I think that I am setting my expectations too high about what I can do in one year here. We just bought a house that has 2.5 basically wild acres around it and I have so many things that I want to plant. My DH is a contractor so he can get a guy out here with a tractor to dig up our vegetable garden area for free when he hires him for another paying job. So I plan for sure to have a fairly large veggie garden, but I want so many other things. How do I decide what to do first? I know that it will probably take years to get the property looking decent, I am too impatient. I am planning on planting some fruit trees also (we got a gift cert. for some for our birthday) in the Spring. Hopefully I will be able to plant a few a year until we have a good selection of fruit growing.

Other things that I want to plant are berries, onions, garlic and potatoes. Any tips on planting those things? I don't have any experience with them? Can I just mix them in with the veggies in the garden or should they have their own space. I need to start figuring all this stuff out now. Also, I think that I should plan on planting mostly perennials for flowers in the front courtyard so that I don't have to plant every year, but does that mean that they won't flower this year?

Maybe I should take some pics and post them of the property so that you all can help me. I don't have any IRL gardening friends who can offer an opinion.

THE RESPONSES:

• First, start small! I tried to do too much my first year - and nothing is worse then a half finished garden. Nothing erodes quicker than valuable dug-up earth. I recommend planning a 5 yr garden, with one major project each year.

  I would scale this down the digging the first year especially if you are digging up native established areas. If there are a lot of grasses, the digging will break up the rhiosomes and cause them to grow back with an un-weedable vengance. (I know this first hand) You may be better off mulching very heavily for a year to kill the plants on the size garden you ideally want - and only dig a small one this year. I'd also do a survey to make sure you aren't destroying any rare native species - I'd move these.

  I'd plant annuals the first year. They are cheaper, and you can see how well something grows and get a good feeling for the turf. Then you can slowly start with the more permanent periennal beds. And I think fruit trees are a great idea! Apples are easy to care for!

• Gardening vicariously -- ooh -- maybe someday I will own a house and can get serious about gardening! But until then -- have you done any reading on permaculture / no or low till gardening? I would never want to just tractor up land to plant a garden on it, but there are ways to prepare the soil without ripping it up. We just plop our tomatos and peppers in holes in the ground -- no plots at all, and surround them with compost from our pile. If I had that much unplanned territory, I would do some serious reading on garden planning. Also, I would look into seed-saving and heirloom seed exchanges.

  I read a book from the library (title escapes me) on permaculture planning. You can get all sort of cool multiuse stuff -- an edible lawn, a dine in herb garden, and so forth. I would plant flowers that do something besides just look lovely -- like purple coneflower or lavender -- and I would get to know your existing plants for a season (wouldn't you hate to rip up something that could heal you when sick or make a great meal?).

  I would also plan for rotating plants. My parents garden was abundent but they don't get the whole rotation concept so growth is dwindling -- I think you should be able to find resources on this pretty easily.

  I'm jealous. Have fun.

• Oooo, what fun!!! There's nothing more exciting (in my mind anyway)than a big garden, just waiting to go.

  OK! (rolls up sleeves and gets gleam in eye!) First, I agree - heavy mulching is the way to go unless you want to make major changes to the land levels. I do no large scale digging at all, even in the veggie garden, and ours virtually supports us throughout the summer and well into autumn. If you have to buy in hay or straw it is expensive - but so is rotovating.

  When I'm laying out large areas, I use a garden hose to mark out the contours I want. You can nudge this around endlessly until you have the right shape. Then I use a hoe or mattock to mark out the shape and I usually try to dig a very shallow dividing trench. This helps to keep out creeping weeds and grasses like couch and makes it easier to get rid of them. Then I use Roundup on the area - this is the only chemical I ever use because it penetrates only the plant itself, not the soil surrounding it. Some organic systems permit the use of Roundup in the first phase.

  Then I mulch very heavily with whatever I can beg from DH - good hay if I'm lucky, straw if I'm not. I've experiemnted with newspaper but I've found that it works best in areas that will e totally undisturbed and it needs heavy organic mulch on top. I also don't like the length of time it takes to break down - the organic mulch is my major form of soil conditioning and you will be literally astounded at the difference two years of mulching makes to the soil texture.

