In response to a question on future topics, more than one commenter did say they were interested in some gardening details. Mr. Corcoran does include a lot of material on this topic, and I’ll be skimming excerpts from several different segments. As always, I strongly recommend picking up both volumes of this work – it’s a really handy quick reference guide and organized very well.
Starting on page 454 of Vol 1
Raising Plants: Garden
It’s possible to have both crops on a farm and a garden. The distinction being one of scale (mostly) and of intention (somewhat): one might have 5 acres of corn for the market (or for the pigs) and 200 square feet of tomatoes, cucumbers, okra, and zucchini for the kitchen.
A garden is really just a field of crops in miniature, but that size difference means that techniques which would be impractical at an acre (or 10 acres, or 10,000 acres) in scale can be used.
Page 456
Raising Plants: Garden: Locating and Building Out the Garden
You want to locate your garden:
- Where there is adequate space
- Where there is adequate sun
- Where there is adequate drainage (pg 1061)
- Where you can get water if you need it (close to a faucet or yard hydrant (pg 163))
- Where you can easily store and retrieve tools (close to a garden shed (pg 185))
- Where you can visit the garden daily
- There is good soil (pg 642)
Once you know where your garden will go, you want to design it:
- Decide the total size
- Decide if you’ll be using a high tunnel
- Decide if you’ll be using raised beds, and determine the number and size of them if so
- Plan footpaths between the raised beds
- Decide if you want to fence it in, and in what manner
Raising Plants: Garden: Locating and Building Out the Garden: Location
As with siting an orchard, siting a garden involves picking a location where:
- You have enough room
- You can get to it easily to do maintenance. Out of sight, out of mind.
- You can – if you live in a dry clime – run water to it
- There is adequate light
- There is access for a riding mower to haul harvests out
- There is either already a garden shed, or room for a garden shed, so that you can store tools and fertilizer nearby
Our garden is 30’ from the driveway, 150’ from the house, about the same from the barn, and has its own water supply (a yard hydrant that draws from an underground PEX water line that runs to the house). It’s impossible not to see the garden every time one looks out a window, or steps outside.
Raising Plants: Garden: Locating and Building Out the Garden: Number of Plants
When you’re looking for a location, you need to know how big a garden you want.
There is a maximum size for a garden: how much you and your family can eat.
You may want to have a smaller garden than this, because of cost, time, lack of water, or other constraints.
Let’s look at the maximum garden size first.
I’ve found several lists purporting to show how many plants of each type should be planted per person. One example is this one:
Asparagus: 5-10 plants; Beans: 10-15 plants, Beets: 10-25 plants, Bok Choy: 1-3 plants, Broccoli: 3-5 plants, Brussels Sprouts: 2-5 plants, Cabbage: 3-5 plants, Carrots: 10-25 plants, Cauliflower: 2-5 plants, Celery: 2-8 plants, Corn: 10-20 plants, Cucumber: 1-2 plants, Eggplant: 1-3 plants, Kale: 2-7 plants, Kohlrabi: 3-5 plants, Leafy Greens: 2-7 plants, Leeks: 5-15 plants, Lettuce, Leaf: 5-8 plants, Melon: 1-3 plants, Onion: 10-25 plants, Peas: 15-20 plants, Peppers, Bell: 3-5 plants, Peppers, Chili: 1-3 plants, Potato: 5-10 plants, Radishes: 10-25 plants, Squash:, Hard: 1-2 plants, Squash, Summer: 1-3 plants, Tomatoes: 1-4 plants, Zucchini: 1-3 plants
From: Family Vegetable Garden – What Size Garden Will Feed A Family | Gardening Know How
This seems, to me, like both too many different varieties, and too many plants total. What’s the right number of varieties, and the right number of plants? We can figure that out, right?
I suggest that the answer is no; we can’t actually.
While, in general, I’m insanely focused on capturing all aspects of some future project, reducing it to numbers, deriving materials lists, etc, etc, etc, when it comes to building a garden from scratch, this process somehow that breaks down. I’m not really sure how to approach a list like this. It feels a bit like constructing a soviet five year plan – how many melons might I want next summer?
