Hi!

Welcome to the forum. Every single one of us started out as a "new gardener" at some point, so don't be embarrassed to ask questions here.

It really WOULD take a book to tell you everything you need to know about veggie gardening, but I'll try to give you a little basic 'starter' info, and we can get into more complicated sub-topics later on as the growing season progresses.

SOIL: It all starts with the soil. Plant roots actually grow in the open space between soil particles, so you need loose, friable soil which contains a lot of organic material. Loam or sandy loam are ideal for growing veggies. If you have either extremely sandy or silty soil, or (even worse) very dense clay soil, you can improve these soils with the addition of organic material.

Organic matter comes in many forms. Over the years I have improved my dense clay by adding the following (not all at once!): compost (home-made or purchased), pine bark fines, peat moss, composted animal manure (chicken, cow, horse, rabbit, etc.), chopped/shredded leaves or leaf mold, greensand, lava sand, soft phosphate powder, blood meal, bone meal, humus, and peat moss. You can till these in using a tiller, or spade them in by hand.

You also could build a garden using the "lasagna gardening" method of piling up layers of organic material on top of the existing soil, but that is a whole topic in and of itself. Pat Lanza has a great book on "lasagna gardening" (a couple of books, actually) and I think there probably is a lasagna gardening forum here at Garden Web.

DRAINAGE: For the best results, you need garden soil that drains well. If you already have well-draining soil, you are ahead of the game. If not, you will greatly improve your soil drainage by adding the organic material discussed above.

RAISED BEDS: Building raised beds that are a minimim of 4" to 8" above the existing grade of the yard will improve drainage if you have poorly draining soil. You can edge the beds with any thing you want, although I wouldn't recommend using chemically-treated landscape timbers. Or, you can just mound up the soil without any sort of edging, but you will have erosion problems. Mulching mounded un-edged beds will have slow down erosion.

SELECTING A SITE: To grow veggies successfully, place your garden where it will receive a minimum of 8 hours of sunlight per day. You can have a garden in a somewhat shadier area, but your yields will be lower.

GRASS REMOVAL: Remove all grass and weed roots before you add organic material to the soil. This is EXTREMELY important if you have bermuda grass. If you leave 1/4" pieces of bermuda stolons every 3', the bermuda will completely cover the garden area by the end of the growing season.

WALNUT TREES: If, by chance, you are trying to plant a garden near black walnut trees, you will find that some plants cannot grow in that location because of a chemical (juglone) produced by the black walnut trees.

TIMING: Some plants grow and produce better in cool weather while others grow and produce better in hotter weather. Timing is everything. Onions, for example, are a cool season crop. Onions are planted in mid-winter and harvested in early to mid-summer. Tomatoes, peppers and okra, on the other hand, are planted in mid- to late-spring and harvested in mid- to late-summer. For each type of veggie you grow, proper timing of planting is the key to success.

WATER: Vegetables need the proper amount of water to grow. To a certain extent, you are at the mercy of the weather. In a wet year, you cannot do much to avoid 'too much rain', although having raised beds will help keep the plants from drowning. In a dry year, you can irrigate. Soaker hoses or drip irrigation are recommended as they keep water off plant foliage (wet foliage is VERY disease prone) and also conserve water.

FERTILIZER: As an organic gardener, I prefer to "feed the soil" by enriching it with organic material and then let the soil feed the plants. I also use some organic fertilizers, especially those made by Espoma.

Some people choose to use chemical fertilizers and I respect their right to do so. Although I choose to be mostly, if not totally, organic, I would never quarrel with someone else's choice to use chemicals. Having gardened both chemically and organically at different points in my life, I simply believe organic is better.

It is important that you do not over-fertilize your plants with either organic or chemical fertilizers. Plants that are over-fertilized are more attractive to disease and insects. In addition (unless they are producing leaf crops), over-fertilization often gives you "all foliage, little fruit" in the case of certain veggies like tomatoes and peppers.

