Gardening Moms!!!!

I am an organic farmer, so I can help you out here....

A note on varieties: look for seed companies and nurseries that cater to northern growers. Johnny's Selected Seeds, High Mowing, Fedco are all good. They all have websites. I think they all sell berry plants as well.

1. Strawberries come back year after year. It is a good idea to replace the plants every 4 years to keep up a good yield. There are 2 types: everbaring that bare less at a time, but over a longer time period, and June-baring that tend to produce a lot in a small time frame.

2. Blueberries take several years to have fruit. Assuming you buy a plant in a one gallon pot, you will only get a few handfuls for the first few years, but it is worth the wair. Blueberries are one of the best foods out there! Blueberries need a lot of water.

3, Most raspberries produce on second year wood, meaning that the canes that shoot up this year will produce next year. Each winter you will have to cut out the canes that produced that summer. Kind of a pain and they need trellising, also a pain. There are varieties (fall bearring) that grow shorter and produce on first year wood. Not need to trellis and you just cut the whole patch down each winter. Easy!

4.Garlic should be planted in late september. Music is my favorite variety. Cloves are big and easy to peel. Plant each CLOVE 5 inches apart with the pointy side UP. Just poke them down with your finger about and inch or so. Garlic needs a lot of fertility. Fertilize when you plant it, then throw some more on in April. It is ready to harvest in late July when the leaves start to brown. Don't let the tops die all the way. As it starts browning pull one up to see if it is as big as you'd like.

5. Potatoes are easy. Buy organic potatoes to plant. Conventional ones are sometimes treated with sprout inhibitors and won't grow, Dig a furrow and drop in potatoes with at least 2 good eyes (the place where they sprout) 10 inches apart, then cover. When the greens grow several inches above the soil, hill the plants with more soil until the greens are almost totally covered. Do this 2-3 times during the summer. New potatoes are ready a few weeks after they flower. The rest can be harvested in the late summer/ early fall. Yellow Finns are the best and most versitile.

6. Books: The Square foot Gardener is good, esp if you don't have much space. Eliot Coleman's " The New Organic Grower" is also good. Just google organic gardening books for northern growers. And just pick the brains of other gardeners. They love to share. Just look at me. I've never met you and I've rambled on this much!

7. Composting can be a pain in the .... but it is worth it. One of the best "rat-free" ways is to build a few worm boxes-about the size of a foot locker. Get a bunch of red wigglers to star your box. You can be filling one, while the other one gets "processed" by the worms. Rats and other critters can't get in them. Just don't add meat. You'll be amazed at how much less garbage you generate. You can even throw your paper waste in, if there isn't curbside recycling in your area.

Additional note: I don't know if you grow peas, but kids LOVE raw shell peas (and snaps) esp. if they can pick them and shell them on the spot. Cherry tomatoes are also great, esp Sungold (the sweetest ever). Red peppers can be tricky, but if you grow a small pimento type, they are more likely to ripen. Nelson carrots are the best-short season and very sweet.

Have fun!!!!

My hubby is the gardener, but I can tell you this. Yes, Strawberries normally come back the next year.
I would suggest you go to Barnes and Noble or even a department store, and look for kids books on gardening. Get it now so you can be ready in just a few short weeks. Even the Library would probably have something.
Potatoes are hard, depending on your soil.
You might let her do a flower garden as well. It's nice to see something pretty that you have "made."
Good Luck and take care. And you are great letting her learn this so early. Good Job Mom!

Strawberries will come back. They'll come back every year and will spread more and you should get more berries this year as well. Blueberries and raspberries may produce fruit the first year you put them in, but if they do, it's a small amount. They will come back every year as well and will produce more fruit then. Yes, you need to plant garlic in the fall, it's a bulb. Think of it like a tulip, you plant those in the fall so you have them in the Spring. Also, garlic does not produce that first year, so if you planted it just last fall, don't expect a crop of it this year, but next year. Potatoes are easy to grow. It depends on what kind of room you have. We have raised beds that are 8' x 4' so we do more trellis and space saving gardening. We have a large open garden at my parents that we do as well. When we grow them i the raised beds, I grow them in a 'pot'. I have wire that I line with landscaping cloth and fill that with te potatoes and dirt. This really heats up the dirt and save alot of room. I am sure there are some great videos on you tube showing you how to do this. And composting is AWESOME and EASY! We vermipost and compost...again it depends on how uch room you have. We have open compost area in our yard and then a compost 'can' in the garage that we made out of a garbage can. The most important thing about composting is to remember to turn it and to have your brown to green ratio in check. Raising worms is cheap and easy and produces the best compost and 'tea' for your plants. You can make a worm bin out of a simple storage bin. If you want info on those email me at ____@____.com Luck! A.

Composting can be as easy as you want it you be, especially if you're not in a hurry to get the finished material. I do it mostly to reduce the amount of waste that goes into a landfill and having the extra fertilizer is just a nice side product.

http://www.makedirtnotwaste.org/ is a useful site with lots of information.