What I suggest is a better plan is to make some sort of crude guess as to your consumption of a few vegetables, plan your first year garden around that, and then with the knowledge that comes from that (“yes, I love cooking with my own onions”, “yes, I love making pickles from cucumbers”, “no, as it turns out I can’t REMOTELY eat that many carrots”), revise your plan for year 2. Revise again for year 3, etc, and using the gardening analog to the mathematical technique of the method of successive approximations, dial in the correct garden size.
One approach to building the first year’s list is to look at how many vegetables you buy while shopping. If a typical weekly shopping trip has:
- 5 carrots
- 1 8oz box lettuce
- 1 2lb bag of onions
- 1 bunch of 5 tomatoes (1.5 lbs)
One can say that over a 10 week harvest season one will want
- 50 carrots
- 5lbs lettuce
- 20lbs onions
- 50 tomatoes (15lbs)
And then figure out how many plants one wants
- 50 carrot plants
- 25 lettuce plants
- 8 tomato plants
Raising Plants: Garden: Locating and Building Out the Garden: Size of Beds and Paths
Once you have the list of plants you want to grow, you can use that to figure out how many square feet of planting beds are needed. (Most seed catalogs will talk about the ideal spacing of various varieties).
Using our examples above, we get
- 4 square feet of carrots
- 12 square feet of lettuce
- 8 square feet of tomato
Which is a total of 24 square feet of garden bed.
Beds need walking paths around them. You can either start sketching a layout of beds and plants, or you can just do a rough calculation.
I suggest that you allocate a minimum of 1.5 square feet of path for each square foot of bed, and as much as 3 square feet. If we use 2 square feet of path per square foot of planting bed, we now have a garden of approximately 75 square feet.
There is a lot more on the topic of gardening, and if there are any further specific requests on this or other topics, let me know. Mr. Corcoran and his wife have done a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to trial and error and these books definitely reflect the effort and man hours.
Be sure you check out Mr. Corcoran’s other work too – his SF is extremely good.
I like it. Do the raised beds help with vermin? How do you keep out the rabbits and rats?
You forgot to list seconders among the vermin.
Firsters stick their heads up and get swatted down, as is tradition,
What are you gonna do when Bro’mania Firsts wild all over you, yusef?
Jizz all over you like when you were in band camp.
I live in the city in an apartment, I have several bug out bags and lots of ammo. My garden is herbs and tomatoes, much more than this I cannot expect.
The garden rocks!
Same. My garden is the nearby supermarket.
Here is the wife’s garden
https://ibb.co/qCKdgZF
very nice.
Did not know he was a Prometheus winner. May check out.
I am travelling to NYC and back tomorrow all day and taking my Kindle with me. Long story short, I don’t have the dead time I used to when I lived in NYC (and my subway commute was over an hour each way) so I have basically read nothing this year. I am *still* in the middle of The Expanse series that I’ve been reading for years.
But with 10 hours on the bus tomorrow I might make some progress.
Mr. Fish. I do like a great garden. I have a brown thumb, so I don’t have a garden. Also no one wants to give me a ride when I’m hitching a ride.
I’m lucky to have family that are much more into gardening than I am. So I get all of the benefits with none of the work.
That second picture is fake. No way all that is ripe at the same time. 🙂
We cut our garden in half this year. Just the two of us now, so we don’t eat as much and it was too much work. I don’t know if you could accurately plan how much to plant, as you said you should adjust each year. To make it more complicated, some varieties do better in different years. This year the squash beetles got 2 of my zucchini plants, but I’m spraying Sevin on the last one and it’s huge.
Our soil is really hard, so any tubers are small. When we tried carrots they were tiny and twisted together in knots.
TOK, the wife has been doing potato’s in bags the last couple years, so much easier to get the right soil you want, and to harvest.
I’ll have to look into that. We had some good sweet potatoes one year, but some voles or other critters chewed through them.
I do finally have enough topsoil in my tiny backyard for root vegetables. I need a solid irrigation system just for the food crops. I plan on building something out by next year.