PEST CONTROL: A veggie garden that is grown in well-prepared, well-drained, properly-fertilized soil will be able to survive most attacks by insects and other bugs. In most cases, if you leave the bugs/insects alone, the plants will recover on their own. In other cases, there are some great organic rememdies, including beneficial insects and bacteria, that can take care of insect issues without you having to resort to using toxic insecticides. (By the way, some organic insecticides are so toxic I don't use them and I seldom resort to the use of chemical insecticides on food crops.)

VARIETY SELECTION: Most plants grow well in our climate but some do not. Selecting proven varieties increases your chances of success.

SEEDS OR TRANSPLANTS? Some crops grow best when started as seed planted in the ground. Other crops grow best as transplants purchased (or ones that you raise yourself) and transplanted into properly-prepared soil.

ONIONS: Onions can be grown from either sets (small, dry onions) purchased in bags, or small plants (with the bulb end smaller than the diameter of a pencil) purchased in bundles. For reasons too complicated to go into here, they are generally difficult to grow from seed that is sown directly in the garden.

TOMATOES AND BELL PEPPERS: Must be planted as transplants. Because of our extreme summer heat, these cannot be grown from seed sown directly into the garden. If you direct sow tomato or pepper seed once the soil is warm enough for it to sprout, you won't harvest ripe tomatoes or peppers until late summer or early autumn at the earliest. On the other hand, you can have tomatoes and peppers to harvest from transplants as little as 2 months after they are transplanted into the garden.

HERBS: Many can be direct-seeded, but a few grow best when set out as transplants (rosemary and lavender generally do better if set out at transplants). Some herbs are annuals, some are biennials and some are perennials. Growing herbs is VERY rewarding and the flavor of just-picked herbs is vastly superior to those you buy in the grocery store.

EAST-WEST OR NORTH-SOUTH? This is a hard question to answer because there are so may variables, including the physical lay of the land on which you garden (flat or sloped?), the prevailing winds in your area during the growing season, and the amount of shade you have to deal with.

In general, though, think carefully about the issue of shade. It is usually better to plant tall crops like corn or indeterminate tomatoes on the northern side of the garden so they will not shade shorter crops. On the other hand, if you have plants like peppers or rhubarb that benefit from some shade in the hottest part of the summer, you might want to plant something tall on the west or south side of them to give them a little summer shade.

For example, I like to plant rhubarb where it gets sun until about noon or so and then shade to partial shade throughout the afternoon. Peppers like a little afternoon shade too. Corn, tomatoes, beans, black-eyed peas and okra prefer LOTS of sun. Lettuce benefits from partial shade.

Because I garden on a very complicated slope, I have some beds that run east-west and some that run north-south. In my particular circumstance, this is necessary to reduce erosion, which is a real problem on our land.

Some vegetable gardeners in my local area that garden on flat land have beds that run north-south. Others have beds that run east-west. Both seem to have similar success.

GARDEN WITH NATURE, NOT AGAINST IT. This sounds logical, but you'd be surprised at how many people fight nature continually. I'll give you a couple of examples. Some plants are made to grow in cool weather and will produce good crops in cool weather but not in hot weather. So, if you try to get cool season crops to grow in the hottest weather, you will be very frustrated. Conversely, if you try to plant heat-loving plants too early, they may die if exposed to freezing temps or may survive but not thrive.

If you try to keep ALL the insects out of your garden, you WILL have massive insect problems. Why? Because everything in the garden is part of an endless cycle of life. If you try to kill off ALL the bugs, the bad bugs will rebound more quickly and the good bugs will rebound more slowly. This means that you won't have enough good bugs around at the right time to eat all the bad bugs and, therefore, the bad bugs will overpopulate and destroy your crops. Some of the insects that are considered beneficial in the garden include lady bugs, green lacewings, earthworms, ground beetles, and beneficial wasps.

