It appears we will be moving into a place with a small backyard. I used to garden many, many years ago, but my knowledge seems to have escaped me. I want to grow veggies and herbs, and was thinking about doing a starter garden using one of those little greenhouses and seeds. My question is how long before planting do you start those? Also any good websites to gardening made easy? What produces can be canned? I am new to this and want to have some of my own stuff going on from my own backyard so ANY advice or tips are greatly appreciated!
I have no idea when to start a garden, but I do know of a good book for planting small gardens is the one on "Square Foot Gardening". I think they have a website too.
Those flimsy little plastic greenhouses will protect your seedlings from a light frost, but anything more than that, and they will get too cold. I usually start my seeds on St Patrick's Day - peas, potatoes, spinach, lettuce, carrots, and kale can go straight outside on St Patty's Day, and they will survive the cold and snow. Everything else goes in a sunny window inside. I then transplant the seedlings outside once all the frost is past - usually around Mother's Day. You can grow your herbs year round inside in a sunny window.
I blanch and freeze most of my veggies like corn (on the cob and/or cut off), carrots, etc. I even freeze whole tomatoes and extra potatoes (cut into cubes.) The tomatoes and potatoes change texture when they are frozen, but they are great in soups! The berries are also good frozen for smoothies, or they can be made into popsicles or jam. Have fun and experiment!
check out the farmers almanac online. This helped me some last year and it was my first year gardening. The square foot is also good. Unfortunatly dispite all that we had a late frost last year and I had to do my "starts" again.... by my daughter had fun doing it all over again with me :)
I am not sure where you are but the Maritime Northwest Garden Guide (put out by Seattle Tilth)is a great resource. It tells you when to start seeds inside and when to put them out in the ground and how to plant for healthy garden rotations. Also Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades by Steve Soloman is very helpful (if you are west of the cascades and All New Squarefoot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew. I have been teaching organic gardening for years and those books are what I recommend most for new gardeners. The Seattle Tilth Garden Guide is by far the most valuable and helpful for me. I have been doing it forever and it still gets used every year. If you are in the Seattle Area or Portland area and you want to take classes Seattle Tilth and Oregon Tilth (no relation) teach some great classes. Hopefully you live on the West side of the Cascades otherwise only the Squarefoot gardening book will be helpful. Good luck and for canning Tomatoes and pickled things are the easiest things to start canning because it is hard to mess them up. There are tons of good canning books out there check out Amazon. Happy Gardening! you can plant garlic and fava beans now for your spring garden.
These books are great! LASAGNA GARDENING...You can do your herbs inside right now. Fall is when you want to plant bulbs(garlic and flowers), dill is best if sewn in the fall and you can plant lettuces now too! Broccoli, Cauliflower, Brussel Sprouts, & carrots can last through the snow too. I am a horticulture freak and LOVE these books. I bought mine on Amazon.com or you can check them out at your library. Email me if you want. :)
Gardening in the pacific northwest is lots of fun.
General rule of thumb - is I plant my potatoes on St. Pattys day and my tomatoes on Mother's day - as for tomatoes I always plant one of the stupidis variety and two grapes and the rest are romas. I've found traditional varties don't do was well since it doesn't get hot enough.
When I plant potatoes I plant peas, lettuce, spinach. The the warm weather stuff in May.
I live up in Seattle - so I'm not sure the climate differences in your area - but I do recommend Maritime Northwest Garden Guide available at the Seattle Tilth website or garden stores. Also check out territorial seeds in Corvallis they have seed grown for the pacific northwest.
As far as canning goes - sorry can't be of help.
Instead of canning, I blanch and then freeze some of my produce. I'm just learning myself, but have "practiced" the last few years, growing tomatoes, potatoes, green beans, artichokes, peas, squash, carrots, and pumpkins. I've never had much luck with peppers or onions, but I'm going to keep trying!
But the peas and beans I've blanched and frozen, and I've cooked down extra tomatoes into tomato sauce and then froze that in the jar instead of canning. But I'm considering experimenting with canning this year!
I've often longed for an idiot's guide for new gardeners, but haven't found one. I've checked lots of books out of the library, copied the pages that helped, and pulled the garden pages out of Sunset magazine, which is geared specifically toward the NW.
Good luck, and happy gardening!
You've gotten great gardening advice, so I'll skip that...
On canning:
Anything acidic (like tomatoes or tomato sauce)or super sugary (like fruit in syrup or jams...not that hard to make btw...just time consuming), or things that you pickle, work the best. Although, in theory, anything can be canned. A pressure cooker is a GREAT investment for canning.
This year I'm working on the blanching a freezing thing, too. I'm picking up one of the deep freezes from Lowes (90 bucks), and putting it in a closet we don't use much to facilitate that. Odd to find a freezer in a closet, but hey...there's an outlet.
