Garden of Eden

If you’re like me you are pouring over your seed catalogs right now in between breaking up the ice dams on your roof. So, in anticipation of warmer weather, I’ve prepared some tips and techniques that will help you grow a more successful Maine vegetable garden this year.

First off, you have to know when to plant particular vegetables. Everyone seems to rush things and end up replanting multiple times. Here are some dates for planting a basic Maine vegetable garden.
 

April 15–30: Hardy vegetables that can stand cold and frost are peas, spinach, radishes, and onions. A gardener can be smug if he is eating peas on the 4th of July.
May 1–15: Lettuce, beets, carrots, broccoli, cabbage, and potatoes can go in now. Potatoes aren’t particularly hardy but they won’t break the surface for a couple weeks.
May 16–31: Corn, beans, squashes, and pumpkin seeds can be sowed since they won’t pop up till after the last expected frost date. Avoid planting any starter plants.
June 1–15: Now that the soil has warmed up, cucumbers, tomatoes, and peppers can go in. I prefer starter plants rather than seeds. While your neighbors’ plants are struggling, yours will catch up and thrive. 

The most important component in a successful garden is soil preparation. I own a rear-tined Troybilt tiller and it’s a godsend for preparing the soil and tilling between rows to keep out weeds. If you don’t own a tiller you can rent one or find someone who tills gardens. If your garden is small or raised beds, good old-fashioned elbow grease and a garden fork will work. Soil science is a bit too complicated to go into here but if you work in organic matter like grass clippings, leaves, compost, and composted manure, that’s a good start. Avoid fresh manure or you will end up growing weeds instead of vegetables for years to come. I also add 5-10-10 fertilizer to the garden if I have been lax in adding organic matter.

Fill up your garden with vegetables! It drives me nuts when I see gardens that are 25% vegetables and 75% dirt. Pack everything into wide rows leaving walkways only wide enough to run a tiller through. Once a garden is well under way, all that growth acts as natural mulch and keeps the soil warm and moist. By the end of July you shouldn’t see very much dirt at all—just a canopy of rich green vegetables.

Don’t get fixated on watering. I have a hand-dug well with spring water that is too precious to waste by leaving a sprinkler going for hours. If I see my plants suffering due to dry weather, I’ll pump water to the garden from a brook, but that is rare. I avoid watering by waiting until we have a couple hot days in early June, followed by the inevitable soaking shower, then I mulch around the plants with straw, not hay (hay has weed seeds). That mulch keeps the soil warm and wet for a long time. If you must, water in the early morning or evening when the sun isn’t beating down and evaporating the water before it soaks in. Drench the garden occasionally for a long period so the water goes deep into the soil. You want to stress your plants a little so the roots have to reach down deep to find moisture and nutrients. If you water lightly they always find what they need at the surface and won’t establish strong roots and never produce to their capacity.

Tomatoes take forever to ripen in northern climates. Here are a couple tips to speed that along. Instead of placing the roots in a deep cold hole and ending up with half-dead plants, try this: Pull off all the leaves and stems below the cluster of leaves at the top; dig a shallow trench about six inches deep and lay your plants lengthwise in the trench; cover over the root ball and stem leaving that cluster exposed—it will grow straight up. If you were to pull up one of these plants later, you would see that roots had formed all along that stem that stabilized and nourished that plant. Here’s another tip for the truly anxious: Take a shovel and dig down about a foot in a half circle around a mature tomato plant six inches from the stem. This “root-pruning” will fool the plant into turning those green tomatoes red. 

Bugs can really set a garden back so I dust my vine crops (cucumbers, squashes, pumpkins) with 5% Sevin when they first break the surface or are transplanted—hardly organic but so be it. I repeat this if we have any rain. This keeps the cucumber beetles at bay and allows the young plants to get off to a good start. 

If you try my methods I promise you will work less, enjoy gardening more, and reap a cornucopia of fresh vegetables. With food prices skyrocketing, growing your own food has become less of a luxury and more of a necessity.

Brad Eden is an artist, writer, Registered Maine Master Guide, and owner/editor of the online magazine www.uplandjournal.com.