Help starting a garden.


Moonbeast32
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I want to finally make president Benson's advice a reality. But I've never done gardening before. I feel in over my head. 

I have an empty garden box, and a small portable greenhouse. there are mountains to the east, so I don't get much sun in the morning. I live in Utah county, in the foothills of Timpanogos.

I have never done gardening before. I don't know what seeds I should plant or how to raise them. Could someone please help me to make an educated decision?

Edited by Moonbeast32
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I try to do a garden of some sort every year, but I don’t have much of a green thumb. So, my gardens have been haphazard and some years successful and other years not so much. Our soil is very rocky and so we have switched to container/box gardening. I’m getting older with a bad knee and don’t have the strength or energy I used to have, so container gardening works for me.

One crop I plant every year is radishes. I don’t particularly love radishes, but they only take about 25 days to mature. They are easy to plant, and easy to care for and it’s exciting to get results within such a short time frame. It helps me feel like I’m a successful gardener.

My minimal garden every year includes radishes, turnips (personal favorite of mine when fresh and small), tomatoes, zucchini, carrots, and crook neck squash. On years when I feel like I can handle a larger garden I add  bell peppers, corn, green beans, peas, cucumbers, pumpkins, egg plant, broccoli, lettuce, and cabbage to my minimum garden. I often try strawberries and different melons, but don’t seem to have much success with them. 

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31 minutes ago, classylady said:

I try to do a garden of some sort every year, but I don’t have much of a green thumb. So, my gardens have been haphazard and some years successful and other years not so much. Our soil is very rocky and so we have switched to container/box gardening. I’m getting older with a bad knee and don’t have the strength or energy I used to have, so container gardening works for me.

One crop I plant every year is radishes. I don’t particularly love radishes, but they only take about 25 days to mature. They are easy to plant, and easy to care for and it’s exciting to get results within such a short time frame. It helps me feel like I’m a successful gardener.

My minimal garden every year includes radishes, turnips (personal favorite of mine when fresh and small), tomatoes, zucchini, carrots, and crook neck squash. On years when I feel like I can handle a larger garden I add  bell peppers, corn, green beans, peas, cucumbers, pumpkins, egg plant, broccoli, lettuce, and cabbage to my minimum garden. I often try strawberries and different melons, but don’t seem to have much success with them. 

I have a spare back yard if you need more room to plant :) 

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I grow Jerusalem artichokes, aka sunchokes, aka weeds. It's something I can grow successfully. They grow to be as much as 13' tall, so if you're using a window box, they might not be the ideal choice. Then again, you might like having tall sunflowers growing in front of your window.

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My contribution is that of bad example, cautionary tale, voice of warning.

We had a good year or three of growing sugar snap peas.  Everything else we tried failed - tomatoes, strawberries, corn, squash.  The wild flower mix I planted took off so well it degraded the usefulness of our horse pasture.  We had 3 bad years in a row - mostly cutworms and rabbits.

People in my area have wonderful gardens.  I bet if we cozied up to the smart experienced people, they could set us straight and we'd be back up and running.  But wife figured poultry was easier.

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I put tomatoe plants in pots. I have a potato box and a strawberry box. I have mints, chives, rosemary, and other herbs in pots as well. I would love  huge garden but the only good place would be in the front yard and my husband won't go for that.

Pumpkins, squash, corn, cucumbers are all pretty easy to grow. Squash and cucumbers plants are the best way to go in my mind.

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22 hours ago, Moonbeast32 said:

I want to finally make president Benson's advice a reality. But I've never done gardening before. I feel in over my head. 

I have an empty garden box, and a small portable greenhouse. there are mountains to the east, so I don't get much sun in the morning. I live in Utah county, in the foothills of Timpanogos.

I have never done gardening before. I don't know what seeds I should plant or how to raise them. Could someone please help me to make an educated decision?

When I lived in Redmond, WA I lived in a condo with no soil. I read Square Foot Gardening, made a 2' x 4' garden box, and placed it on my patio. I stuck 2 long dowels behind the back corners and ran some twine between them for the climbing plants. The dowels slid into some hardware so I could remove them again. With a short summer season I couldn't plant tomatoes, but cherry or grape tomatoes did great.

My second year I made a box frame the same size as my garden box and covered it with clear plastic. This considerably extended the planting season for me. You may want to consider something similar for your box if you're worried about the temperature.

For plants, you'll notice that everyone usually starts with zucchini. I'm pretty sure that's an edible weed. I don't know anyone that loves zucchini but we all plant it because it grows. If it doesn't grow for you that tells you there's a pollination problem and you should probably focus on self-pollinating plant. One tomato plant can pollinate itself. If you don't get much wind just give the plant a little shake every now and then.

Some plants behave like weeds in that you really have to watch that they stay in their own space. I love strawberries but they produce runners to try to take over. Just plant them with space in between and prune those runners when they show. The last time I planted strawberries I bought them from a local farm rather than getting them from the chain store just so I knew they worked with the local climate.

Herbs are also a weedy plant and should be limited to containers.

Your best plant advice will probably come from some local gardeners though.

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We have terrible neighbors that don't care and don't worry about their pets.  They have cats that have had meningitis or can pass it, or so we have figured from events that happened to another one of our neighbors that had tragic things happen to them.  One of our neighbors and us were growing gardens and the cats decided that these places were their litter box.  Did you know meningitis (I think that's what it was) can actually transfer into plants and such [edit: or that's what it seemed to turn up in some research we and the infected neighbors did.  Unfortunately, with an uncooperative bad neighbor we couldn't verify this information or that their cats were the ones transmitting it.  I'm not a doctor so this is just what we took a guess at in regards to how the neighbor actually GOT the disease in the first place or the route of transmission.].  The neighbor got it.  Has problems for life.  Not sure what recourses they could have, but we decided NOT to grow a garden after that due to our bad neighbor's basic uncaring attitude.

That also have dogs which they don't tend to take care of and get loose a bit.  Those dogs also feel like our yard is their personal potty chair.  It is annoying.

(they also tend to burn stuff in a firepit which they made themselves to be extremely LARGE...when the wind blows directly our house.  When we have one of our grandkids with Asthma visit, that turns really bad.  I think this neighbor doesn't care about anyone but themselves to be honest).

(IT could also be that they turned against the church a few years ago and dislike the church now.  I sometimes wonder if it is more due to that relationship where I have been quite active and they are pretty anti which has flavored these things, or if they are simply like this in general as neighbors).

Our best hope is to grow things indoors. 

Edited by JohnsonJones
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On 3/27/2020 at 10:20 PM, Moonbeast32 said:

I want to finally make president Benson's advice a reality. But I've never done gardening before. I feel in over my head. 

I have an empty garden box, and a small portable greenhouse. there are mountains to the east, so I don't get much sun in the morning. I live in Utah county, in the foothills of Timpanogos.

I have never done gardening before. I don't know what seeds I should plant or how to raise them. Could someone please help me to make an educated decision?

I have a brown thumb.  But I've succeeded in square foot gardening because it is very manageable.  I started with a 4'x4' box which gives me 16 square feet of garden - that means, I can plant up to 16 types of veggies in that little space. 

What I did - I think of what I will eat (because my family will eat any veggie whereas I don't eat veggies unless I force myself to) and then look at the plant's growing chart to see if it grows in my region and when to plant it if it does then see how it is planted in the square foot garden.

Check it out and see if it works for you.  I didn't buy the book.  I just googled everything I needed to know.

 

Another thing I succeeded at was green leaf lettuce on hydroponics.  This was super easy maintenance.  I converted my system to aquaponics and I didn't do too well with keeping the system maintained.

 

 

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