In the Garden Articles

Victory Gardens: Forward, March!

by Joan S. Bolton

Green onions, broccoli and bright calendulas share space in these raised beds.

Is it time to revive our victory gardens?

During World War II, the government rationed dairy products, sugar, coffee, meat, canned goods and gasoline, and called on Americans to grow whatever they could, to support the war effort.

Nearly half the adults not serving overseas responded by planting more than 20 million victory gardens to feed themselves and their communities. Even Eleanor Roosevelt planted a victory garden at the White House. By the end of the war, victory gardens produced more than 40 percent of our country's fruits and vegetables.

Today, there's a new call to create victory gardens.

This time around, these gardens, which are typically composed of annual row crops, are seen as a solution to everything from coping with the failing economy, to a means of keeping food safe, to eliminating the energy and environmental costs of transporting produce hundreds or thousands of miles across the country and world.

At home, you can start a victory garden to feed your own. Or tend a few extra rows to donate to a local food bank, church or charity. Growing vegetables also provides an excuse to get exercise and fresh air, and connect with nature. And food harvested straight from the garden simply tastes better.

What to Plant

Zucchini blossom

Grow what you like to eat. Years ago, my husband and I planted Brussels sprouts because someone told us we should. The trouble was, the plants occupied prime growing space for four months, and then neither of us wanted to eat them.

On the other hand, we grow at least two dozen tomato plants every summer, and eat fresh, can or give away every last one.

But if this is your first garden, pace yourself. Resist offerings such as the "Victory Garden Package" listed by heirloomseeds.com. The package includes a whopping 76 seed packets of everything from beans to kale, kohlrabi, okra, parsnips and turnips.

Even within a particular vegetable, there are what may seem to be a gazillion choices. Cucumbers, for instance, range from traditional slicers to burpless to bumpy to thin-skinned oriental varieties. With tomatoes, there are literally hundreds of different kinds, from red cherries and miniature yellow pears to plums for canning and beefsteaks for eating fresh.

Early Girl Tomato

Summer Sweet Corn

Yellow Snap Beans

Yellow Doll Watermelon

Whatever you choose, make sure you're in the right season. Summertime crops include tomatoes, beans, corn, cucumbers, eggplants, melons, peppers, pumpkins, squash and tomatillos. All need at least six to eight hours of direct sunlight every day. Most can go in the ground beginning in April or May. But wait until June to plant eggplants, melons or peppers, all of which prefer warmer night-time temperatures.

A variety of leaf lettuces, spinach and yellow calendulas share this raised bed.

Winter crops include beets, broccoli, cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, leafy greens, radishes, snap peas and spinach. They require only four to six hours of direct sunlight a day. Start now, and there's time to squeeze in another round of the faster-growing varieties, such as carrots, leafy greens and peas, before the weather warms up.

Also, to grow a reasonable number of different vegetables, plan for at least two beds measuring at least 3 feet by 8 feet. If you don't have room, look for space in a friend or neighbor's yard, or in a community garden. If that won't work, consider setting up a series of large containers.

In selecting the site, make sure that it's within reach of a hose. Hauling buckets of water gets old quickly. Also, try to plant in a place that you walk by frequently. It will be easier to keep an eye on watering, bugs and harvesting.

Prepare the Site

Bell peppers and pink cosmos flourish in this raised bed tucked into a sunny corner. Note the handy faucet nearby.

Prepping the soil is the most important step to a successful vegetable garden. Since your plants will be extracting copious nutrients in short order, they need superb soil that drains well. Your goal should be a fertile, fluffy mix that crumbles between your fingers and has a fresh, earthy scent.

By far, the easiest place to create this rich, loamy mix is in a raised bed, where gravity will help promote quick drainage. If not in a bed, at least mound the soil. Rambling, vining crops, such as watermelons and pumpkins, also grow well on large hills spaced several feet apart.

At its most basic, a raised bed is a rectangular wood frame, about a foot tall, that's placed on the ground and filled with soil. This can be a combination of native soil scavenged from elsewhere in your garden, along with ample quantities of soil conditioner, fine-textured organic material and compost. Don't use bagged potting soil. It's too lightweight and will break down and collapse in no time.

Planting Time

Ceramic peas in a pod prove there's room for whimsy in and amongst the strawberries, edible nasturtiums and vining pole beans in this raised bed.

If this is your first garden, consider growing both seeds and transplants.

Sowing your garden solely from seed will save money. But some vegetables from seed are labor intensive and require more finesse, especially early on. Sowing seed may also add a month or more to the time until harvest.

A general rule of thumb is that big seeds are easy and small seeds may not be.

Tomatoes, for example, can be temperamental. Rather than sowing the tiny seeds directly in the ground, it's best to start them in flats or pony packs, where you can control the conditions. But that requires extra supplies and effort. And despite the most tender of care, they are susceptible to damping off disease, which is a fungus that attacks seedlings. There's nothing more disheartening than seeing your first tomatoes sprout, only to topple and die a few days later.

Other summer crops from smaller seeds include peppers and eggplant. Again, the extra steps necessary to start the seeds in smaller containers, then transplant them into the garden, may prove challenging for beginners.

Zucchini grows fast from seed.

However, some of the most popular summer growers, including beans, corn, melons, pumpkins, squash and zucchini, get off to a great start when sown from seed -- especially when you sow them directly in the garden.

These vegetables send down roots so quickly that if you start them in containers, they may be rootbound before you know it, with their vigorous roots coiling around one another and pushing out the bottom drain holes. If this does happen, either from your own seedlings or from transplants bought at a nursery, gently untangle the roots and spread them out during planting.

# # #

Heirloom Vegetables

Edible nasturtiums weave their way past an apple tree in a pot, strawberries in a raised bed and all types of climbers, including purple pole beans, clambering up a trellis in this very narrow raised bed garden.

Most gardeners agree that heirloom vegetables are older, open-pollinated, high-quality plants.

Some folks insist that an heirloom must be at least 100 to 150 years old. Others say the cut-off date is in the early 1950s, when scientists began hybridizing plants.

Open pollination refers to how plants reproduce. Open-pollinated vegetable varieties cross-pollinate when wind, insects or water carry pollen from one plant to another; they self-pollinate when individual plants bear both male and female flowers.

Hybrids, on the other hand, are hand-pollinated in laboratories to create new plants with very specific characteristics.

The key difference is that the seed produced by hybrids rarely results in offspring similar to the parents, while the offspring of open-pollinated types is more likely to be consistent.

But open pollination is tricky, too. For vegetables that cross-pollinate, such as beets, carrots, corn, squash and pumpkins, you must isolate the different varieties in order for the offspring to remain true to their parents. But for self-pollinators, such as beans, lettuce, peas and tomatoes, you can grow different varieties side by side and reasonably expect that their offspring will remain true.

As for quality: gardeners are most likely to save seeds only from their favorites. So if the same plant has been passed down for more than a century, odds are, it's still a good bet today.

# # #

Seeds of Wisdom

Most summer vegetables don't like water on their leaves. Instead of using a sprinkler, keep the water at ground level by flooding trenches between the rows, or running soaker hose or drip irrigation through the beds.