In addition, the use of broad-spectrum pesticides can kill off wasps, bees, flies and other pollinators that are essential for some garden crops.

So, in order for your garden to succeed, try working with and not against Mother Nature.

Growing your own herbs and veggies can be a lot of fun. It is important, though, to relax and focus on enjoying the process as well as the final result--your harvest.

Try not to obsess about every little setback because raising a veggie garden in our wildly variable Oklahoma climate will drive you nuts if you let it.

You have to be flexible and go with the flow. Most 'garden disasters' are survivable.

In Oklahoma you have to deal with wildly varying temperatures, especially in the springtime, as well as wind, late snow/ice in April, tornadoes, hail, high winds during thunderstorms, torrential rainfall (my garden's 'record rainfall' is 9.25" in one day, and 8" of that in 4 hours), months of drought, wildfire and plagues of grasshoppers and army worms. Is any of this a reason NOT to garden? No. Just keep whatever bizarre event occurs in perspective.....and keep your sense of humor.

Veggie gardening should add joy and zest to your life, but that joy and zest is often accompanied by stress and frustration. Enjoy the process and don't sweat the small stuff.

Hope this info helps.

Dawn

Dawn, you are great. I appreciate your being so thorough since I, also, would like to expand to more vegetables and herbs.

I know you gave an explanation of companion plants (for me with roses), but would you explain, or show a picture of how you handle a steep slope? Our recent ice storm has given me an opportunity - forced opportunity - to begin some of my large rose shrubs at a much smaller size. I can also look more carefully at my hillside. I do know that I need to give myself more entrances to the hill, but also need to shore up my plants. I would love to hear how you do it.

Sammy

Hi Sammy!

I hope your holidays were great and that you are doing well. How badly did the ice damage your roses?

Our slope runs downhill from west to east AND from south to north. So, the southwest corner of my vegetable garden is the highest part of the garden and the northeast corner sits about 4 feet lower and is the lowest part of the garden. Most of my raised beds run east-west, but at either end of the east-west beds, I have a couple of north-south beds. And, at the end of the north-south beds, I have a couple of beds that run east-west. This positioning of the beds breaks up the flow of the water and slows it down, which means we have less erosion.

If all the beds ran in the same direction, my pathways between raised beds would carry all the rain water in the same direction. Having some beds that run the opposite way creates some little "dams" that break the flow of the water.

We also have a retention pond at the northeastern corner of the veggie garden, just outside the garden fence, and the water that runs off the garden flows into this pond. The pond is an important erosion control tool for us. Without the retention pond, the runoff would go straight down the slope into the bar ditch and from there would flow into the creek and then into the Red River.

With droughts occurring fairly often, capturing runoff in the retention pond helps us capture the water that otherwise would run off. The pond also creates some habitate for turtles, frogs, toads, etc. and I like that.

Our raised beds are not anything fancy, just soil raised about 6" to 8" above the surrounding grade. The raised beds improve drainage and that improves the yield in the veggie garden.

If I had it all to do over again, and IF money was not an obstacle, I would have used either ornamental stone, concrete blocks or cedar or redwood landscape timbers to raise the level of the lower part of the garden 4' so I could garden on level ground. Of course, that kind of work was far beyond what we could afford to do.

I am fairly happy with the way the positioning of the raised beds slow down the flow of the water. A lot of the farmers around me do contour farming to achieve the same thing, but they can change their contours whenever they want with their tractors. Because I have wood-framed raised beds, I am stuck in a less flexible arrangement.

EVERYTHING is heavily mulched, including the pathways, in order to further reduce erosion. Still, if we have a thunderstorm that dumps several inches of rain in one day, erosion does occur and a lot of mulch washes out and has to be gathered up and put back into place.

However, as the tilth of the soil increases over time, I have noticed that more and more water soaks in instead of running off. After almost ten years here, erosion is not nearly as much of a problem as it used to be, so I think I am making progress.

