This post inaugurates a series directed at the needs of new gardeners who are about to take the leap from wanting a garden to having one.

It isn’t intended as an all-inclusive guide, but rather as a starting point because gardening is a skill and a passion which can never be fully mastered. We can never say “That’s it. I know all there is to know about gardening … no sense doing it anymore.”

A garden is forever sending its best and brightest students back to the bottom of the class. I know this because I go there frequently. Ask me about last years potatoes. Or, better yet, please don’t ask.

The peas came out pretty nice, though. I just wish I’d planted enough.

We will consider:

* Choosing a site

* Preparing that site

* Starting from seed v. purchasing potted plants (there are a couple other alternatives that we will also consider)

* organic methods and (some – a very few) chemical methods

* fertilizing (under organic management, seldom necessary)

* various gardening philosophies

* About 10,000 other things … one at a time and in no particular order.

So, are you up for the ride?

– Bill

There are five primary ways that a home gardener can hold Jack Frost at bay IF the temperature dip isn’t extreme. It isn’t possible to beat a 60 mph –30 F. arctic blast outdoors. Don’t even try. But you can sometimes stretch the growing season by several weeks with a judicious application of some simple techniques.

When the sun goes down, cold air that had been suspended in the atmosphere on a pillow of warm air nearer the ground is free to fall. This happens all year around and is part of what gives us the cooling at night in the summer.

This cool / cold air pools in low spots. Warm air is replaced by cool air, then cold air, then colder air. That low spot always ends up with the coldest air available. If the air is cold enough and if our garden is in that low spot, frost forms on our precious veggies and flowers. So, here are 4 tactics to defeat this phenomenon that are suitable for the backyard gardener.

Read on, my gardening friend. Read on …

Well, this wraps up this series – for now. There is always something new to learn in the garden and I am not “the world’s foremost authority on everything”.

I would certainly ask that you pass along any additional tips about growing tomatoes that you would care to add. In particular, the Folklore / History section could certainly use filling out, but every section could benefit from your keen eye and experience.

Read on, my gardening friend. Read on …

Tomatoes are prone to attack from a variety of pests, most of which can be warned off by careful inter-planting with marigolds, chrysanthemums and certain herbs.

Read on, my gardening friend. Read on …

Beyond lettuce, bread and mayonnaise, there are many other things that tomatoes go well with. Thus we come to the concept of companion planting.

Known positive companions:

Companion planting is a somewhat murky area of horticulture. Sometimes a plant will be carried as a positive companion on one list, and shown as a negative companion on another. Then, too, varying levels of expertise come into play. It’s a mess … but ‘something’ is going on out there in the garden. Tomatoes planted alongside young dill do better than tomatoes planted further away from the dill. But, as the dill matures, the advantage transfers over to the tomatoes planted AWAY from the dill.

Read on, my gardening friend. Read on …

(Watch the soil temperature with a soil thermometer (50 deg. F.) or by observing the neighborhood yellow forsythia. When it starts to bloom, the soil is warm enough.)

The soil thermometer is especially useful because it will tell you if your soil warming techniques have worked well enough to ‘cheat’ the calendar. Even just a few days on this end of the season and another few days on the other end are enough to give you an extra month or more of growing season.

(Okayyyy Bill … let’s see the math on that!)

If you can cheat the calendar a few days in the spring you’ve gained a few days … and that’s it. Good to have, nice to know, worth two ‘atta-boys’ and one pat on the back and not much else. Except that you have learned to defeat Jack Frost in your own garden with your own materials.

But if you can defend the garden against the first frost of next fall (using the skills developed in the spring), you can probably count on 2-3 more weeks until the next one. Michigan is justly famous for its “Indian Summers” … a frost followed by a month or even two of growing weather. However, if the first frost caught you unprepared, you won’t have to worry about the timing of the second one. You’ll be too busy pulling out dead plants and generally feeling sorry for yourself.

Tender vegetables that require both warm air and warm soil are shown below:

• Beans – from seed
• Sweet corn – from seed
• Summer squash – from seed
• Tomatoes – as transplants
• Chinese cabbage
• Chicory (Radicchio)
• Corn
• Cowpea (Black-eyed pea)
• Cucumber
• Melon (all varieties)
• Okra
• Peanut
• Pumpkin
• Rutabaga (Swede)

The seeds are fairly easy to cheat with, but you’ll want to pay attention to what you are doing with any plants you set out on this list.

