Caring for your Vegetables
Watering some more…
Once your vegetable seeds germinate, a rule of thumb is an inch or two of water per week. Not all plants like the same moisture levels. Cucumbers like to be consistently moist. Never leave your soil soggy, that drowns the roots and leads to a loss of seedlings and diseases.
Supporting your crops
As your vegetables grow, many of them will need supports. If a plant is left on the ground without something holding it up, it is more prone to rotting or diseases. Cucumbers, tomatoes, peas, some beans, like Scarlet runner beans, require a trellis. There many designs and ways to support them, from simple to elaborate. We used a galvanized wire fence for the pea trellis that is very versatile. It can be used to cage in plants and protect them from rabbits or deer, as well.
The back garden box has a trellis for the Scarlet Runner Beans and an arbour for the Valiant Grape.
Straw mulch used.
Galvanized Wire Fence
Origin Point Garden Zone 1/2-Inch x 1-Inch Mesh 16-Gauge,30-Inch x 10-Foot
Garden Netting
Protect your garden from deer, rabbits and birds! This large: 7ft x 100ft netting can be used to build trellises or protect your crops. Easy to install – cut to size.
Controlling Weeds
Weeding is one of the least favourite tasks of many people, but it is a great chance to get out and see how your garden is doing and enjoy the experience. Large plots can become very difficult to maintain, so you need to be prepared to spend a lot of time weeding and watering if this is your garden space. With square foot gardening, veggies grow closer together which helps shade the soil and prevent weeds. Mulching, as mentioned, also helps keep weeds manageable.
Early on, learn to identify weeds. When seeds first sprout, they have cotyledons, which are embryonic leaves – they do not look like the actual plant’s leaves. The next set are the true leaves.
Keep the weeds down in your garden to reduce competition for the soil nutrients and water.
Yellow circle: true carrot leaves are branched.
Orange circle: weed
At the very early stage, it is easy to mistake your vegetable seedlings for weeds. I usually wait until the true leaves are visible on both weed and veggie to make the call on which one to pull. This prevents a lot of frustration, should you pull out your freshly sprouted veggie. Also, by then, your veggie seedlings should have formed a row (or whatever shape you planted) and the weeds will stand out between the rows.
Mulch
You can mulch between your vegetables once they are bigger. I use straw, not hay because it is full of seeds. There are hemp mulches too that lots of people like. Mulching helps moderate the soil temperature, prevents evaporation, keeps soil loose and friable, and reduces weeds. Don’t cover your plants, just the bare ground around them. Leave the mulch back from the stem of the plant, where possible, to prevent problems.
Shade cloth is helpful for veggies that like a more moderated climate. Some vegetables like lettuce and spinach don’t like hot weather and benefit from it.
Pests and Pets
Who doesn’t love a nice tasty bite of fresh garden produce? Wait, you didn’t take that bite! What has happened to your plants?
Welcome to growing your own garden. Birds, squirrels, rabbits, worms, and all sorts of creepy, crawly, hoppy, and flying bugs are going to try and help themselves to your garden.
Protecting Your Crops with Row Covers
Often, vegetables that are in the same family (a biological classification) suffer from the same pests and diseases. Broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, kale, cabbage, kohlrabi (and likely some I’ve missed) are all in the brassica family and the cabbage-loper moth loves to lay its eggs on them. These hatch into little green worms that will destroy your crop before you even know what happened. I learned this the hard way the first time I tried growing Brussel’s sprouts. They all went in the trash there were so many worms. The best way to prevent this frustration is to use floating row covers.
Most covers are water permeable and don’t need to be taken off to water. There must be air flow to prevent mold and diseases. You can use a hoop system or lay the cover over your newly seeded bed to help keep birds and pests away from the tasty new seeds and seedlings. Be careful not to damage any sprouts when you lift the cloth though. Only lift it to weed and then immediately put it back on. Trust me.
Protecting your Crops with Netting and Fences
I use netting to keep the birds off my peas until they are about 10″ tall and not as tempting to them, as well as to protect my strawberries. Make sure your netting is bird-safe. You can use the row covers mentioned earlier too, to keep bugs off. These are something I am trying next summer to ward off leaf miners.
Check out more crop protection options here:
Barriers
Pesticides
There are lots of sprays and powders on the market. But before you run out to your nearest hardware store or garden centre, assess the damage. If it is a small patch of beets and you have time, you can usually eliminate leaf miners by removing damaged leaf areas or squishing them inside the leaf. The damage is sometimes cosmetic and you can overlook it too. Check out this post on Integrated Pest Management.
Because you are growing food, I would recommend using organic, non-toxic products on your food. There are so many options that I will cover them in another post. But for now, BTK (Bacillus thuringiensis kurstaki) is a systematic insecticide used to treat cabbage worms. Diatomaceous earth works on soft-bodied insects like ants and slugs.
