HFHK Tips for Starting a Garden

PREPARING, PLANTING, AND CARING FOR YOUR GARDEN

Prepare the soil for planting

1. You will need to turn the soil and add organic matter, such as weed-seed-free homemade compost, commercially available mushroom compost, or leaf compost (both of the latter available in bulk from soil suppliers or bagged).

2. We normally use a shovel to turn the soil first, then break up any clumps. An inch or two of compost is then spread over the soil and worked into the upper soil layer. Finally, we rake it smooth. (In our school gardens, classes of 2nd graders wear gloves and use hand cultivators to work in the compost and smooth the soil.)

3. Note that you should avoid cultivating the soil when it is very wet, especially if your soil does not contain much organic matter. If wet soil is cultivated (especially if it contains a lot of clay and not much organic matter), you will CREATE clumps of soil which will then be VERY hard to break up. This is especially a problem for in-ground gardens. Raised bed gardens drain quickly and are usually filled with soil containing lots of organic matter.

Here is a video showing how to prepare your soil for planting (please note that although you see them stepping inside the garden bed, we do NOT recommend doing that as it will compact the soil).

Planting your garden

1. Cool-weather crops: Cool-weather crops can withstand frost and a little snow so they can be planted in the very early spring and in fall. In HFHK school gardens, we start planting in mid-March, and use fast-growing crops like spinach, lettuce, radishes, Japanese turnips, arugula, kale and bok choy, which are ready in 6 – 8 weeks. In your own garden, you can also plant the slower growing cool-weather crops such as peas, carrots, beets.

2. Warm-weather crops: Vegetables such as tomatoes, peppers and eggplant should be started indoors. In Delaware, they are traditionally transplanted into the garden around Mother’s Day. This is also the date to start planting warm-weather crops from seed, such as cucumbers, squash and beans. If you get your garden off to an early start, you can grow and harvest an entire crop of fast growers like radishes before you transplant your tomatoes, etc. to that spot.

Here is a video showing how to plant seeds and transplant seedlings:

3. Transplanting your seedlings: If you start your own seedlings indoors, you will need to “harden off” the seedlings before you transplant to your garden. This involves exposing your seedlings to increasingly more sun over a period of days. Set them in the sun 15 min the first day, 30 min the next and so on until you have reached 8 hrs. Then they are ready to transplant. This is important so the plants don’t burn and die. It’s similar to gradually acclimating your skin to the intense sun before exposing your untanned body to an entire day at the beach in the sun.

4. Garden map & plant spacing: Draw a sketch of where you want to plant each crop in your garden. Different crops need differing amounts of space. Read the information on the back of each seed packet to help guide your map. Keep in mind that there are various ways to plant a garden. For small gardens without drip-irrigation, there is the “Square-foot” gardening method, which maximizes the use of space. Keep in mind that the information on the seed packets assumes you will be planting in long rows, like farmers do for irrigation purposes. The spacing on the seed packet also assumes that you will orient your rows north-south, and the spacing between the rows is designed so the rows won’t shade each other as the sun moves east to west each day. In a small home garden/raised bed, you can orient your rows east-west, as long as you put your tallest crops on the north side and taper down to the shortest crops on the south side. (This is because the sun comes from the south in the Northern hemisphere, and will prevent the tall crops from shading the shorter ones.) In a raised-bed garden, especially one with a linear drip irrigation system (such as HFHK uses in the school gardens), spacing between the rows can be closer than recommended on the seed packet, and spacing of the plants within the row can also be closer.

A Comprehensive Vegetable Garden layout guide can be found here. Thanks to Happy DIY Home for this useful information!

*HFHK recommends using raised beds for vegetables as soil in the ground may contain harmful contaminants. Determining whether there are contaminants requires testing which is done separately for each potential contaminant, so unless you know what you are looking for, it’s best to use raised beds for safety reasons.

Useful garden planning tool:

Good information about choosing plants (companion planting):

5. Planting the seeds: When HFHK plants with an entire classroom of children at once, we use stakes and strings to guide the children in digging a little ditch where they will plant the seed. (Note that the string is tied to the stakes close to the soil surface, so the children can put the back of their trowels right up against the string.) The depth of the ditch is the planting depth recommended on the seed packet. Students dig the ditch, sprinkle or place their seeds in it, and then gently cover with the recommended amount of soil.

6. After the seeds are planted, keep the soil evenly moist until you have uniform germination.