  I have used newspaper this year on a particularly difficult area - at the top of the garden there is a band of horrible, clay soil which dries out and cracks in summer badly and is of very poor quality. I have been trying to establish a screen of native trees and shrubs to block out the farm sheds and had almost no success at all. So this year DH and I made an ENORMOUS bed edged with railway sleepers I'd dragged out of the vegetable garden while re-designing it (yes, I know I sound like superwoman here ). We mulched it with six months worth of newspapers and EIGHT huge round bales of hay. It was a mammoth effort, but is succeeding brilliantly. The plants are growing with huge vigour, far better than anything I've attempted there in the past five years.

  Potatoes are a great starting crop for your veggie garden: they are brlliant soil cleaners and leave you with an excellent soil texture because they break the spoil up as the tubers are growing. As my vegetable garden is running out of room, I'm considering growing them elsewhere, but they're a great way to start a rotation. They can also be grown without digging. I lay out a layer of mulch, put the seed potatoes on top, mulch more, sprinkle with manure or blood and bone (watch out of you have dogs around, they *love* digging this up in search of the elusive dead animal they just know is buried in your potato patch ) and then mulch *heavily* on top. This is important to make sure the potatoes don't green off. As soon as the plants have flowered, you can start "Bandicooting" them (that's what we call it out here in the wilds of rural Australia, anyway ). This means you can reach under the straw and pull of individual potatoes without disturbing the plant's growth - you get these incredible little spuds with skin so thin you can rub it away with your finger. You won't believe that plain boiled potatoes with butter or olive oil can taste so good. When the frost gets the plants, pull back the mulch and voila - potatoes for the winter!

  The other great soil cleaner is broad beans, which I sow every year. They have a wonderful effect on soil as they are legumes and fix nitrogen in the soil. They are ocasionally grown around here as a commercial crop and DH has noticed that the effects on the soil are incredible - much better than peas and other leguminous plants which are recommended for the same purpose. I plant them here in autumn, but that will depend on whether your ground freezes over or not (I have no idea where you live!). Make a network of stakes around them and criss cross with twine to support them - they grow abou five feet tall. The beans are an early spring crop here and are delicious simmered with cream and bacon and lemon juice. When I remember, I try to also quickly blanch and freeze them.

  Garlic also grows very easily - plant the cloves at the same time you would plant flowering bulbs and harvest when the tops die back towards the end of summer. I'm just doing this now and the young cloves are very sweet and nutty - quite different from older garlic.

  Berries are also dead easy. Plant the canes in winter or early spring, but make sure that they are in an area where you can keep the growth under control from both sides. When we came here, MIL had a huge hedge of loganberries but she'd planted them near the garage and they were totally out of control and getting under the garage walls and into neighbouring shrubs. We've finally killed them off and dug them out, but it was a very big job. I dug up half a dozen roots and planted them as a hedge at the back of my veggie garden so I can mow along both sides and get the whipper snipper underneath them. They are *delicious* (am I saying that about everything? LOL!)

  Other good staples in my veggie garden are corn (harvesting now and yes, delicious!), runner beans, tomatoes (plant lots to make sauces and freeze for winter), zucchinis and pumpkins, leeks, shallots, lettuce, spinach in winter/early spring, chard, broccoli (after the head's cut off, it sprouts again for months). I also inherited a thriving asparagus patch from MIL. If you plant a new patch it will take a couple of years to mature, but it is such a luxury and very easy to grow.

  Fruit - apples are great. Plant some crabapples too for glorious spring blossom and lovely fruits in autumn which make yummy jelly (I just can't use delicious one more time in this post ). An unusual fruit tree which we love is the quince. Check to see if it's hardy in your area, but I would think so as it's closely related to the apple. It has big, single, porcelain pink blossoms in late spring and produces wonderful, heavy fuzzy yellow fruit (in some traditions, the fruit in Eden was actually a quince). This can't be eaten raw but it has a wonderful trick. Cooked very slowly in the oven overnight or simmered on the stove top, it turns a deep, glowing, ruby red and is positively scrumptious with cream or yoghurt. Quince and crabapple jelly is also one of the nicest things in the world on fresh bread.

  Flowers! My garden is mostly perennial, but some annuals in the first season will help fill up spaces while the perennials are bulking up. Very easy perennial stuff includes penstemons, catmint, hardy geraniums, lambs ears (stachys), irises. All of these grow almost anywhere and need little attention besides cutting back after flowering. Oh and PLEASE plant some old fashioned roses??? The modern hyrbid teas and shrub roses you get in the nursery are fine, but they have big, formal flowers and often harsh colours and their shapes are awkward and need lots of pruning. The old roses makes big, soft bushes with lovely, softly scented blowsy blossoms, all quilled and ruffled like tissue paper. Plant them somewhere where they have room to grow and look for varieties like the Bourbon roses which flower twice - names like Souvenir de la Malmaison, Madame Ernst Calvat, Madame Isaac Pereire, Louise Odier, Honorine de Brabant (can you tell I LOVE these??). You may need to order these by mail order, but a lot of the older roses are also quite easy to propagate by cuttings, so if you see one growing in an old cemetery or the like nearby, try taking a cutting in midsummer.

