Growing Great Fruit and Vegetables

Spring is in the air and the urge to get out and plant is strong, but this yearly urge must wait another few weeks as the ground is still covered in at least a foot of snow and the temperatures are hovering around zero Celsius. It is even too early to start seed indoors as it is at least nine weeks before we can begin to plant anything out. Well maybe some peas if the ground thaws early and the weather is warm but little else, especially the heat lovers like tomatoes and cucumbers.

This year I will be growing in containers on the second floor balcony. However it matters little where you grow or what you grow, what truly matters is how your grow.

Cucumbers may not be the best plant for the novice but if you know what they need and make the effort to see they get what they need you can grow them and just about anything else. The following short list will give you some tips for growing some of the vegetable garden essentials.

Cucumbers:

The cucumber is a demanding plant. They have an extensive root system that requires regular watering and good healthy soil to grow best. The plant will tolerate a variety of soils but it will do best in a loose well-drained soil that is complemented with organic matter such as well-rotted manure or compost before planting. The soil pH should be between 6.0 and 7.0.

Strawberries:

There are four basic types of strawberries. They are June bearing or spring bearing, ever bearing and day neutral.

The fruits of day neutral plants and ever bearers are usually smaller than June-bearers fruit.

June bearing strawberries are classified into early, mid-season and late varieties.

Onions:

Onions are not all the difficult to grow. First off, you have two types of onions, summer onions and winter onions. Summer onions are fresh onions that come in yellow red and white and have a fairly thin skin.

These are the sweet onions, the ones that you are most likely to find in your sandwich or salad. It is their high water content that makes them sweet.

Companions Planting:

Companion or compatible planting is the first step towards understanding plant communities and how designing you garden as a functioning community of plants that benefit from each others’ company is a natural model that increases your garden’s vitality.

Perhaps, one of the oldest plant communities that we know of is the Three Sisters, beans, corn and squash. It is a First Nations planting method that goes back for several centuries and is often associated with the Iroquois.

You will succeed if you feed the soil organic material such as compost, by the way compost is a great way to reuse kitchen scraps (vegetable) that you might otherwise toss away and turn grass clippings and fallen leaves into food for your soil.

You will succeed if you place the garden where the plants get the sunlight they must have; vegetables need at least six to eight hours of sun each day. Tomatoes and peppers love sun and heat so consider this when planting them.

Water your vegetables need water so install a rain barrel and plan for those dry id-summer days. Speaking of planning, make a rough sketch of what will go where before you plant and this will guide you through the planting.

You can grow great vegetables, read seed packs and respect the information there, put the right plant in the right place and make sure to water them. Nature does a great deal of the work for you but now and then you do have to lend her a helping hand.