Best Gardening TipsBest gardening tips and guides to get the garden of your dreams

Unless you plan to grow some lamb’s lettuce, the gardening season is finally over (too soon, though). However, I’ve got some tips for you that are just the right thing if you

a) are feeling too active on a Saturday afternoon and want to get your hands dirty and

b) want to do something good for your vegetable garden so the next season will be even better than this.

When you’ve grown a lot of vegetables during the summer, your garden will be quite low on important nutrients. The essence of the following How-To is to provide enough nutrients from compost to your soil and to make sure that it mixes perfectly with your existing soil.

So lets get started!

Step 1: Break up the ground!

Use a spade to  break up the firm soil. Do not chop up the large  earth sods (they’ll be useful in the process). So, simply turn them around and (if possible) let columns open.

It’s no problem if individual weeds remain in the soil.

Step 2: Time to empty your compost!

Open your compost bin and sieve it’s ingredients using a coarse grid. It may seem like a lot of unnecessary work, but this process will result in extremely rich and fertile soil (compost) – you’ll reap the results of your efforts during next year’s harvest!

The remains of your sieving efforts (single branches etc.) should be put back into the compost and covered with a bit of soil to encourage the compostation (otherwise, it will simply dry out).

This grid (on the photo) is simply perfect for sieving the compost ingredients.

This is what the sieved compost looks like (the small hill on the right side):

Step 3: Cover the sods with compost soil!

You should now disperse the soil over the original soil you’ve broken up in step one. If you don’t have compost, you can use bought soil as well. Ask for organic compost in your local garden center or in tree nurserys etc.

During winter, snow and rain will flush the nutrients from the fresh compost soil into the coarse clumps in your vegetable bed.

This picture shows one of my vegetable beds covered with compost soil (on the right side) and unprepared (on the left). The only thing that remains to be done is to rake the soil in spring – you’ll have perfect, soft earth.

Most people believe that the vegetable gardening season ends in september and starts all over in April or May. While this may certainly be the time with the most agreeable temperatures – where you will spend more time outside – it isn’t true that winter is a „dead season“. Besides preparing your soil for the coming spring (what we described in this article ) you can in fact practice winter gardening and continue to grow vegetables. In this article, I will write mainly about two points: To use season extenders for extending the “warmer” season; and which crops you can grow now (in winter) to generate yields in spring.

How can I continue to grow plants even though it gets cold?

You can use so-called “season extenders” for winter gardening to retain some level of warmness for your plants and to protect them from wind and snow damage. This can be:

• Covered raised beds (with a transparent cover to allow sunlight to get in). Have a look at this site to see what I mean.
• One step further is to construct your own row covers using special lightweight fabric and a hoop framework. Use simple flexible wire or pvc pipes to construct the hoops, then cover them with the fabric.

With this later system, you’re flexible when it comes to size. You can create small row covers just large enough to cover your plants; or you can create kind of greenhouses, that you’re able to enter and work inside.
The benefits of these system are, of course, that you use the greenhouse effect to heat up the air under the respective cover. As it will get cold at night nevertheless, best grow cold-resistant plants.

Which plants are suitable for winter gardening?

There are winter gardening vegetables that can be planted even in late fall or in the winter months (alsowhen the ground is frozen). In fact some plants (so-called cold season plants) are meant to be planted rather and will not grow as well  if planted late in the year. The benefit of planting early is that a.) you get healthy, resistant plants and b.) you get your vegetable yields much more early (in spring instead of in summer).

Before planting any seeds, you should always clear your beds of all dead plant material (also autumn foliage), crack the ground open, add compost and till it in. You can use organic fertilizers if your soil has been grown heavily during the preceding year.
Typical cold-hardy plants are the following:

• lettuce
• peas
• spinach
• broccoli
• Brussel sprouts
• carrots
• radish
• cauliflower

You should not grow tubers and roots this early during the year, as they will easily rot from wetness. If, however, you combine the two tips I gave you in this article (cold covers & cold season plants), you can even grow potatoes before their time is due and transplant them into your “normal” beds once the weather gets warm again.