  Gosh, your head will be whirling by now! There will be lots of good gardening books around, but for a more esoteric book to curl up with on a cold winter's evening, can I recommend Michael Pollan's "Second Nature"? Amazon definitely has it. He writes for the New York Times and Harper's, and the book tells about how he and his wife made a garden on an old abandoned dairy farm on a rocky hill in Connecticut. It is beautifully written, very funny and thoughtful.

  I'd better stop now - this post is getting book length itself! Please ask anything - gardening is one of my major passions in life and I get huge pleasure from growing food and flowers for my family.

  • You are a womyn after my own heart! I put off reading this post until it had my undivided attention, as I knew it would stir up those emotions that hit in the dead of winter! I so want my garden to wake up!!!

    Thank you for the potato idea, I have a space behind the shed that I was planning on digging up to plant taters, I have been DREADING it! NOW I DON'T HAVE TO!! From you description it makes perfect sense why potatoes were the only thing that would grow in Ireland!

    One thing to add, I totally agree about the beans, all that good nitrogen will mean a bumper crop of whatever you plant next year. I do have a cool idea for you though. Instead of planting them in a row make a teepee out of bamboo poles or long willow switches. Then plant the beans at the base of each pole, leaving one space for a door. When the beans grow up, AND BOY WILL THEY GROW! You will have a living teepee for the kids, and they even have snacks hanging on the inside!

    • You will be AMAZED at the soil quality after you do the potatoes in straw. The combination of the taters, manure/fertiliser and mulch gives you this incredible crumbly, moist, fertile, worm ridden black stuff that looks good enough to eat for dessert. And no digging!!

      I like the teepee idea - I already grow some of my beans up poles, but I hadn't thought about taking it another step and doing something more creative with it - and maybe it would make the kids eat beans???

      Actually, I've been meaning to ask you two gardening related questions - firstly, what do you preserve and how do you do it? I make jams and jellies with whatever fruit comes to hand and DH loves bottling cherries with a Fowler jar kit. I lightly stew and freeze some apples for pies and last year I froze tomato puree - this year I will make proper sauces and freeze them and possibly also bottle some tomatoes. I've also snap-frozen broad beans. What else do you do that is worth the effort?

      • Last year was a REALLY bad year for growing in our area, it was very wet and cloudy. Usually though our secret is super long days! We have huge tomatoe plants with wondeful tomates on them, and plenty of green ones at the end of the season! LOL While our growing season, only lasts from mid May to early October we have about 18 hours of sunlight in the high point of summer. We plant early producing varieties so we don't run out of time in September/October. Our first frost usually comes in September so anything that is not frost resistant has to be harvested by then. We can extend the season by putting blankets over our peepers and tomatoes. Also many people have green house which helps extend the season, they grow cucumbers, melons, peppers (capsicum) and other hot weather crops.I hope to build one this spring. Our temperature reached 30 quite often here so those greenhouses get as much heat as they would way south of here. The spinach I fall plant (actually I do a lot of fall planting as our weather is very conducive to it) and have baby spinach by June,other things we grow are, lettuce, zucchini, broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower,many herbs, potatoes, beets, peas, beans, leeks (though they are hit and miss as they like a long season and a temperate climate), onions, garlic (you have to fall plant this t make it worth while) blueberries, raspberries, all sorts of squash, carrots, parsnips, turnips (in fact our root vegetables are the best ever because the serious frost they are exposed to makes the REALLY sweet!), brussel sprouts, rhubarb...I am sure there are plenty more but I can't think of anymore right now. Many people as surprised at what grows up here, but I tell you we have great weather in the summer, sunny most of the time with a huge rain storm every few days to soak the ground then blue sky again in a few hours. I have not used a drop of tap water on my garden only rain water and that which I collect in my rain barrels, I do mulch quite a bit though so that helps.

