“Veggie Fever” - Idaho Farm Bureau Quarterly / SPRING 2009

Veggie gardening is the big thing this year because people are trying to save money on produce. Oftentimes, their eyes are bigger than their backs are strong.

To make sure 2009’s “big thing” work for you is to start small. Before you till a quarter-acre tract, stop, smell the—uh—onions and consider what your family will actually eat. If they’ve never eaten okra in their life, there’s no reason to grow it. If your family eats a lot of carrots, by all means plant them. But if they’re banana eaters, it’s not going to save you money to grow a garden.

Growing your own food gives you the satisfaction of doing something that is relatively difficult, has true meaning and tastes really good. When gardeners overplant, they lose a lot of effort, time and money—and wastage in the garden is one of the things that people should try to avoid.

Focus on high value crops like tomatoes and peppers that can really save money at the grocer’s compared with low-value, space-hogging crops like sweet corn. Some top-dollar berries and herbs can even make your landscape look good while making you feel good about the cash they’re leaving in your pocket.

Growing food in modest sized raised beds and even in containers, thus saving precious time in watering, weeding and pest management. For gardeners with few hours to spare, timesaving approaches make the difference between delight and despair. If you want, you can always plant more containers as the season progresses. If you want, you can always plant more containers as the season progresses.

For those who will be tilling their own ground, great produce depends on great soils. If you don’t have them already—and few of us do—it’ll take several years to achieve them with generous, repeated applications of composts, aged manures, leaves, grass clippings and so forth. “Most of our soils here have less than 2% organic matter content. Anything organic helps. While a soil test can be moderately pricey, worth the money to know what your soil needs. After you’ve spent a couple or three years improving the soil, you may not need to add fertilizers”— and the test will begin to pay for itself.

Start plants from seed if you have time. Share spendy seed packets, fertilizers, tools and equipment with fellow gardeners. Stagger your plantings so you don’t harvest two-dozen kitchen-ready lettuces all at once. Save space by inter-planting, like slipping carrots in between lettuces or tucking herbs into your flower borders. Save water—and the weeds it awakens—by using drip rrigation, soaker hoses and mulches. Make your own tomato cages, bean supports and other garden structures: creativity pays. Be vigilant for pest damage: nip it early

while you can still treat pests cheaply or—better still—dispatch them for free underfoot.

If you’ve never gardened before, it’s okay to start with three tomato plants, a

6-foot row of carrots and maybe a zucchini. Insuring your personal success is more important the first year than growing a lot to eat. If you find that you like gardening and were successful at it, then put in more next year. In the meantime supplement your home-grown produce with trips to the local farmers’ market.

Knowing and growing are unquestionably linked when it comes to producing food. An educated gardener is a successful gardener. Fortunately, University

of Idaho Extension offers a cornucopia of gardening education through its

county extension offices, its http://www.extension.uidaho.edu/idahogardens

Web site and its Educational Communications

catalog http://www.info.ag.uidaho.

edu/ that’s ripe with how-to publications.

These publications—most of them downloadable—walk you through the gardening experience with everything from “Planning an Idaho Vegetable Garden” to “Harvesting and Storing Fresh Garden Vegetables.”