I thought about growing vegetables in order to better weather the coming crises which may be quite difficult, I thought about it a few months ago, but after learning how much I would have to learn, I thought, oh, all this information is spinning my head. Where should I start? What fertilizers to use, how not to overpay money and other resources? How to stretch soil fertility as long as possible and is it possible not to be physically exhausted in the process? Time is also running out.
Well, as a result, my brain subconsciously abandoned this idea, well, I was too used to a comfortable life and food from the supermarket. And so it has been for four months.
I know I’m pathetic. I haven’t even bought seeds yet.
Imagine you’ve got a friend who has never ran a day in their life, and they say they want to run a marathon. Great! An awesome goal! But then they start taking about what specific shirt they should wear on the day of the marathon to reduce drag by some small percentage, when they haven’t even started training yet. It’d be a bit silly, right? You’d probably tell them “Just start practicing today, and as you practice more, you’ll know more.” And you’d be right.
Perfect example.
Better to try, fail, and learn than to fail because it was never started.
Exactly this. Vegetables take a while, so grab your plants now, and start learning!
this!!!
dig a hole, throw in half a potato, and water it from time to time
My rhizophobic ass: shudder
Just start small. You don’t need to start a full blown garden if that seems daunting. Just plant a few seeds, see what grows and what does well. Then next year you can expand if you can handle it and you have the experience from what grew well the previous year. Also I wouldn’t really bother with fertilizer to start, just plant the seeds and just water them depending on the weather (don’t need to water them if it rains).
Gardening is just like any other skill, you start small and basic and expand from there as you gain more experience and skills.
Just take it easy. Put a seed in some dirt and water that spot once a day.
Green beans are really easy where I live near lake Erie. Theyre the only crop I direct sow.
I buy the bush variety of everything so I dont have to fuck with poles and trellises.
Also, you could decide this year to just buy the starts from a local greenhouse – those are plants that are already half grown. Growing from seed is harder than just planting something thats already established.
But yeah, end of the day, its just putting a seed in dirt and adding water.
If you’re late in the planting season you can go for winter veggies. Potatoes and carrots can be planted when it’s cold, and ready to harvest when its warm again. Kale stays green well into the snowy seasons.
Potatoes just needs a bucket or bag per potato, and soil and/or sand. Fill the bucket maybe halfway and hide the potato, then once it starts growing in the spring keep covering the all but the top part of the stem with new sand-soil until the bucket is full, then let finish growing. Water regularly once it thaws outside, but not while it’s freezing.
I think I kept it cold but protected during winter, like a shed, but maybe I just left it outside? You can keep one bucket indoors and one outdoors and see if there are different results in the end. Bring both outside once there’s sun and warmth to kickstart the growing.
Well it’s way to late in the season to start much by seed. I wouldn’t even bother with trying with that. Like others have mentioned get started reading and trying something simple. If you want something grand you will have to wait until the spring next year. Gardening forces you to living seasonally like that. You can’t hold back the heat or frost if you fall behind.
As far as specific starting plants I would do an herb such as basil and salad greens. Both are simple to buy starters for still at garden store and have a short growing season.
Lots of great comments and advice here already so I won’t give you technical info. I’ll just say this, you’re going to learn the most by doing. Information here is helpful, sure, but actually making the mistakes you WILL make is a necessary and important part of the process. Fucking up is not failing, its learning. What type of space are you working with? Do you have the ability to prep via canning/dehydrating/freeze drying? I own and operate a small farm as a side business. So I can give some specific advice depending on your answers.
A lot of people have given good information here, but I think right now you seem to be experiencing overwhelm, and you may need a bit more experience to make sense of it all. So I’m gonna start you off very simple.
Buy a packet of snap peas. Little Marvels are good, but any snap peas will work.
Get a growing container. If you can find a milk crate, that’ll work. You can line it with the burlap from a bag of rice, or with garden cloth.
Fill it with dirt. There are a lot of cool things you can do to make dirt, but we’re doing dead simple. Buy some soil at the store. Garden soil or potting soil will be fine.
Sprinkle your peas over the dirt. Push them in so they’re covered by dirt.
Water daily on days it doesn’t rain. The goal is to make sure the soil doesn’t dry out.
When the peas sprout, put something into the container for them to climb up. Wooden stakes are usually good for this.
Harvest peas as you see them. They can be eaten raw or cooked in various ways.
Eventually, they will finish producing and die off. You will notice them going brown and shriveling up. Once you reach this stage, look up how to compost. That will be your next step.
Once you have built confidence with the above exercises, start looking through seed catalogs for next spring to figure out what you want to grow. Then come back to Lemmy for advice with a list of the plants, your location or growing zone (you can look your growing zone up online) and some information about the space available to you to garden and whether you’ll be doing it as containers on a patio vs. in dirt, etc.
