By Randy Cavin
Press Reporter
With not as much produce reaching supermarkets, people are turning to another
Roger Todd of Martin displays cabbage and lettuce he has growing in his vegetable garden. Todd is an experienced gardener and says cabbage and lettuce are two vegetables that are easy to grow for first-time gardeners.
method to get fresh vegetables — gardening.
Now is the time to get a vegetable garden started; however, many people started their garden a few weeks ago.
The rise in first-time gardeners is exceptionally high because of the COVID-19 crisis. Fresh produce is not reaching the store shelves and some people are not wanting to take a risk of going grocery shopping.
That has turned a lot of consumers into first-time gardeners. Mike Biggs of Biggs Nursey in Greenfield can confirm that as the nursey is experiencing a spike in sales.
“This has been a record year for us,” Biggs said. “It has been great. Luckily, my three kids, Reece, Barkley and Baker, and John Brock, I do not know what we would have done this year if they had not been out of school. They have been working every day and it had been great to have them out here.
“We have eight greenhouses out here, and we almost have the back houses empty. That is the name of the game, but I did not think it would be this quick. This has been such a big demand this year that we had a guy tell us the other day that you cannot find a deep freezer anywhere around. Tillers are a thing of the past and people cannot find them. Anybody that has a little room in their backyard, they are planting a garden this year.”
The gardening season is now getting started since the risk of frost is quickly going away. There are a lot of growing options for first-time gardeners. Many vegetables are high-yielding and low-maintenance.
Biggs has some good choices of those types of vegetables for first-time gardeners.
“I will start off as we go through our seasons,” Biggs said. “In March, cabbage, broccoli, brussel sprouts, lettuce, and turnip greens do well. Seed potatoes are great, but we have run out of them as our supplier does not have anymore. As the season goes on, it gets too hot and the bugs will take over them. Right now, through the end of May, a tomato crop is good.
“Sweet corn is a really good crop for this area right now. It handles the cooler night well. Cucumbers, squash, peppers, pretty much all of the vegetables that grow around here, even watermelons, they are easy to grow if you have halfway decent soil at home.”
The first thing to do before you start a garden is to plan it out. You want your garden in a location that gets plenty of sunshine and the soil has good drainage. Then you must decide how big you want it considering the available space you have. The next step is to break the ground with a tiller or lawn tractor with a disc attachment.
Once your ground is properly plowed, then you can lay out the rows for the vegetables you want to grow. A garden hoe is a tool to use for that and a small gardening shovel to dig holes to transplant starter plants.
Biggs says there is a step everyone should take before they begin transplanting vegetable plants.
“I start off by digging the hole and we recommend Miracle Grow,” Biggs said. “I recommend a teaspoon per gallon of water. Put it in the hole, place the plant in it, and cover it up. Use hydrated lime. I would not recommend planting any of your vegetables without hydrated lime.”
Lime is used to raise the pH level in the ground that may be too high is acidity. High acidity will sour the soil. Lime will sweeten it to a better pH level.
Other good-tasting vegetables for first-time farmers are butter beans, purple hull peas, green beans, and okra.
Roger Todd of Martin is a long-time gardener and he already has vegetables growing in three garden plots. He offered some tips for getting a garden started.
“The first thing I do is put down some compost and lime on the ground,” Todd said. “Then I will till it into the soil and let it sit for a couple of days. I try to wait until April 15 to start planting. Of course, cabbage, lettuce, and onions can be planted in February. I get by garden ready early and that is when I start planting those early vegetables.”
Once the spring weather gets warm enough, he plants peas, beans, corn, okra, and tomatoes.
“After you getting it all growing and keep it bug-free, it does well for low-maintenance vegetables,” Todd said. “You just have to keep them sprayed down once per week to keep the bugs off of them. Once they get growing, I take Miracle Grow and spray them down every seven days with my water hose and spraying attachment.”
There are some plants that are harder to grow than others. Todd believes the hardest one is also one of the most popular plants to grow.
“It is tomatoes,” Todd said. “You have to babysit them a lot. You have to make sure to keep them mulched and fertilized. You have to keep the suckers off. I use nitrate. I will sprinkle that about six inches from each plant. That keeps the roots from rotting and from getting spotty tomatoes.”
Suckers are new shoots that grow out of the joint where a branch on the tomato plant meets a stem. These small shoots will grow into a full-sized branch if left alone, which results in a bushier, more sprawling tomato plant, and cause less fruit to grow.
Do not confuse the suckers with the main stems. Suckers will drain the energy from the plant and fruit, while the main stems will produce fruit and provide the energy from the sun for more and larger tomatoes.
"vegetable" - Google News
May 04, 2020 at 06:25PM
https://ift.tt/35s3frq
Big rise in first-time vegetable gardeners - Weakley County Press
"vegetable" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2CyIOeE
https://ift.tt/3aVzfVV
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Big rise in first-time vegetable gardeners - Weakley County Press"
Post a Comment