I’m picking cukes but no tomatoes. Kohlrabi/broccoli and radishes, including Daikon, are over. Watermelons and squash have a long time left to grow, corn is just beginning to tassel.
Odd footnote: Apple trees looked like some kind of blight hit them, I sprayed malathion, one weak tree died, the only tree that had a few apples started to look very bad, I trimmed off the dead/dying branches. Really pruned it back. It has a few apples, still but to my surprise this morning it has started to regenerate and the new growth is going to have blossoms! In August with fruit on the tree. All the other trees seem to have recovered, more or less.
Most important thing with a garden is to plant what you really like. My wife likes cukes (a lot), I like tomatoes and corn. We eat everything else. My garden is sandy but I have a well. The garden covered with weeds now but the plants have outgrown the weeds so they are OK. I start my peppers, cabbage and tomatoes inside, about mid April, plant them last week of May is the weather is good.
We’ve had a lot of rain this year, lots of wildflowers. Very optimistic about the honey crop this year.
Thanks LCDR, I want to be out everyday but it’s getting tougher and tougher to get much done. It’s good therapy as well.
My BIL has been growing / breeding heirloom potato varieties in an attempt to make them more resilient and nutritious. He also has over 10 varieties of chilies growing. All organic and free for my picking.
My 1,100 square foot garden is shit this year, despite the good spring rains.
The birds and the rabbits have been hell on all the little plants.
We will have have a good harvest of garlic and potatoes, though.
I have trapped 5 pocket gophers, they just make the mounds and cause some damage. They were all yearlings I think, good that they are gone.
Eamil, the local retarded guy (can you say that anymore?), made his drinking money trapping gophers. The state used to pay 50 cents for every pair of gopher feet.
I got a $6 bounty on a fox, 1955, paid by the local game warden. He trimmed the tops off the ears, gave the fox back to me. Gophers back in those days were .15 and had to bring in the 2 front feet. Township paid the bounty. I had a couple dozen one year. Township treasurer kept the feet so they couldn’t be reused by another kid.
My first year with a garden in the south. Got a late start this spring and learned the hard way that some stuff I grew up north hates the heat. None of root vegetables ever sprouted and the peas eventually wilted.
Watermelon, pumpkins, tomatillos, and black-eyed peas seem to love the heat.
Oh yeah, had to put up a fence to keep the deer out.
I figure something like this might be effective for most critters.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ElcviGYMb3U
Yeah, impossible to have a garden here without a fence. The deer will destroy what they don’t eat. I had a 6′ chain link installed about 5 years ago, I should have done it years earlier. I fooled around with posts and chicken wire for many years. Posts rotted, deer would get in and tear the fence down trying to get out.
The turkeys come through on occasion but don’t bother the garden. I had a couple plastic owls out last year but crows don’t seem to be a problem.
My FIL is great at growing things. I helped him set up his garden this year. He uses those flat irrigation hoses attached to a timer. For potted plants he has a drip system also connected to a timer. My garden is too big and too far from the house for something like that.
I got a small trailer of chicken manure from my neighbor. I used it in the hills of melons, squash and cukes. That stuff is like magic. The vine crops really grow. Other stuff I use 10-10-10.
“13-13-13”
An old Kansas colleague’s solution to everything.
We’ve had a terrible rodent problem in our garden this year. Rats, mice and voles. They got much of our early vegetables. There were hundreds of them flattened on the road on one section of my afternoon ride. Must be global climate change warming.
It is climate change. Repent!
My chief pest are wild chickens. A neighbor trapped all the roosters, but the damn hens are not meeting their maker fast enough to make me happy.
I get tomatoes 9-10 months a year. Right now the main crops are beans, watermelons, zukes, Japanese cukes, and snow peas. When it cools off, I’ll put the broccoli, lettuce, and potatoes in. Beans and snow peas are year round here
Speaking of growing, one poll now has Harris with a 4 point lead in Penna. Managed to hold my tongue at lunch today when I overheard a man call Vance a “moron” and his npr lady companion gushing about what an excellent president Harris will be.