        My all time favorite to can in peaches! These don't grow around here but I get two 20 lb. cases at the organic market in Edmonton or we drive to BC to get them then can them. It sounds like a long way to go just for peaches but in minus 40 weather nothing helps you through like the summer taste of peaches. At first I wanted to can everything in sight but I have since learned (because I have a few nasty looking jars of spiced pears in the cupboard that you couldn't pay me to eat) that it is only worth preserving things you like, or it is produce and time wasted.

        I only ever can with honey, molasses, brown rice syrup or maple syrup. And I cheat! I don't make a syrup instead I put the honey and lemon juice in the bottom of the jar and fill it with boiling water after the peaches are in there, then seal them and put them in a canning bath for 10 minutes. I find when I make syrup there is either not enough of to much. When I do peaches any that are not perfect go into a pot I use to make jam, I would like to learn to make some raw spreads but I can't figure out how I would preserve them?

        I make THOUSANDS (ok maybe hundreds) of jars of crabapple jelly the ol fashion way. With only honey. I make sure to pick a few un-ripened apples as they have the most pectin in them. Then I boil the apples stem, skin and all until they split, I then blend them with a hand blender pour the pulp into a pillow case and let it strain. Then comes the boring part. I add the honey and reduce the jelly until it hits the jelly stage which can take up to 5 hours! What I get though is worth it, not like that weak pink jelly you usually buy but a barely translucent, dark red jelly that is STRONG and wonderful! We eat it, sell it, give it away and I get compliments like you would not believe, they often say "hey this taste like the stuff my grandma use to make! ", you know that can't be a bad thing! LOL

        I also pickle beet, onion and garlic. I stew rhubarb, and freeze some for pies. I freeze zucchini, both chopped and grated (grated makes great cakes and if you mix it with parmesan and spices you get this wonderful spread for pizza) We can our tomatoes (had to buy them last year) in halves, I want to make tomatoes sauce too but usually by the time I get around to it I say forget it! LOL WE freeze berries in a single layer on a tray THEN put them in bags. If you freeze them in a bag at first they become a BLOCK! Same goes for peas but shucking peas is SO much work we usually just east them when they are ripe. Carrots are stored in sand filled containers as are apples. Speaking of apples we make apple butter, and sauce, plus my MIL cuts up tonnes of apples and makes pie filling out of them. She just skins and slices them adds the sugar and spices then freezes them, later when she wants a pie she just opens the bag fills the crust, seals the top and bakes it. Apple butter mixed with peanut butter tastes like the well known brands like Jiff or Skippy but it is healthy! Apple sauce is wonderful with porridge. I make pots of Borsht with the beets and freeze it. It is simple to make (recipe in the attic) is cheap, tasty and I LOVE taking dinner out of the freezer and it being done! Oh sun dried or oven dried tomatoes are awesome in omelets and REALLY easy to make! I better stop as this post is getting long but I will post more if I think of them.

• Oh my favorite topic!! I agree to start fairly small if you have just overturned a bunch of natives they WILL come back, you are going to have to mulch your butt off to keep them down, if you have to much to do you whole garden could get out of hand.

  Fruit trees are a good thing to put in first, any trees for that matter. They do take a while to grow so they are a priority. Don't forget to plant two though, they often have to cross-pollinate to bear fruit, or you can get trees that have another trees limbs grafted on them, this way one tree will pollinate itself (with the bee's help of course) SPEAKING OF BEE'S!!! Plant flowers the encourage GOOD insects this will start building a healthy ecosystem.

  Do you have a composter? If not build one! Compost is the single most important ingredient in your garden, that and mulch!

  Buy the book Carrots love Onions (I think that is the name?) It tells you how to "mix plant" you plant flowers and veggies next to each other to naturally deter bugs and encourage growth.

  I said I would only plant perennials but once I learned that they only flower for a short period I started using a combination of perennials and annuals. The BEST way to go as far as I am concerned is to plant self sowing annuals, like poppies and cosmos, they are annuals that bloom all summer long yet as long as you don't dead head them to much the seeds will dry up fall off and seed themselves again. I swear to you two packages of poppy seed has now completely taken over my garden!!! The only thing to make sure though is that they will not take over the natives in your area, this is how the Americas became covered with dandelions!

  My brother who is an organic farmer filled my head with all sorts of knowledge, it helped me a lot BUT I will tell you the ONLY way I REALLY got to understand gardening was by doing it myself. I bet by next fall you will be giving others advice!! I can't wait to see pics; YOU HAVE ME ALL EXCITED NOW!!!