If I had ornamental garden beds instead of a veggie garden in this location, I probably would have the land terraced, using wood or stone. I'd also use companion plants around the roses and strategically placed large rocks/boulders to help break up the downstream flow of water.

If I still had a lot of water running through the rose beds, I think we would probably put in some French drains, but even those are not going to be as effective during heavy, heavy rains.

I love the look of artificially-created dry streambeds, landscaped with a combination of rocks and plants, and usually built on top of heavy-duty landscape fabric to hold the soil in place. One of these days I'd like to put in a dry streambed to run from the garden diagonally across to the woods to divert some of the rain runoff that tends to head towards the bar ditch and road. My list of things I'd like to do, unfortunately, is long and the years go by so quickly!

Dawn

Hi Bagardenermom,

I live between BA and Bixby. I have a BA address, 74011 and a Bixby phone number! Anyway, I've been growing all the plants that you are wanting to plant for 30+ years. You should find them all relatively easy to grow.

Our soil tends to be sandy loam with a silty clay in it. So it needs some material to loosen it up. I use pine bark mulch. I look for the bags with the smallest pieces. This adds good aeration and provides organic matter. Adding Back to Nature Cotton seed mulch is another good source of organic matter. Compost is excellent if you have it. If you don't treat your lawn, start a compost bin with grass clippings, leaves, vegetable and fruit scraps, coffee grounds, etc. I have a source for pony poo so let me know if you need any. You need some type of manure to get the compost to perking. Or you can use chicken manure, available at most nurseries. The pelleted kind does not smell as strongly as the fresh does.

The best places to obtain herbs if you are not growing from seeds are at Southwood and Sanders. SW always has a huge selection and is very reasonable. Rosemary and thyme are fairly winter hardy here. Oregano comes back also. Parsley, being a biennial will die down the second season, but mine always reseeds prolifically. The only ammendment I added to my herb bed is Back to Nature. That's because I don't have compost here yet. (We have lived at this location for 3 years.) I work the soil by spading it to a depth of about 15 to 18 inches, making sure to remove the roots. It doesn't take much space to plant herbs.

I built a raised bed for the tomatoes which need to be rotated each year. I used B to N and a mushroom compost dressing for these. In the past, I have mixed gypsum, compost, and tomato food together and mixed this in the bottom of each planting hole. I don't put out tomatoes before April 15th. This year was later as we had the late freeze. And I wait until May for pepper plants. If you start from seed, you need to start indoors about February 1st. We always put out the onion sets between February 15th and March 17th, the dates for all cool season crop planting here. Conrads has good plants, onion sets, and seeds available.

This past year I started my tomato plants from seed and had good crops right up until the frost. I tried to protect the plants, but the wind was so strong the night it frosted, that it blew right through the protection!

Another plant you might want to consider is cucumbers. Just a few vines of a burpless cucumber will give you fresh cukes for your salads. You can easily start these from seeds, but wait until May to plant.

I don't post often on the Ok gardening forum, but I'm always reading the posts. You can usually find me on the butterfly forum, as I'm an avid BF gardener and raise lots of different BFs. BTW, I will have flower and vegetable plants to share in the spring.

Welcome to GW. It's a great place to get info and meet lots of nice folks.

Sandy

I did not know that there were other Forum members in BA. My address is also in BA, but 74012. I write Tulsa since it is known nationwide.

Sammy

Hello, thought I would jump in. I also live in Broken Arrow. I seldom post, but I read all the time. You all are great, lots of good information and has helped me a lot. I don't plant veggies, just flowers. Also some herbs. I too like to shop at Southwood and Sanders. Does anyone go to the herb festivals in April. There's one about every weekend. I especially like the one in Jenks.

Hi neighbors!

I love the herb festival in Jenks. I like to order plants from Wild Things to pick up at the festival. So, we have quite a few BA people here. That's great. We'll have to rendevous sometime.

