[LaRemnant]

Okay, so I bought some heirloom seeds from Survivalist Seeds! So... as far as JUST starting, could someone give me a few pointers, as far as first plotting the layout? I know some food can be grown in the shade, like beans I think, potatoes, and I believe most stuff that grows underground, am I correct?

What is a good way to enrich the soil, other than buying fertilizers? Is that the only way, or are there better alternatives, like making a compost pile (or barrel?) after I started breaking the ground? Is there a time sensitive system to it all?

Are there some foods that are better grown with a particular other? Do some vegatables/fruits go bad if you grow them next to each other? I am SEVERELY just starting out, so any clues would be much appreciated!!

ThanX

Noble.

PS

I am SERIOUSLY thinking about buying another capsule soon, considering there are seed banks popping up around the world sponsored by investment sharks like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, so something strange is a'brewin'...

[Screaming Eagle]

Noble,
I don't know where you live which makes suggestions just ballpark suggestions. YMMV according to your specific situation and location and whether or not you intend to remain there for the duration (as far as you know).
There are many soil amendments available. It sorta depends on how large the garden is going to be, what kind of soil you have now (unworked) and what you intend to grow (depending on your growing season etc). I may be able to make some more specific suggestions based on all of that.
For now, get some soil samples done so you know what the makeup of the soil is. Your state Ag service will probably do the testing (you collect the samples in their bags) and give you a report that should contain suggestions for amendments. You can plan on compost being your best overall amendment in terms of loosening the soil (again depending on where you live) and providing natural nutrients. If it's a hilly area or slopes, think about terraces that will slow down the water runoff.
Go ahead and start a compost pile with leaves, grass, kitchen waste (no animal fat, bones etc), branches and limbs, ashes from the fire place (again according to your soil test) etc. Plan for a way to water it either by pond or well (if possible). Depending on how big you want to make it (believe me it can get to be work and you'll need more than you think for sustaining a family), you can think about how to break the ground up with a plow or tiller and incorporating compost in somehow. You can 'till' the leaves etc in as you're turning the soil over which is the beginning of building it up.
Most vegetables like full sun. If you're down south, some broken filtered light is good in the extremely hot afternoons but at least 8 hours of full sun is recommended for healthy plants.
Wish I could help more but I just don't know the details of your particular situation. Start with the soil samples. And I'd leave the heirlooms sealed for now if you can. Go ahead and use commercially available heirloom varieties as long as they're available (straight 8 cucumbers for example). Taters and carrots grow below ground. Planting seasons for various vegetables are according to your 'zone' for plant hardiness (which is important to know). Also, check with your local ag folks for suggestions about what other people have found productive through experience in your area. Some vegetable varieties do much better in certain conditions.

[Unswydd]

What screamineagle said is just what I would have told you. Compost, Compost, Compost!!!!! Find a spot that is out of the way but gets plenty of heat from the sun and keep it turned with every adding of scraps. Put a little fence around it and cover it with an old tarp. As you add make a little hole in the middle, dump your scraps in and cover it. It needs to be moist, not wet but excess water hopefully will run off if you do get it too wet. There is a wealth of information at your local extension office and you can find sites that give you information on Companion Gardening. That will tell you what plants like to be near other plants and what plants will help keep certain bugs away.
I'm real proud of you for doing this. This is a wonderful way to make your own way!!!

[ColcordMama]

Oh dear. You must feel overwhelmed by now, buddy. Here, lemme help ya.

Yes, you can take a soil sample to your extension office, OR you can do it yourself, and here's how. Get a washed-out mayo jar and put soil and water in it. One third soil, two thirds water. Don't use just the topsoil, dig down five or six inches to get the real stuff where your roots will be. Now put the lid on and shake that jar like crazy, then let it sit undisturbed for 24 hours. Look at the layers that have formed in the jar. The bottom layer will be the heaviest one, the sand. The middle layer will be silt. The top layer will be clay. The ideal garden soil, called loam, consists of about 40% silt and 20% clay. Sandy soils are loose and porous, they'll absorb water quickly but not hold it for long. They are best for root vegetables such as carrots, beets, parsnips, etc. Clay soils absorb water slowly and hold it for a long time. They also hang onto nutrients so the plants can use them, a good quality over time. To lighten a soil heavy in clay, dig in sand and peat moss or compost (rotted organic matter).