As we enter the regular routine of the growing season, our focus will change from keeping the tomatos warm enough to keeping their roots moist. If the roots are kept moist, the tomato will not be as good of a target for bugs and diseases to begin with and will be better able to defend themselves when attacked. In fact, bugs and diseases should be considered less the cause of obvious problems than as symptoms of deeper problems. Bugs and diseases will usually seek out the weakest plants as something of a clean-up crew. Play your cards right and the weaker plants will be in your neighbors yard, not yours.

Read on, my gardening friend. Read on …

The function of this series, which will ultimately cover at least 80 commonly grown varieties of plants grown for food in USDA zones 5 & 6, is to provide the reader with a concise and authoritative source of information such that, if these facts are accounted for, success is all but assured.

In time, these will be refined and rewritten so as to make them shorter and more easily digestible but, for the moment, spring is upon us and so is the need to get things into the ground in the very near future. This being the second in the series, let’s jump in where we left off.

Read on, my gardening friend. Read on …

Remember, this series treats May 15 as the conservative “last frost date”. After you’ve planted a few gardens you’ll get a feel for how ‘loosey goosey’ to play things. How gutsy are you? I usually plant my tomatoes on April 15 (tax day) just to put a little polish on an otherwise depressing day. (It helps to have a stash of hot-caps waiting at the ready in case I miss my guess about the weather.

Plant out of doors if a heavy frost (<28 deg. F) is unlikely. A service such as weatherunderground can help in making this forecast.

• Broccoli
• Brussels Sprouts
• Cabbage
• Cauliflower
• Onion

April 1 – April 15

Sow the following as seed directly into the ground as soon as soil can be worked to a depth of ~4-6 inches. Their sprouting time will take them past dangerous weather and they grow quite well when soil and air are still quite cool.

• Beet
• Carrot
• Collard
• Endive
• Kale
• Kohlrabi
• Leek
• Lettuce (leaf, loose head, firm head)
• Mustard
• Pak Choi
• Parsnip
• Pea
• Radish
• Roquette (Arugula)
• Spinach
• Swiss Chard

Do yourself and your garden a favor. Pull back any mulch left over from winter for a few days before planting and work most of it into the ground just prior to planting along with some blood meal, coffee grounds, cracked corn or other organic source of nitrogen. The added biological activity will warm the soil several degrees and that could make all the difference in the world as to when you can plant what.

According to the National Climatic Data Center, Detroit and the surrounding area have a less than 10% chance of experiencing a frost after May 15. This is the ‘safe’ date for people who have no way of protecting their sprouted plants from frost … but pretty much all backyard gardeners do. Even a single layer of newspaper forming a tent over fragile plants and weighed down at the edges with loose soil or planks for the night is often sufficient. A table-top barbecue grill with some leftover charcoal, an old blow-dryer or a camping lantern will all serve as make-do smudge pots, too.

So, let’s consider what should be happening, and when, in the spring. For the sake of consistency only, I’ll use the May 15 date, but I should warn you that the bulk of my personal garden will be in a full month earlier. I’ve learned that my raised box form of gardening, combined with shelter from the wind by two garages, a large stack of firewood, and the backyard neighbors’ overgrown fence line, allows me some impunity. An assortment of tomato hot-caps, 1 gallon milk jugs and 2-gallon glass pickle jars and so on provides additional insurance against ‘surprise’ frosts. I’m also not above setting a Coleman camping lantern and a small charcoal fire out on the ground all night, either.

Okay … remembering the ‘iffy’ nature of the May 15 date, here goes (when confronted with a contradiction, just go with what your bunions tell you – the more online sources you reference, the more confusing this is going to get.):

These guys can get started inside:

• Artichoke
• Celery
• Eggplant (Aubergines)
• Pepper (sweet and hot)
• Tomatoes (all varieties)
• Broccoli
• Brussels Sprouts
• Cabbage
• Cauliflower
• Onion

These guys can go in the soil now:

• Potato seeds (sprouted chunks of spuds)
• Onion sets
• Asparagus root
• Broccoli – as transplants – protect from hard freeze
• Cabbage – as transplants – protect from hard freeze
• Collards – from seed
• Spinach – from seed
• Peas – from seed
• Lettuce – from seed
• Turnips – from seed