How can I start a vegetable garden in the next couple of weeks with no experience?
Posted by pano | Under Herb Garden Wednesday Sep 1, 2010For my senior project at school, I’m thinking of learning how to plant vegetables, and maybe flowers. Can I start a garden this September? I live in Sacramento, California. What sort of vegetables and herbs can I grow? I want to grow the vegetables on the western side of my house, but if that is a bad idea, I may be able to work around to the Eastern side.
Also, besides keeping the food for my family, is there a place I can donate the vegetables to, or some other sort of cause I can put them toward?
I’m thinking of relating this project to being green and the economy being crappy, like a victory garden.
If any of you have ideas of how to improve on this project, I’d love some opinions.
Great idea!! Fall is my favorite time to grow veggies because the bugs are much less active and prevalent. The first thing you have to determine is what to plant. Much of that decision is dependent upon when you plant it and what you plant. Bear with me on this, it will all make sense in the next paragraph. There are vegetables that prefer warm weather when they mature (most herbs, squash, peppers, beans, melons, corn, eggplant), and ones that prefer cool weather when they mature (broccoli, cabbage, brussels sprouts, peas, radishes). Suppose you plant peppers in North Dakota right now– Well, the plant will be frozen before the 60-90 days or so it will take the seedling to grow, produce flowers, and mature the peppers. Broccoli is a different story. A mature broccoli plant can survive temps in the mid 20s. The best quality heads are produced when the temperatures are between 40-75.
So, what you have to do is work backwards: First, pick out the veggies you want to grow in September in Sacramento. Do not plant the warm weather ones next month– they won’t grow very well in Sacramento now. For those, wait until Spring so they can mature in the Spring-Summer. Secondly, find out how many days it takes for those veggies to mature from seed (info available on the internet). If you want them to mature on say, November 15th and it takes 60 days to mature, you need to plant it around mid September.
Good luck!