Next, go to Lowe's or Home Depot and get a soil test kit from the garden department. It should cost you less than $10. You will use it to determine the pH (potential of hydrogen), whether your soil is acid, alkaline or balanced. It's easy to do and only takes a few minutes. Just follow the directions right on the package. The ideal soil for veggie gardening will fall between 6.0 and 7.0 on the test strip.

Once you know the makeup of the soil and its pH, go to a good gardening center and ask someone who should know (not the pimply-faced teenager at the register) what amendments you need to dig in right now so you have a good garden soil next spring. This is the ideal time to amend the soil, now so bacteria have plenty of time to work and get the soil ready. Ideally, you'll be adding organic matter and digging it in well with a rented rototiller. Make sure you ask for organic fertilizers if at all possible because that's the best and in the long run the cheapest way to do it. For example, bone meal, manure, wood ashes, and dried seaweed are all great in a garden. I once tilled in a whole pickup load of free sawdust into my 25' x 55' garden, along with 2 plastic garbage cans of free riverbed sand. Wow, that garden was fantastic! Anyway, ask for specific advice about which amendments you're going to need.

Start a compost heap RIGHT NOW, TODAY. Pick an out of the way sunny spot in your yard and start dumping organic waste there in a heap. NO meats, bones, fats or other animal-attracting garbage. Plenty of coffee grounds, eggshells, peelings, trimmings, grass clippings, sawdust, straw, leaves (dried or fresh), steer manure (about $4 a bag from Lowe's) for the nitrogen. Use a container in your kitchen to collect this stuff and dump it on often to prevent fruit flies from gathering in your kitchen. Think green-brown-green-brown layers on your compost heap. Water it often, and every so often mix it up like a salad, using a pitchfork or something similar. You want it to stay damp and warm so it can rot fast, so cover it with a tarp if you have to. The compost will decompose into a rich brown crumbly matter that is absolutely ideal to dig into your garden soil. If you have one of those fancy compost tumblers you can begin producing compost in a week, but holy cow, those things are expensive!

As for which veggies go well with and which veggies hate other veggies, I'll tell you what I know. Cabbage and dill plants thrive next to each other. Marigolds are wonderful all through the garden because they repel certain pests that can ruin your crop. Google the term 'companion planting' to learn much, much more. Now, when you get ready to plan your garden, there are some things you should know. Corn should always be planted in a block of at least four rows, so it can pollinate. Not long skinny rows, or else the pollen just blows away onto other plants. Always plant corn where it won't shade the rest of your garden from the afternoon sun. MOST veggie plants need at least 3/4 of the day in sun. The only plants that do okay in mostly-shady areas are leafy plants such as spinach, chard, collards and herbs. Even they do better in full sun.

You've already bought seeds so there's not much point in telling you what to grow, but lemme give you some suggestions from my years of experience. Kentucky Blue green beans are incredible. You can't save the seeds to plant next season because they're a hybrid, but this plant pumps out delicious pods like nobody's business. Pinto beans from that bag in your pantry also are wonderful in the garden. They produce over the whole season on waist-high bushes. They are a non-hybrid half runner type bean that when the pods are green and tender taste like your grandma's green beans, especially when boiled with a piece of bacon. Let your pods mature, dry them and shell them out to make more beans just like the ones in the bag. If you have a tall fence or can put up something 10' tall to use as a trellis, plant Emperor (AKA Scarlet Runner) beans and you'll have gorgeous red flowers that turn into foot long green beans with delicious flavor. Let them mature and dry and shell them out and you can boil the big dark maroon-with-black-splashes beans like pinto beans. These are pole beans, climbers, that can get up to 10 feet tall, a real show stopper in the garden. One of my personal favorite veggies to plant is Swiss chard, especially Bright Lights or Fordhook. Swiss chard is absolutely delicious and better than spinach in performance and nutrients. If your climate is mild like mine here near Phoenix, this is a perennial plant. It just keeps going from year to year. You carefully harvest individual leaves and the plant just pumps out more of them. The big leaves are deep green, and with Bright Lights, the midribs and stems of the leaves are in bright beautiful colors such as orange, yellow, red and pink. You can cook those fleshy midribs and stems like asparagus, and the green leaves are delicious boiled or steamed and served with a vinaigrette or butter. Very mild and tasty.

