Talk to me about gardening...

[becca011906]

Ok so i'm trying like made to save TONS of $$ this summer for a vacation in Sep so me and dh bough some seed at walmart last night... neither of us have a clue what we are doing.... we bough some cucumbers, carrots, lettuce, cabbage, watermelon, peas, ect. we live in indiana and our land we live on was farm ground 4 years ago (b4 we moved in) when we dug up a flower bed 3 years ago our grown SUCKED it was clay and we added some potting soil to get the flowers started up will we need to do this again to get food food to come up??? How much time will i need to spend carring for it? hopefully we will keep animal out of it, not to many birds since we have no trees, we do have three dogs and one runs loose on our property all day long so we think we are going to put it inside the fence the kids play in to keep the dogs out. will i need to water the stuff daily? Any tips i would love~!
thanks!

[farmer mama]

Hi! I would post in Digging in the Earth for more info, but if I were you I would get my hands on some compost, you can buy it at garden stores, and add some to enrich your soil. Also, you may want to look into starting your own pile. I would also go to the library and pick up a good garden book. The sunset guide to organic gardening is very simple and clear for the beginner. After the work of planting, I would guess I spend about 1-2 hours a week in my very large garden (but I am obsessed) weeding, mulching, planting, etc. When the plants are getting established, I water every day, and then space out watering gradually to about once a week (but the climate here is very moist). I would just keep an eye on how droppy or thristy they get. A fence may be helpful. Good luck.

[Belleweather]

Here's my hints: We have crappy soil in our yard as well (we live on an Isthmus, so it's all clay and sand and stones.) so we did raised beds. We got some cheap lumber from Home Despot and put together rectangular boxes, and then filled them with soil, compost and manure. NOT potting soil; we got cheap black dirt from a friend, so it wasn't irradiated to kill weeds or anything, but it was much cheaper.

We started the seeds indoors in those little cups that go right into the ground, and then when we put them into the dirt we put down black water-permeable plastic over the dirt and put the plants through it, so that weeding wasn't something we had to do all the time. We weeded occasionally, watered when it was dry and staked stuff when it started to over run. We got bushells of tomatoes and zucchini and peppers with near to no effort.