Also, check out c/gardening, as well as potential related communities like balcony gardening and hydroponics.
Pretty sure it’s too late in the year to plant peas in most places, but otherwise they are a great starter vegetable.
Really? Most peas I know take within the realm of 60 days, making them a pretty short cycle crop, hence why I chose them. Peas planted now would be finishing up near September, which is before the first frost date in most Northern Hemisphere zones AFAIK. I doubt OP is in the Southern Hemisphere from the comments on when they first began considering a garden.
They grow quickly but germinate best in the cool weather of early spring.
That makes sense. I’d say it’s still worth a shot for OP, though; if none germinate within a week, they can try sprouting second batch indoors where it’s cooler and transplanting them outside.
I just try stuff out with not that much investment or care after, if it dies it dies and if it works out it means that it’s worth my time to try again.
Just don’t overthink it. Grab some seeds and a bag of whatever soil fits your budget and get something growing.
Gets something growing and then branch off from there. Introduce fertilizer if you think you need it. We don’t bother. Soil longevity? You running a science experiment? Plant stuff. If you start to have issues, look up how to fix it then.
You won’t get the perfect 20 year garden right off the bat. Experiment, fail, learn, adapt.
Peppers, tomatoes, and green beans are all pretty easy to grow. I’d recommend investing into some sort of netting or greenhouse situation so that animals don’t eat it.
A raccoon ate two and a half of my scotch bonnets last year. I’m not even mad, karma definitely got its revenge.
Google what to start growing this time of year that is easy.
Go to the seed section in your hardware store or go to rareseeds.com and get a few things. Get some soil and a big pot same time. Or hell, buy some already started plants.
seedtime.us app sign up then unsubscribe to mailers if you want to know when exactly to prep/plant/harvest for your specific area. No guesswork.
Congrats you are now a gardener.
Write down when you do things like plant and water and then you can research any problems or improvements for the next year.
just to add my own observation. rareseeds is great for heirloom seeds (seeds you can grow, fruit, and replant). however, their efficacy has been less than desirable the past couple years. I have had more luck just buying the run of the mill seeds from the store and getting a better germination rate.
if you want to get started growing on the right foot, I would start in the spring when most big box hardware stores and greenhouses have put out vegetable plants ready to plant. you don’t have to mess with when to plant them properly, or even fight against mold or algae wiping out your seedlings.
buy at least two or even three of each type just because at least one of them will probably die.
that’s the next thing. plants die and that should be expected. if your plan is to grow your daily food then always have a backup plan to fill empty spots with quick growing crops with high yields.
things like greenbeans, peas, Lima beans, etc can start producing in as little as 40-50 days.
also, final bit of advice. don’t try to fill 100% of your grocery bill your first year. you’ll be disappointed and burnt-out. 15% is more realistic. and the next year you can bump it up to more like 25%.
I started my garden this way back in 2020 and it provides about 70% of my grocery needs. the other 30% are fruits and processed goods like rice, pasta, etc.
for example right now I have a pasta dish with herbs and vegetables from my garden. the only thing I used that didn’t come from the garden was the salt, pepper, butter, and pasta. dish cost was around $.25 a plate and I still have around 4 plates left after four others were eaten.
anyway, good luck!
best not to do it alone but with a community of other people. it’s quite challenging to do all that by yourself.
if you do it with 3 people, you can have 3 types of vegetables. each does one. alone you can only have 1 type.
Buy a pot. Buy some soil. Buy some seeds.
Put one thing in the other, you may have to experiment in which order they go. I found that pot - soil - seed worked best for me.
You sound like you suffer from decision paralysis. You need to get started with something, anything. In a few seasons you’ll learn. If you expect the apocalypse to happen sooner than a few years my strategy would be to run towards the mushroom cloud. You can’t rush this.
For soil fertility, I recommend using the corpse(s) of an oligarch or two to enrich the soil (Human Composting). Would likely have to use some sort of anaerobic (no oxygen) composting set up so the right bacteria can get to work. This way you help solve the crisis, in part, and get some high quality soil.
Buuut that’s longer term stuff that will take a while to set up. There are still a bunch of veges you can plant; beets, swiss chard, arugala, lettuce, turnips, kale, spinach, probably a bunch of others. Go grab some of that stuff, dig out a plot in your yard (if no yard use pots) and stick 'em in there. Usually there’s instructions on the packet on how to and how deep to place the seeds, how often to water them, etc. The same information is easily found in so many places online also. Don’t worry about soil fertility this year. If you have enough space you could just dig another plot and use that one.
Best thing to do is to start small and learn how you want to do things. Planning out an entire self sustaining garden eco-system would be a lot, even for someone with a well-callused green thumb.
https://plantisima.com/things-to-plant-in-mid-summer-for-a-delicious-late-harvest/
