starting a garden

[Storm]

Yikes, I have never been interested in gardening at all. I have recently gotten interested in herbology. I am studying and not ready yet but I would like to start a small garden this year and see how I do. I was thinking of maybe four or five herbs but narrowing it down is hard. A few safe and practical herbs, I think. Also I was thinking some roses and maybe violets. Wondering if anyone knew of any faery friendly flowers. I have read of herbs but I was thinking of a few just flowers. I live in wisconsin if that matters. Also if anyone has any words of wisdom for me it would be much welcome.

[Raevyn]

Hi storm I'm with you in this boat - we just moved to our house at the end of October and now I can't wait 'till spring comes, and I was thinking it'd be nice to start a garden. Of course, I live in a totally different environment then you probably (being here in Canada), but I'm interested to know what would be easy to grow flowers and plants.

Basically, I'm starting with no idea of what I'm doing

[Demeter]

A little narrowing down is a good idea. First choose which herbs you are most likely to use for your own cooking, baking, medical and/or magickal purposes. For a basic herb garden, many people start with the popular cooking herbs: chives (regular and/or garlic), oregano, marjoram, basil (regular and lemon - there are lots of other types but best to hold off on them until you find out whether basils in general do well for you), mint (planted in separate pots because if you get them in your regular garden they will take over the world!) and the Simon & Garfunkel herbs: parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme. Cilantro is popular if you like southwestern type food (but I think it tastes like soap ) I am also partial to tarragon, but not everyone likes its slightly anise flavor.

Of these, basil is an annual and parsley is biennial but treated as an annual - these will have to be replaced yearly, so they should have a part of your bed where pulling them won't disturb the annuals.

Some flowers can be mixed into the herb garden: garlic chives growing under roses may help prevent aphids from getting them too badly. Mexican marigolds (tagetes, the smelly kind) are supposed to help ward off nematodes from other plants. Flowers and leaves from nasturtiums are edible (slightly peppery) and can be added to salads. The petals of roses and anything from the violet family can be candied.

Here's an idea for a square garden four feet on a side. so you can reach into the center easily. (This is just a sample, you can design your garden any way you want, but this could give you a start.)

Start by marking off your square. I recommend raised beds, especially in northern areas; they drain and warm faster than regular beds. The easiest way to do this is to take four-foot long boards (2x4 is good) and fasten them together to make a square frame. If you have grass, you can start by either removing the sod and composting it, or composting in place: that is, cover the grass with a thick layer of newspapers or a sheet of heavy cardboard. Put the frame on top to hold the paper down. Then fill the frame with a mixture of topsoil and compost and vermiculite and water until thoroughly moist. I will assume that you orient your square so the points are at north, south, east and west.

For the rose, your biggest plant, you will have to dig a deeper hole, so do that first, then orient your bed around the hole.

Your biggest plants should go in the center and the north, so as not to shade other plants. Put your rose in the center point, and put chives or garlic chives under it. (One clump pot at the garden center is actually 10-20 small plants, and if you pick them out and plant them separately, they will form more clumps. Put your sage in the north (maybe pick a variegated leaf kind for visual interest). Western point: oregano. Eastern point: marjoram. Southern point: thyme. Northwestern side: several tarragon plants. Northeastern side: parsley. Southwestern and southeastern sides: basil and lemon basil. Keep them pinched off to keep them low and bushy. Around the outside edge of the box, put dwarf marigolds in each corner and violets or pansies along the sides. If you have a fence, you could train climbing nasturtiums up it and put other edible flowers at their feet. Mints and rosemary should be potted up; the mints to keep them under control and the rosemary because it is tender and will die if you don't bring it in for the winter.

The fastest way to get your garden going is to buy seedlings; get them as early as possible so that they don't have a chance to be pot-bound. With the flowering ones, DON'T get the cute ones that are blooming like crazy in the flats at the garden center: that means they have already outgrown the pot, are in distress, and probably won't grow well in the garden. You are better off getting the smaller but healthier plants. Put all your plants in the garden and then mulch with more compost or with wood chips to prevent the growth of volunteer herbs, otherwise known as "weeds" - some will show up regardless, but if you catch them early they're easy to tweak out. Or let them stay, if you want.

