Gardening Guru
By Ron Rothroch
(Jan. 2015) Happy New Year everyone.
Now that the holidays are over and the gardening magazines are appearing in your mailbox we start thinking about planting in our flower and vegetable gardens. My goal here is to inspire and inform you on various areas of gardening techniques while saving you time, money and effort.
To garden inexpensively some tips include:
- Don’t start too early. The last day for frost in central New York is around Memorial Day so planting flowers and vegetables, except for early planting peas, you may lose plants by putting them out too soon, I know I have.
- Buy used .Consider buying used garden tools at garage sales; flee markets, craigslist or other places to keep costs down. Sometimes you can even find good resource gardening books.
- Buy seeds on sale. Seeds from catalogs can be a bit pricey plus shipping. Check clearance sections at local stores, seeds are still good from last year. Another thing to think about when ordering seeds are… if you are getting seeds from a warm climate, ie Florida or California; ask if they will they do well in New York? Ask where your seeds were grown before buying. Plants grown in a cool area of the US will grow much better in our area of New York.
- Free fertilizer. You can make you own fertilizer by making your own compost. You can make a compost bin; I have one made using cement blocks. You don’t have to build a bin you can just pile it up. No room? Just dig a trench in your garden and fill it with plants and table scraps (DO NOT put any meat products or diseased plants in this mix).
- Seedlings. If you think you want to start your own seedlings indoors start saving egg cartons, yogurt cups and small plastic containers, they make great seed-starter pots.
- Share. Become friends with other gardeners. Most gardeners enjoy sharing plants and seeds, plus shared advice is free and your knowledge will increase and your mistakes less. I recommend joining a garden club for all of these reasons.
- Container gardening. If you don’t have the room for a garden, consider growing in pots. You can grow vegetables in containers as well as strawberries and small blueberry bushes in containers. If you grow in large containers fill the pot half way with crumpled plastic bottles before adding the soil, you’ll save weight and soil.
Tip of the day: Use inexpensive popsicle sticks or old blind slats as plant or row markers.
Sow lettuce seed in January or February on top of frozen snow for earlier than spring sown lettuce.
Before you break out your rototiller and work hard at tilling your garden this spring know that you will bring millions, yes millions of weed seeds to the surface. The new way of gardening is to forego tilling and just hoe where you want to plant and plant your seedlings or seeds. By not tilling the soil it is proven that keeping the soil structure intact and not disturbing the earthworms and their tunnels the soil is healthier for growing plants in with a small amount of weeds to deal with. Food for thought, pun intended.
Happy gardening from the gardening Guru.
Ron Rothrock is a USAF retired Master Sergeant who has many years of experience in landscaping and gardening, growing berries, vegetables and fruit trees. He loves tinkering in his greenhouse, specializing in perennials.