Hi! Looks like the organic gardener gave lots of good advice--we live north of you, in zone 3, so that's where I'm coming from.

1. Yes, your strawberries should come back. There are everbearing varieties (that bear all summer) and June bearing varieties. Strawberries seem to require a lot of care, in keeping them off the ground, preventing bugs, and such. Straw (hence the name) can be a huge advantage. They should come back.

2. Blueberries will not bear for quite a while.

3. Raspberries might bear, but it's better to let them grow, then cut them back in the fall (as organic gardener said, they bear on new wood), then wait for great growth and bearing on year 2.

4. We are trying store bought garlic that sprouted this spring. We'll see. You typically plant garlic in the fall, but I'm not positive it would survive MN winters.

5. Potatoes are super, super easy. Get seed potatoes from a garden store. You want to mound them up; as they grow, they kind of push upward, and you don't want the actual potato to see the sun; they turn green and mildly toxic then. You'll see the greens on the top grow; when they die off (late summer; early fall) you can start harvesting. Potatoes are wonderful as keeping them in the ground keeps them good--it's like a cellar. A potato fork is a wonderful thing; you stick it in the ground very gently on the outside of your potato mound and gently bring up the plant, from the roots. My kids (2 and 5) absolutely LOVE harvesting potatoes.

6. If you go to a good book store, you'll find tons of books; it depends a lot on what you want to plant (organic, veggies, basic gardening). It is very helpful to get something written by someone in your region; even though we live in MN, we are so far north that even MN books don't always apply to what we're doing (many MN books are targeted at the Mpls/St Paul greater area).

7. Composting is wonderful, and can be very simple. Most of what makes it complex is when they suggest altering greens and browns and making sure you get a hot compost. We do not hot compost; it's too much work! My husband banged together leftover wood pallets, and put a hinge on one on the top. The only reason we use pallets is because all the places we have gardened have large animals that want in to the bin. My parents, who garden in suburban Milwaukee, just have a pile of garden waste and grass clippings in the back of their yard and it does fine without a container. We put food scraps, leaves, grass clippings, yard waste, paper towels, egg shells...everything but meat and dairy. And we just chuck it in and shovel it around with a pitchfork every so often (like once a month!). It does take longer this way, but we feel that we both get rid of our food and yard waste in an environmentally responsible way, but we also get something out of it, even if it does take two years. We've also used not-quite-finished compost to improve the soil when we plant trees--we dig the hole huge, supplement with compost, and use the soil we dug elsewhere.

I saw someone suggested peas; my kids LOVE sugar snap peas and picking them and eating them raw was a blast for them. Our sugar snap peas did really, really well last year (they're a cold weather crop, so do well in MN) and we're going to plant a lot more. Another super easy plant is lettuce. I got a salad mix of seeds I really liked last year; I could cut about 3" of lettuce and have salads with mixed lettuce varieties for supper for four! Some leaf lettuces you can cut and they come back again...and again... We had very few problems with bugs; we did start getting small slugs at the end of the summer, but by then, our lettuce was mostly done anyway.

Good luck, have fun!

1. Generally you should not allow strawberries to bear fruit the first year they are planted. You are supposed to pinch off all flowers the first year so that the plants can grow stronger. If you covered them well for the winter they should come back this year. As they grow runners make sure you pinch some off so that they don't get too crowded. After they are done bearing this year cut off all the leaves and fertilize. Cover with leaves before a hard frost comes.
3. Raspberries do bear the first year, but you will get more in subsequent years. They spread a lot, so only need a couple of plants to start and will have plenty in a few years.
7. Composting is NOT complicated. Get yourself a plastic compost bin. I got mine at a recycling center but I believe they sell them at Home Depot too. They are surprising expensive for what they are but are cheaper at the recycling center (I think I paid less than 80 dollars). Put a bunch of dry leaves in the bin in the fall and then add all your none animal product kitchen scraps- banana peels, coffee grounds, watermelon rinds....I even put in all our napkins and paper towels. IT is good to have a mix of dry (leaves, paper) and wet (grass, veggie scraps) and to give it a stir once in a while with a hoe.

I don't do blueberries, garlic or potatoes. I think green beans are one of the easiest things to grow as long as you have a fence to keep the bunnies out. You can get more info than you will ever need by a simple google search on anything.

1. Strawberries bear more on newer plants so every year let some runners spread out and once rooted, throw way the original parent plant.
2. Blueberries need a pollinator, usually another blueberry plant of a different variety. Blueberries do best in acid soil so you should fertilize them frequently with an acid fertilizer. Garden stores can help with this.
3. Raspberry plants do not produce on old canes - those that had raspberries on them the year before - it's dead wood. Raspberries are VERY invasive and will come up under garden edging, boards, fences, and in your sodded lawn. It can be difficult to get rid of once started.
4. I've lived in zones 4b (southern Colorado), 3b (northern Minnesota), & now in 4a (Iowa). I've never had luck getting garlic to survive winters. Maybe I've used the wrong kind. Chive will grow anywhere and when the pretty purple flowers go to seed it can be very invasive.
5. In my compost pile I've thrown out old, shriveled potatoes bought from the grocery store, and they often spout and bear good potatoes, though sometimes small. Wait until the first light frost or the leaves turn yellow, before digging them up.
6. There are lots of good books, even at the library.
7. The easy way is just throw everything in a pile in the corner of your yard - grass clippings, egg shells, garbage, etc., but No weeds with seeds & NO meat. Periodically go out and turn the pile over & mix everything together. It composts faster if you make layers of grass clippings, a little dirt, & garbage, but it will work if you just throw everything in a heap and do nothing. The pile is rarely, if ever smelly. It can attract mice, though, so I'd suggest not putting the pile against or near your house.