What sort of brain damage do these people have?
TDS.
All I can say when she “wins” is that the country will get what it deserves.
This would be lovely if I actually liked vegetables. My crops would probably be spuds, beets, and green beans.
Robocop enjoys Titty Tuesday.
https://archive.is/kdPsp/5988bfdfe41207a545b0a4b4825f2e8e23fce084.jpg
https://archive.is/bg5d9
This is still (at this point), a long term project. You don’t need to actually rely on your garden for much of your food supply. So I think your “start small, and learn from there” approach is very wise. Evolve the garden to fit your needs and capabilities (including what your land wants to grow).
It may turn out that you can grow a ridiculous number of peppers in the garden you want to manage, just because of the soil, exposure, etc. Now you’ve got trade goods, for your neighbor who has just the right place to grow, say, tomatoes.
Breaking News. The Qatar based political head of HAMAS is being reported killed in Tehran by a possible Israeli airstrike. HAMAS confirms his death. He was there to attend the inauguration of the new Iranian president.
https://www.cnn.com/world/live-news/lebanon-beirut-explosion-07-30-24/index.html
If it was an airstrike, it doesn’t say much about Iranian air defenses and says much about Israeli intelligence capabilities.
That was long overdue.
Now for the rest of those vermin…
Right on.
Thanks for this. WRT my garden, I need all the help I can get.
zucchini for the kitchen. – eewww gross
There is good soil – my parents took few years to get good soil. Brought in dirt and ehm well fermented old cow dung.
Asparagus: 5-10 plants – wait isn’t it one spear per plant? also asparagus takes a few years before it makes proper spears
Peppers, Bell: 3-5 plants, Peppers, Chili: 1-3 plants, Tomatoes: 1-4 plants – this seems low depending on usage
Squash / zucchini – this should be 0 plants just because you cannot have negative numbers. foul stuff…
Morning glibbies
Travis J I Corcoran / morlock is one o dem extremists you should ot read those books.. Also while I did not read any, I remember him claiming one of his SF books is better than Moon is a harsh mistress and that is a bold claim 🙂
How tragic. Hamas leader assassinated in Iran. Wonder if the FBI could have provided them some handy tips in advance to prevent such a thing?
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13691589/Hamas-leader-Ismail-Haniyeh-targeted-killed-Iran.html
Maybe it was just shrapnel?
Morning, my green thumb friends.
🌄😎🌱
23 hot pepper plants in pots. A couple 🍅, 2 cukes, celery, asparagus, and bell peppers too.
The deck is full.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wezvUAwOfmM
🎶🎶
Good morning, Sean & homey!
…and rhy!
Mornin’.
Morning.
How’s it going with each of you gentlemen?
I first griggily woke at 5:18 and thought “Oh, good, I’m going to get started on time.” When I next managed to look at the clock, it was suddenly after 6, and I was behind schedule. I still made it to the office on time, but I was running behind. After reaching my desk, I opened my cheese curds to find them covered in mold! 🤢
In short, this morning is not going well at all.
Ugh! 😖 Hope it gets better from here!
Gotta go get ready for an 8 a.m. appointment before work.
https://www.mulletchamp.com/
Round 2 ends today.
Gah. One of the kids has been doing a local car dealer commercial this week.
Jesus fellas, it’s supposed to be business in front and party in the back, not woman in the back. Mullets are low rent enough as it is but those are too long.
suh’ fam
whats goody
Mornin’ all.
Music that fits the theme — Tend My Garden .
Share and enjoy!
Wow. Thought I refreshed last night, but didn’t see that this posted.
Haven’t had much luck growing anything myself yet to be honest – my schedule (with reserve stuff) just has too much inconsistency to keep a daily eye on stuff in the yard.
I love small town shit like this. It used to happen at the NJ shore where I grew up.
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/oyster-farms-massachusetts-harbor-bc8f0ad3?st=rtjgb7x8ivqxad1&reflink=share_mobilewebshare
Question is which town is the bigger Masshole?
Good morning!