Long Island Gardening Community Resource

There are some thinks to think about when starting or preparing your garden.

1. One of the most important things is to know how much sun your garden gets everyday. If you gauge it at this time of year, remember the sun will be out longer and will be higher in the sky (and does take a little bit of a different angle during high summer months). Of you get less than six hours of direct sunlight, you need to plant accordingly.

2. Prepare Your Soil. Test your soil if you can. I am certainly guilty of not testing the soil. I figure if I keep adding my amazing home-made compost I don’t need to, but really I think I should. Also I can get it done for free because I have recently become a member of the Horticultural Program at Cornell Cooperative Extension of Nassau County. Along with my membership (think it was $20 or so) I get a free soil test at their labs. Testing the soil allows you to amend the soil and get it nice and ready for herbs, vegetable, fruits and flowers. Each plant has an ideal soil ph range and they do vary. So you may want to prepare differnt beds (if possible), a more acidic bed for acidic loving plants and a more alkaline bed for basic soil loving plants. Here is a list of vegetables sectioned into plant ph preferences. Also, make sure your soil is loamy. You want your plants to drain well. Otherwise, you may find them stunted or unwilling to grow and asking why o why won’t you grow? Do this by adding gypsum and/or using raised beds. Raised beds really worked for me.

3. Find North! - The most northerly part of your garden is where you want to plant your tallest plants. I plant vining cucumbers and pole beans there. In front of that Ill plant tomatoes. In front of that Ill plant Peppers and Eggplants, Herbs and others alike in size. In front of that, onions and lettuce and so on…. The idea here is to allow your plants to grow in an area where they get maximum sun exposure. By placing the tallest plants to the north, you can guarantee they will not shade out the other plants (unless the sun one day decides to go off track).

4. Give your plants enough space. Look and the seed packages and allow the space needed for proper growth. Sometimes I cheat here and the only reason is that I know that my plants are not going to be competing for nutrients. On the other hand onions for example need more space to grow bigger (from my experience). So if its carrots and basil, close together, tomatoes and onions, normal spacing. But you will have to experiment for yourself on that one.

Usually, I will pick out which plants I want to grow this year and then map them out on a piece of paper. I draw each plant in the space I want to give it. This way I can also plan on when I can harvest it and plant something else (for example, lettuce or radishes or arugula or snap peas). I like to plant some of these producers that I can switch out halfway or quarter way through summer.

What usually winds up being a problem for me (good problem though) is that my vining winter squash plants go everywhere and my prior planning gets all messed up. Once I saw in someone else’s garden that they planted all the squash vines all over the perimeter of the yard, this way they were controllable along the borders of the yard and had free roam. I’ll redirect my plants as much as I can but they always wind up on the lawn. I don’t have the luxury of a large yard.

5. Plan By The Seasons. To keep the garden growing all season, make a spring, summer, fall and winter garden plan. Ill give a few examples for each.

Spring - sugar snap peas, lettuce, broccoli
Summer - tomatoes, peppers, eggplant
Fall - same as Spring
Winter - Kale, Garlic, Brussels Sprouts

Keep in mind if your growing from seed to start many of them 3-6 weeks ahead of when you want to plant them. I will start planting some seeds in February.

6. Some other basics

Plant near a water supply.
Don’t plant near trees and shrubs - compete for nutrients.

7. Crop Rotation - If possible try not to plant the same plant families in the same places you planted them the previous year.

Well, thats it for now. I will add more to this list as I remember more. Feel free to list your comments about your experiences and suggestions.