Sandy

Hello Tulsa BA peeps.
I live in Tulsa 74136. Don't grow much veggies, just a few maters, and some peppers. But I do have herbs, and flowers.

I have lived here for 3 years now, and with the latest ice storm my yard will be more sunny in the future.

Have you heard of the master gardeners program? I completed it in 2005. We (master gardeners) have a plant sale each April, and I personally get my herb plants there.

Hope you all survived the power outage without to many days without.

Moni

Here is a link that might be useful: Tulsa Master Gardeners

Wow, what a great day to find Garden Web. Through a Google search for Herb Festivals I came across this site. I also live in Broken Arrow and love to, as my husband says, "dig in the dirt". I've just recently moved from a large lot to a very small one so I'm trying to find room for my flowers, herbs, and a tomato plant. I love attending the herb festivals and wondered if anyone had dates for Sand Springs, Jenks, or any others in the area.

Thanks for the enjoyable reading and good information.

Sue

Sue,

The Sand Springs Herbal Affair and Festival is scheduled for April 19, 2008.

The Jenks Herb and Plant Festival is scheduled for April 26, 2008.

Dawn

Thanks Dawn. It's now on my calendar and I can't wait!

Sue

Hey I noticed someone mentioned rosemary overwintering here ok? I didn't know that! Is there any special type that you grow? Any special care? Oh the things to learn!!!

BAGARDENERMOM- hey I totally love the starting seeds indoors thing too but if this is your first time gardening also feel free to BUY some transplants around April at your local store or even walmart. You can always do both too. But I just wanted to make sure that you know just buying a few transplants at wally world is a GREAT no pressure way to get started in gardening! Also, if you need some time to make a garden bed and build up soil this summer- consider container gardening too while you work on the yard garden started. Just remember that you will have to water and keep an eye on any pots that will get dried out quickly in our heat and WIND! Look for some dwarf varieties of plants to get you started in container gardening. For more info google it- its a pretty popular style for people with no yards or even apartments!

Backyardmomma,

Two of the more cold-hardy rosemary varieties are "Arp" and "Madalene Hill", which is sometimes sold as "Hill Hardy".

Dawn

I wish I could remember the rosemary variety I have. I started it from seed last spring. I put one of them near a south-facing brick wall and it appears to have survived just fine. This is the first winter I have tried; I usually buy a new one each year.

Gayle

Gayle,

The only rosemary seed I have ever seen sold in seed packets is the common, everyday Rosemarinus officianalis. Rosemary usually does not come true from seed, so it is possible (though not likely) to get more than one type of rosemary from a packet of seed. If you get one you like, and you want exact replicas of it, it is best to root cuttings from that plant. I think there are over 100 named varieties of Rosemary.

Dawn

So the best way to get the variety recommended for our cooler climate is to purchase plants then and not seed? Sounds like I need to order it online? But I am wondering if I hold out on ordering if there would be a chance I could find one at the Jenks herb festival. I've never been but I am assuming thats a place where I could find a wider variety of herbs. How are the prices there compared to ordering online? Just wondering since this will be my first year to go!
Gayle- when did you start your rosemary from seed? Was it this time of the year or do you need to wait till after frost date? How fast does it grow? Do they get as big in our area or do they stay more dwarf size? (although it may depend on variety)
Thanks everyone- I learn so much from all the garden talk!

I started it indoors, I think about this time of year. I have a big south-facing window so I can get by with it, without artificial lights.

Even so, once things have sprouted I try to put them outdoors when weather permits. I put plastic storage tubs upside down over the flats to keep the wind off of them. Like little mini-greenhouses. The things that like lots of heat go on the blacktop driveway with plastic tubs, and the things that like it a little cooler get some sun protection and/or ventilation of the tubs. I lay some rocks on top so they won't blow away.

Rosemary tends to have poor germination so I think I got lucky to get my three.

Gayle