Ok, I plan on planting a vegetable garden next spring. I'm going to build a box made out of 2X6's the measures about 5 Ft. by 8 or 10 Ft. I would like to plant two types of Potatoes, carrots, and maybe one or two other crops. My only problem is that I'm new to all of this.

I'm looking on some advice to help get my soil ready. I live outside of St. Louis on the Illinois side, so we get lots of rain, and also have hot summers. Right now its a mixture of clay and plain old brown dirt. Should I build the box now and treat it like a compost pile until next spring or do you recommend something else?

Also, I've read a lot of information about spacing, should I just follow the instructions for each vegetable or is there another distance I should use?

5x10...not much room. Potatoes take up lots of room, as do tomatoes, and squash and cukes...

If your planning on next year....add your soil and treat it as a compost bin until fall...should be fine, but when it comes to spacing, if you dont respect each plants spacing rules, they wont do as well as if you do.....just by what ive seen over the years.

Give the plants the room that the tag recomends.

Howdy and welcome to the OG forum.

I never grow potatoes in good, prepared soil. When I want to enlarge the garden, I lay seed potatoes on the sod and just cover them with heaps of leaves, straw, old hay or other mulching material.

Spuds will grow nearly anywhere, so no use dedicating valuable real estate that could be used to grow other, more demanding crops. If you have an out-of-the-way part of the lawn to use, maybe plant your taters there.

Wayne

Heck why wait until next spring? You can plant peas now, get some sort of harvest from them, and till them under in the fall to fix lots of nitrogen.

Until three years ago, I hadn't planted a garden since I was a kid with a little corner in my parents back yard. When I finally got to a place and time where I could plant a garden again, I didn't really start until after June 1.

I pretty much did everything wrong, but I still got out a crop of beans, corn, lettuce, tomatoes, some herbs, carrots, radishes, even celery (about a handful).

Dig your dirt up until it's fluffy, plant some seeds from the rack in the supermarket and go for it. Don't worry about being the perfect organic grower right away, just grow something.

The sooner you get something in the ground, the sooner your education will begin, and no matter how much sage, or stupid, advice you get from us, you will learn more from the fruits of your own garden that you will evey learn from us.

Even if everything you plant dies and you get NO yield this year, you'll at least get lots of compost material. So grab your self a rake and hoe and dive right it!

And, oh yeah, welcome to the OG forums!

OH, and if you're building that box out of plain old framing lumber, 4x8 is probably the most cost effective size. Cut one 2x6 exactly in half and use 1/4x4" lag screws to secure them to the ends of the other two 2x6's. Two lag screws at each corner, or three if you want to be really persnickety. Line the inside of the box with plastic (try heavy duty leaf bags if you'd rather not buy a huge roll of Visquene) to make the box last longer.

I dedicate TWO such boxes just to potatoes, another one for salad vegetables.

Go out and grow something!

From personal experience keep the width of you beds no more than 4 feet. Reaching into the center of anything much wider when you get older will be a real chore. You may want ot spend some time with Lasagna Gardening 101,
http://ourgardengang.tripod.com/lasagna_gardening.htm
which can detail all you need to know on how to build a bed that will grow things quite well.

I second Kimm1's advice on the 4 foot beds and the website. I would also recommend you check out a couple books from your local library. They are: "Lasagna Gradening" and "Square Foot Gardening". They can answer a LOT of questions. The only real contention you might find about them on these forums is their "Garden Soil Formulas". For the most part, too expensive and unnecessary. Grass clippings and leaves will do you just as well in most cases.

quote:

Originally posted by BackyardFarmer:
Ok, I plan on planting a vegetable garden next spring. I'm going to build a box made out of 2X6's the measures about 5 Ft. by 8 or 10 Ft. I would like to plant two types of Potatoes, carrots, and maybe one or two other crops. My only problem is that I'm new to all of this.

I'm looking on some advice to help get my soil ready. I live outside of St. Louis on the Illinois side, so we get lots of rain, and also have hot summers. Right now its a mixture of clay and plain old brown dirt. Should I build the box now and treat it like a compost pile until next spring or do you recommend something else?

Also, I've read a lot of information about spacing, should I just follow the instructions for each vegetable or is there another distance I should use?

Yes, not much room. Why limit yourself? Are you an apartment dweller and short on space?

I'd tear out some ornamental stuff to use the space for food production. I pulled out a lot of my shrubs and turned them into garden space.

Oh, and welcome to the forums from the outer wristbone of the mitten.

I'm looking at some new space in my yard now, I may be able to do two 4 x 8 boxes. I live in the 'burbs and own a dog who needs space to run so I can't eat up to much of my yard.

I'm using this garden to supplement what I get from my grandfathers garden. He has about a one acre garden behind his house so me and my wife get tomatoes, corn, green beans, bell peppers, cucumbers, jalapeños, and okra from him all summer. Our goal is to try and eat as natural as possible, I hunt so I have a chest freezer full of deer steaks, roasts, and ground meat that I've harvested and processed myself, so with that and the veggies from my grandfather we should be set Until the fall or later, I just wanted to see if I could add some variety to what we have access to by planting some in our own yard.

On-in a new bed with grass clippings and yard waste as the first layers of its new existance, you will want to grow less demanding plants like potatoes this year. Simply turn the sod over and set out spuds and cover with leaves or other browns. Continue to layer in mulch till fall. Add no manure with spuds. Mulch only. Add table scraps to your compost on first year.

Next spring you can try tomatoes, cukes and on the third peppers or maybe carrots.

4 foot wide beds is about the limit of human reach.

Ok, so I spent some time in the yard measuring everything to see what I can do as far as space. I can build one 6x12 box and one 16x5 box. I can get the materials at lowes for $48.00. I think this is the most space that gets continuous sun that I can spare in my yard.

I'll takes some pictures once I finish building it Saturday morning.

New Gardener

Pay attention to the width everyone recommends 4Feet anything larger is too wide to get to the center without walking on the soil wich will compact it!!

I laid the boxes out using string and twine and was able to reach the center from both sides. The six foot box is a bit of a stretch but not anything thats uncomfortable.

One really cool thing about gardening is that the plants usually will forgive you on stuff like how wide you make your beds. They really don't care...your back might, but your plants won't.

I remember my first garden year when I planted lettuce in a 6x6 bed in rows 6" apart. It tasted really good and it sure did look pretty...