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To city dwellers, what we stand on, also known as the ground, is most often asphalt or concrete, and our experience with "real ground" comes from an occasional walk in the city park. Few if any city slickers ever have the experience of standing in a real vegetable garden, much less growing one. So our "real ground" knowledge might be described as nonexistent.
I am a city slicker who grew up on the east coast. I was certain that you could put seeds or plants in any sunny plot of ground, give them a little water, and magical things like flowers and vegetables would spring forth -- even in Colorado. Ah, foolish me.
I moved to Colorado Springs, acquired a house with a back yard, and decided to plant my first vegetable garden. My back yard looked a little like a California beach and I am not totally clueless. My husband borrowed the neighbor's rototiller and tilled a garden bed for me, adding topsoil to the mix. I randomly threw some seeds in the ground, added a few starter plants and waited for the fresh veggies to arrive.
By the end of the summer, it was easy to total up my yield. I got two - count 'em - two carrots, one the size of a small radish and one the size of a large banana. I still have a picture of the big one. The peas were delicious. I ate them as I picked them -- about two individual servings. Three tomato plants produced three beautiful red tomatoes about the size of ping-pong balls. My pumpkin vine produced a single, softball-sized pumpkin.
At this point, farmers, experienced home vegetable gardeners, and Colorado Master Gardeners are either weeping or rolling on the floor laughing. But I was thrilled. I actually grew some vegetables! What, I asked myself, could I accomplish with a little knowledge? I set out to learn more about vegetable gardens and spent many a pleasant winter evening browsing through seed catalogs; but somehow, the idea of learning about soil, fertilizers, insects, and the local climate escaped me.
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One day during an early spring blizzard, I started my next vegetable garden in my basement. I planted seeds in dozens of little Styrofoam cups and egg cartons. I planned to plant my new and improved vegetable garden on Memorial Day. When Memorial Day arrived, it was cloudy and cool with freezing rain in the forecast. I was certain the weatherman was nuts. No one has snow or freezing temperatures on Memorial Day. Right? If this were Pennsylvania, we'd be wilting in the heat by late afternoon.
Out I went with my trays of little seedlings and started digging. By the time they were all in the ground, in razor-straight, regimentally-organized, carefully-labeled rows, it was beginning to sleet. By late afternoon my seedlings had disappeared under several inches of snow. I vividly remember gazing at the back yard, grinding my teeth.
Some of those seedlings survived -- for a while. I added some more starter plants and again waited to see what would happen. But Mother Nature had taken my measure and set out to teach me a lesson. The bugs moved in and more of those brave seedling survivors keeled over. My single row of corn produced beautifully tall, corn-free corn stalks. I threw away a couple of mutated radishes. The pepper plants dropped leaves like it was autumn and the tomatoes refused to produce even a single flower. My sunflowers, added for color, stared stubbornly at my fence, most likely ashamed to be seen in the midst of such a mess. My half dozen zucchini plants produced - yessir - truckloads of zucchini.
After that, in the summer, I went back to standing on concrete or asphalt at the local farmers' market, staring humbly at the wonders those farmers produced. Occasionally my neighbor, who grew up on a farm, invited me to stand on his lawn and admire his vegetable garden. He gave me enormous heads of lettuce and lovely ripe tomatoes. To this day I am still hugely impressed at the cunning ability of these farm folks to do something useful with what we stand on.
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my "sunny window sill" was not sunny enough, I looked longingly at the catalog
pages with $300 to $500 light set-ups for seed starting. The wheels startedturning,
and soon I was at the hardware store buying a set of three-foot wide plastic
shelves, and four-foot wide fluorescent light fixtures. (I think there is
a conspiracy out there to keep seed starting addicts from having four-foot
wide shelves and four-foot fixtures.) I hung the fixtures on their adjustable
chains, plugged the lights into a power strip, plugged the power strip into
a timer, and suddenly had the capacity to start hundreds of seeds!
Prepare
the bed by digging in 1 pound of nitrogen fertilizer per 1,000 sq. ft. Buy
tomato varieties that work in our fairly short growing season (an average
of 148 days). Beefsteak varieties just take too long to mature.
Tomato plants are tough! They can take a lot of abuse and survive. But the one thing that's sure to kill a tomato plant is a freezing temperature. Harden off tender plants 10 days before transplanting. Start by putting them out for a few hours away from the wind and in part shade and increasing the time in the sun and wind each day until they can handle 8 hours of full sun and stay out overnight. IMPORTANT: If the temperature gets close to freezing or below, bring them inside!
Before transplanting, let the plants wilt slightly so that the stems are flexible. See those bumps at the bottom of the tomato stem? Those are all roots waiting to happen. Tomato roots like warmth and easy access to water so plant them shallow, but deep. Sound confusing? Here's what you do. Dig a shallow