Now, about tomatoes. You need to know that tomatoes are either determinate or indeterminate. That means that determinate tomatoes produce one big crop, then that's it. If you want to can tomatoes and do it all at once, plant determinates. If you want tomatoes all summer long, then you want indeterminate. Determinate tomatoes usually grow up in a big bush, while indeterminate keep growing and growing and growing and need a tomato cage or trellis for support. Whichever you choose, get a variety that has as much resistance to disease as possible, one that has a lot of letters like V, VF, VVFNT, associated with it. If you want to save the seeds to plant next year, get a non-hybrid variety such as one of the heirlooms like Mr Stripey (a distinct pumpkin-like flavor), Mortgage Lifter, Abraham Lincoln, Russian Black, etc etc. Generally, hybrids with plenty of disease resistance will produce better than a touchy heirloom that might need lots of attention if you're a newbie to gardening.

Zucchini. Get it. Plant it. Enjoy it. Plan on freezing the excess, because there will be excess. I was giving my excess zukes to the neighbors and that worked really well until they wised up and started locking their cars at night.

Potatoes. You really want to plant potatoes? You sure? Okay then. Do some research on planting spuds in a stack of old tires or in a garbage can. That's the easiest way, trust me. Even if you do manage to plant and nurture potatoes in a garden, harvesting them could be a nightmare, sort of like an Easter egg hunt but underground.

One final word: plant watermelons. As long as they have full sun, plenty of water and lots of room to ramble, you'll be rewarded with lots of delicious melons from late June on. Get whatever little seedlings your Lowe's or Home Depot is selling next spring for the best results for your area.

Hope this helps. Ask me later if you have any questions. My fingers are tired now.

[Bones]

Ok, so there is already a lot of info here and someone may have already said it but a really good quick and free way to fertilize your soil in to go to a local horse stable and shovel up some horse manure. After it is shoveled out of the stalls it usually goes in a pile somewhere on the property and it is already mixed with sawdust from the stable. Usually the folks that own the stable are happy to part with as much as you're willing to take. Just mix it in with the soil when you're tilling up the soil for planting. We did it for years and had an awesome organic garden.

[ColcordMama]

Yes, horse manure would be excellent in your garden, but if you're going to use it do it right away, because horse manure needs to be aged or composted at least 3 months before used in a garden. Cow manure can be used fresh, doesn't need to be aged, and any dairy would be glad to let you have as much as you can haul away.

[Cajunlady]

While at the Ag Center they offer a large variety of brochures pertaining to your state and one of my favorites is a Vegetable Planting Guide which is a yearly planting guide telling specifically the best times of the year for planting, depth and spacing of seeds and much more.

Some other brochures present information about raising chickens, ducks, etc. and usually have plans for housing.

Others on fruit varieties and planting. Check it out and this would be an ultimate resource center for you. Hope this helps.

[Bones]

Originally Posted by ColcordMama

Yes, horse manure would be excellent in your garden, but if you're going to use it do it right away, because horse manure needs to be aged or composted at least 3 months before used in a garden. Cow manure can be used fresh, doesn't need to be aged, and any dairy would be glad to let you have as much as you can haul away.

You're right but if you get it from the stable you can usually pick from the older section of the pile that has started to compost. very good point though, I forgot to mention

[cowgirlup]

I don't have much to add. Just do the research online as to what grows best in your area. It's discouraging when you have high hopes for a favortie vegetable only to find you don't have the right climate, light or soil. Although soil can be improved.

Have fun!!!

[Omega]

Since we're in Florida, we have a pretty hot and sunny climate that will literally roast many crops so its best to research the varieties you're looking to plant.

One thing you might want to try is making your own self-watering planters rather than planting directly in the ground. There are many ways to do this and there is no need to spend money on the Earthbox or others at the store. I can show you how to make these with plastic bottles, jugs, buckets and other containers. When setup correctly, these self-watering containers can be a very efficient way to grow many food crops. It also gives you the ability to move the plants if you need to adjust for sunlight or unexpected weather conditions.