You can do all this in two days: one to set up the garden box, one to do the planting (you want to get the plants in as early in the a.m. as possible).

Here are a couple of websites you may find useful:

Mel Bartholomew's Square Foot Gardening site:
http://www.squarefootgardening.com/

and a very busy gardening message board that I frequent. There are many very helpful people there and a special forum for herbs and another for gardening for newbies:

http://forums.gardenweb.com/forums/

I realize I have been kind of long-winded here. Sorry.

[Lavender]

Wow! That's wonderful stuff, Demeter! Not long winded at all!

I'm going to stick this in one of our resources threads. Yup!

[Storm]

"One clump pot at the garden center is actually 10-20 small plants, and if you pick them out and plant them separately, they will form more clumps."

I am guessing that "garden center" is the store and not THE gardens center point and "one pot clump" is a pot with a clump of herb? Sounds pretty clear but I just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing something.

"Keep them pinched off to keep them low and bushy" Does that mean pruning?

I wanted some red clover in there. I love clover...Could I edge it with that.

"Around the outside edge of the box, put dwarf marigolds in each corner and violets or pansies along the sides. " This is actually outside of the box?


This is excellent. Thank you so much. When do I start planting. After there is no chance of snow? That could be as late as May and we have been known to have an inch or two as late as May 10th.

[Blueowl]

Faery friendly plants...here is alist I picked up along the search engine and posted in another forum I am a mod in...
www.enchantedfaeriesforest.com There I have all the herbal and faery info posted there.

1. Apple
2. Bluebells
3. CLover
4. Elderberry
5. Elfswort
6. Foxglove
7. Heather
8. Lilac
9. Misteltoe
10. Peony
11. Poppies
12. Primrose
13. Roses
14. thyme

[Demeter]

Originally posted by Storm

"One clump pot at the garden center is actually 10-20 small plants, and if you pick them out and plant them separately, they will form more clumps."

I am guessing that "garden center" is the store and not THE gardens center point and "one pot clump" is a pot with a clump of herb? Sounds pretty clear but I just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing something.

"Keep them pinched off to keep them low and bushy" Does that mean pruning?

I wanted some red clover in there. I love clover...Could I edge it with that.

"Around the outside edge of the box, put dwarf marigolds in each corner and violets or pansies along the sides. " This is actually outside of the box?


This is excellent. Thank you so much. When do I start planting. After there is no chance of snow? That could be as late as May and we have been known to have an inch or two as late as May 10th.

Sorry for not being clear. "The garden center" in that reference is the place that sells all the gardening stuff, including plants. Chives are usually sold in a little pot that has a whole bunch of little plants that look like grass. Each one of those plants is a bulblet with just a few leaves. If you carefully separate out the tiny bulblets and plant them out spread an inch or so apart, they will multiply to fill in the space, the same way daffodils and crocuses multiply. If you let them bloom and go to seed, they will also spread that way. Then next year you can dig up the new clumps and spread those out ... and by the year after that, you will be potting up chives and giving them to your friends ...

With basils and many other plants, you prune by pinching off the top pair of leaves with your fingers when you think the stem is tall enough. Since that's the growing point of the plant, that stem can't grow any more, and it will put out a couple of more branches, making the plant bushier. Then when those are as tall as you want them, you can pinch them off too. Basil likes to be tall and leggy with only a few stalks (unless you specifically buy a bush type), but it will easily become a bushier plant with judicious pinching.

When I said around the "outside edge of the box" I meant just inside the rim, in your good raised bed garden dirt. Although if you wanted, you could dig up a few inches around the outside of the box and put in a lower level, just one row, of flowers.

