Douglas Green - Guide to Canadian Vegetable Gardening

Ive got lots of tips and hints to share with you, but Im putting my absolute top seven rules of thumb first in this book for a reason. This is what its all about in vegetable gardening.

Planting. Ive said that close counts, but its better to plant shallower rather than deeper. This doesnt mean we want to create shallow relationships with all our vegetable friends, but it does mean that if you have a choice to plant seeds a little too deeply or too shallowly, then pick shallow every time.

Mulch. If you do nothing more, if you learn nothing else from this book, I hope you learn that mulch is the key in our modern soils to creating and maintaining a great garden. A 7-cm layer of mulch will reduce your weeding and work by 80 percent; a 10-cm layer will bring that labour-saving into the mid-90 percent range. And the decaying mulch adds the necessary organic matter that makes your soil better.

Organic. Modern plant research has proven organic methods create both a more nutritious vegetable crop with more vitamins and minerals and a healthier plant that is far less susceptible to insects and diseases. I also notice that more municipalities and provinces are banning the use of agricultural chemicals for home use, so learning about organic production is not only smart, its going to be necessary.

Compost. If you want superior results, learn how to make compost and compost tea. This is not only good recycling, its state-of-the-art research findings. The objective to adding compost to a garden is to provide the beneficial microorganisms that help our plants. Compost tea is the method we use to do this when we cant produce enough compost; a handful of good compost will produce enough compost tea and microorganisms for an acre of ground.

Taste. Not only can you can save energy and money by growing your own, but fresh is better. You already know this but you wont truly understand it until youve picked a cob of corn and its cooking within one minute of being picked. You wont understand this until youve tasted celery (yes, it does have a taste), or fresh carrots, or a vine-ripened tomato sliced between two pieces of freshly buttered toast. Fresh from your garden is the way its supposed to be and the way many of us have forgotten.

Selection. Have enough confidence in your taste buds to make your own plant choices. Plants that come from big garden shops and chain stores are not chosen for your region. They are centrally grown and shipped from seed that is chosen for germination rates rather than taste. You can do better yourself with a little practice and discrimination about which varieties you like or by finding a local garden shop that sells the plants that grow well for the owners. All plants are not created equal when it comes to both taste and performance; youre going to find variability from year to year even in the same variety. If you start to obsess over which tastes best, see the first two gardening rules.

Variety. Choose the standard plants youll eat, then add one or two interesting varieties every year to experiment with. Dont start with one of everything in the seed catalogue (although I know youll ignore this advice and wind up with far too many seeds) but rather restrict yourself to things you actually eat. And yes, when you do succumb to the just-this-one-more siren call, seeds do last from year to year and youll easily get three years out of most seeds if you store them in a cool and dry place.