I can't give you much advice on varieties, because I'm in a different area(near Austin TX).
We didn't do too well with berries, so we planted a peach tree.
Onions are easy because we can usually buy bundles of already sprouted onion bulbs. My son likes chives because he feels like a chef when he chops them. They stay green year round here. Potatoes are great for kids to see how they grow, but we've never gotten really big ones. I think you just have to have mounds of loose dirt with few rocks. Purple carrots, zucchini, climbing green beans, and snow peas are some of my favorite things to grow.
In most areas, there are master gardners who love to give advice. Try http://www.extension.umn.edu/gardeninfo/ to see if there's something near you.
I do compost, but I don't end up with very much usable dirt at the end. This is probably because I forget to turn the pile often enough, it doesn't stay wet enough, and I put too many tough branches in. On the plus side, I can see how much stuff I'm NOT putting in a landfill, like bags of grass clippings and leaves. And any time my son wants to hunt for rolypoly pillbugs, he knows where to find them.

My daughter is only 2 and we just started some tomato plants in pots 2 weeks ago so she could see them from the start instead of buying plants this year. She is enjoying helping me water them. She's not totally excited about them growing yet, but certainly had fun helping me fill the pots with dirt! Tomatoes are pretty easy to grow. Just be sure to use cages on them to help support them as they get bigger.

Not sure how large of an area you have to plant a garden? We're building our house this year, so not sure how big of a garden we'll manage to get in, but going to actually try garbage can potatoes. You start with a garbage pail, put in a few seed potatoes and as they grow, keep on adding more soil and mulch. I'm looking forward to seeing if it works as well as some of the articles I found on Google. I've always planted potatoes the traditional way in the garden and have good luck. (I'm in a similar planting zone as you.) Just keep an eye out for potato bugs. We haven't had many, but as soon as I spot a few I pick them off and haven't needed to use any chemicals on the plants to get rid of them, thankfully.

Peas, mixed leafy lettace, onions, peppers are other common things I plant that don't take too much care. I often put a row of sunflowers on the back edge of the garden as well.

Eggplant is something I've done a few years. If we have a cooler season, they barely get ripe before the first frost, but if it's a good year, I get plenty and have blanched and frozen them to use for recipes in the winter.

To keep weeds down, when planting, put several sheets of newspaper down between the row with sprinkling just a little dirt on top to keep them from blowing away. It will keep weeds down and slowly turn to compost over time!

I'm a lazy composter. I just start a pile in the corner of my garden and don't do much with it. At the end of the year, I spread it out over the garden and in spring, work it into the ground. I have a small stainless covered composting bin on my kitchen counter and all fruit & veggie scraps, egg shells go in.

I've gone to a few seminars put on by the local master gardening club or the UW-Extension office. I'd imagine you could find something similar in your area. Another source is I found a local plant exchange club on yahoo groups. Not all that active, but periodically people will post when they have extras of seeds or splitting perennial plants.

I also did a Google search for companion planting. Not sure how much it really helps, but found a few articles on what plants grow well next to each other and which are best to keep spaced apart. Figured it certainly didn't hurt to try the tips when arranging my garden.

Hi
I like to garden and I live in Nebraska, zone 5. Your Strawberries I believe should produce some this year. I don't have any advice on the Blueberries. I suggest finding your local Earl May Garden center for help. Raspberries produce fruit (at least mine do) on 1 year old canes. After that I prune off the branch. Raspberries will only be on the newer branches. From my experience it works better to plant my garlic in the fall. They get bigger and seem to do fine over the winter. Potatoes are easy to grow. Buy some "seed potatoes". Cut them up with at least one eye per piece. Superstition says to plant them on Good Friday. Just plant them in early spring when the ground is workable and dry. Hope that helps.

If you are up to taking care of alot of infants, get ready to plant indoors Feb. 1 in zones 5 and higher; at 6 weeks, you can transplant to bigger pots and by May 1 you can easily transplant - the prediction is for an early and hotter Spring this next year.

If you want to start seeds indoors, you'll need to get your seeds when the catalogs come out in January == and seed mix and seeds but also lights and possibly bottom warmers since soil temps for many plant seedlings need to be at about 50 degrees F to germinate. Florescent lights that they sell in any home improvement store are fine, and don't use much electricity but they should be able to be adjusted to stay within 6 inches of the top of the plant at all times, which means an adjustable chain.

It's a great family project and you have plenty of time to get ready!