Beetle traps that you can buy, but after reading several articles, I’ve heard the traps only attract more to your garden. So I took an organic route by picking them off my plants one by one and placing in a bucket filled with water. Doing this will drowned the Japanese Beetles and not inadvertently attract more if going the trap route. It was tedious, but it worked!
Tip:I have read that Neem Oil works particularly well for Japanese Beetles.
I highly recommend reading up on types of garden pests based on the plants you choose to grow in your garden. I can only speak to the pests I have encountered with the vegetables I’ve grown. I read THIS article and it was very helpful.
5: When to harvest
When to harvest can be obvious for some plants, but not for all. Cucumbers, jalapeños, kale, and tomatoes are among the plants that you‘ll know they’re ready by simply looking at them. But for plants like carrots or radishes you have to get your hands dirty, literally. If you can see the tops poking out of the soil then chances are they are ready. But sometimes you have to dig to see. When checking our carrots last year, I pushed the soil back and determined if they were ready based on the width of the tops. If they weren’t ready, I pushed the soil back and checked a couple weeks later.
K was eager to help harvest the vegetables and did such a great job!
Below is a small portion of our haul last Summer.
6: Preserving your harvest
Herbs
First I’ll talk about how to preserve herbs. If you can use them fresh, I recommend that option. But if you are like me and end up with too much you can easily dry out herbs to use them for months or even years.
How to dry them out depends on the type of herbs and since there is already so much information out there I didn’t want to recreate the wheel. THIS ARTICLE is a good reference on how to dry herbs out.
For rosemary and thyme I simply divide them into workable bunches, wrap the stemmed ends with twine, and hang upside down near a window that gets ample sunlight. This can take a few days or even weeks, but the upside is that your entire house will smell heavenly.
See picture below on how I prep rosemary and thyme to dry them out. Instead of a bow (like pictured below) make sure you leave an additional 4-6 inches of twine at the end to be able to hang them.
Once them are dried out, I use my index finger and thumb (starting at the top) and glide down.
Vegetables
If you plan to plant cucumbers and need a good pickled cucumber recipe, try my pickled cucumbers & onions recipe HERE. It’s actually my moms recipe. She made pickled cucumbers and onions every summer using cucumbers from her garden. Just typing this out makes my mouth water.
For pickled radishes try THIS RECIPE. I pickled our radishes last year because we had SO MANY and gave them to our grandparents. They loved them!
There are seriously so many pickling recipes out there. I recommend searching Pinterest to find recipes that fit your needs. I did find THIS ARTICLE that has 27 different pickling recipes if you need ideas.
And that’s a wrap! I truly hope you found this post educational and feel inspired to start your gardening journey.
Gardening is a trial and error process, so don’t be discouraged if you have some failures. Failures will happen! Use those failures as lessons learned and be happy with what your garden did produce. If you are able to produce any vegetables from your garden, consider that an accomplishment and be proud of all your hard work.
Until next time friends. Xo