It should be noted that the violets are a cool-weather flower. They will bloom in the spring and maybe again in the fall. The marigolds are a warm-weather flower and bloom in the summer and early fall. Deadhead the marigolds (remove spent flowers and seed pods) in order to keep them blooming. The basil should also have flowers pinched off, otherwise it will set seed and then die back.

Both red and white clover would be good additions since they are nitrogen fixing and will help other plants grow stronger, and they will also attract bees. Red clover is a little taller, so you could maybe tuck that in toward the center of your garden and put white around the outside. (Or just sprinkle white clover seed all over your lawn ... LOL ... I have horrified lawn purists by suggesting that, but having variety in your grass makes your whole yard ecosystem so much stronger! Last time we had a drought, I had the only green yard on the block, because most of it was "weeds" which were more resistant to the drought than the neighbors' grass lawns.)

Note to would-be herb growers: anytime you see something in your yard or garden that you didn't plant there, find out what it is and what it is good for before you root it out. Odds are you probably have quite a good herb garden in your lawn already. For example, my last yard had plantain, dandelions, violets, wood sorrel, chickweed, ground ivy, ajuga, red and white clover, and quite a lot of other stuff in there. One year I had volunteer "butter and eggs" snapdragons in the lawn. The Goddess only knows where those came from. The ground ivy was the only stuff I rooted out, and I removed the dandelion flowers to prevent them seeding and getting the neighbors angry, but left the plants in place.

[Demeter]

Oh, and check the instructions for planting on the back of the herb seed packet or the little plastic instruction spike in the plant pot. That will tell you when it's safe to plant out. The tenderer herbs (like basil) shouldn't go out until well past your last frost, but the hardy stuff could go in before that if you wanted to space out your planting. Or ask the folks at the garden center, who will know the safe dates for planting in your area.

And just buying a packet of chive seed would be less work than breaking up a clump; just sprinkle, pat into the earth, water and wait. But you don't get the immediate gratification. On the other hand, the feeling when your first little green babies pop their heads up out of the soil! Unbeatable!

[Lavender]

Originally posted by Raevyn

Hi storm I'm with you in this boat - we just moved to our house at the end of October and now I can't wait 'till spring comes, and I was thinking it'd be nice to start a garden. Of course, I live in a totally different environment then you probably (being here in Canada), but I'm interested to know what would be easy to grow flowers and plants.

Basically, I'm starting with no idea of what I'm doing

I know, here in Vancouver, we start getting our bedding plants in the garden stores about mid March or ealier. Usaually, I start my seeds indoors about now so they have a longer growing season. But I don't plant anything outside until end of April or early May. It depends on the weather. Once you've decided what you would like in your garden, the easiest thing is to go to the local garden centre. If you're not sure whether to get the plants or seeds, check the seed packages. Most of them will tell you if it will be difficult to germinate. Some will describe special instructions & what nots.

For easy-to-grow plants, I love Calendulas...they're like big marigolds. They are very hardy and easy to grow. The flowers and leaves can be eaten in salads. The petals can be harvested & dried for teas or infused in oils to make lotions and salves. A good all-around herb/flower/whatever. You can buy these as bedding plants or start them yourself from seeds. They germinate quite fast and will self seed and cover your whole yard if you let them. Generally, they're annuals but I have some that seems to last all winter if they're in a protected area. And yes, those ones bloom through the winter too.

Sunflowers are a must-have in any garden. I love the multicolour ones. They are easy to start from seeds and grow quickly. You can save the seeds (the ones the birds and squirrels didn't get) and plant them next year. It's amazing how many different varieties of sunflowers there are!

Lavenders are wonderful but get them as a plant. Lavender from seeds don't always grow true...and they can be finicky to start. Once you get them established, they can last for years. Some varieties are a bit more tender than others. It just means that you'll have to cover them in the winter.

[Storm]

This is all so Excellent!!!! Thanks for all the wonderfull information. I am a little less nervous about it now. Woo hoo. Can't wait to go to Steins!!!