I hope this posts motivates you to try winter gardening yourself. I recommend to take a bottle of warm tea along if you’re feeling cold

In today’s gardens, a vegetable garden is mostly in a separated spot, while the rest of the garden is filled with lawn, maybe a pond and ornamental plants and perennials. I think, however, that vegetable plants can also develop a beauty that we normally only see in ornamental plants.

A different approach is the so-called “kitchen garden”, a concept that reaches back to the European renaissance, were noblemen built vegetable gardens not only for a constant supply of legumes and herbs to their kitchen, but also as eye-catchers. These gardens contained both crop plants and ornamental plants and looked like imitations of the kings’ parks (like Versailles near Paris or Sansoucci near Potsdam) with their structured and symmetric layout. I’ll give you some tips on what to pay attention to if you want to follow this layout for your own vegetable garden.

How to create the general layout

Residential kitchen gardens were parts of larger, symmetrically ordered gardens and thus quite formal. If you think that this form would be too strict for your garden, you can lean more towards a wild “cottage garden”-style. In the “historically correct” form of kitchen gardens, paved paths lead through the different vegetable patches so you can easily reach all of them.
The pathways shouldn’t be too narrow – they should be sufficiently wide for a hand barrow. The patches are separated like a chessboard; the whole garden may be surrounded by a hedge.

What plants to choose for your vegetable garden?

A possible layout for a small kitchen garden

Which combination of plants should be planted in the separate beds depends on how they harmonize with the adjoining beds in colour. Generally, it’s nice to have differences in height: Simple flat beds look a bit boring and are not really a sight for sore eyes. Try to incorporate trellises for beans or other climbers. You should also combine vegetables and ornamental plants of different heights in the kitchen garden: This could be cabbage and lady’s mantle, for example, or corn and geraniums, spinach and dahlias etc.

These plants also differ in color: I.e. the blossoms of lady’s mantle are golden-orange, while cabbage is of a light green. I find it better to not combine two many colors in adjacent beds – if you spread the colors over the garden, it will look a bit more structured while retaining the lovely flair of a kitchen garden.

How to improve your kitchen garden

The tips I’ve given above may seem quite simple – however, the devil is in the details. First of all, a kitchen garden will not look good unless you’re constantly improving it. Try to keep it as full and lush as possible and whenever you’ve got the feeling that something’s missing in a patch, choose a new and surprising plant for it.

A kitchen garden – the envy of your neighborhood

I would also advise you to make more from the borders of patches: As kitchen gardens often have a strict structure and are not as densely planted due to the fact that vegetables are often taken from the patch when they’re ripe, the garden could from time to time look a bit empty. To counteract this, you can plant smaller plants like lavender, curry-plant or salvia around the borders of the patches. Be careful to make these fit the main plants in the respective bed.

Trellises can also be an amazing sight, especially when they’re home-made (f.e. irom hazel branches). They don’t necessarily have to be grown by climbers all year but are eyecatchers themselves.

Pay attention to roughly following the rules of crop rotation. This is especially true for plants like cabbages that drain lots of nutrients from the soil – they can be followed f.e. by peas (peas can restore the soil’s nitrogen).

For great impressions on how nice a kitchen garden can be, I recommend you to have a look at  the BBC series “The Victorian kitchen garden” from the 1980s on youtube!

You may remember the article Marc wrote on growing your own tomatoes, where he introduced the best position, fertilizing info and general tips for tomatoes. Well, just a few days ago my friend Stephi  asked me whether and how to cut tomatoes – so I decided to share some advanced tomato growing tips info with the readers on best-gardening-tips.com. You don’t have to follow these instructions too strictly, just take them as a guideline.

Space for your tomatoes

Tomato trees consume a large amount of nutrients, especially nitrogen – so take care to plant the trees with sufficient space to one another. I find it more practical to first grow the plants in pots and only later transplant them into the garden soil so I don’t have to replant them multiple times.

Provide enough sun and warmth

As tomatoes need a lot of sun, you have to make sure that there’s as little shadow as possible on your patch. Surrounding trees and bushes should be cut low; also/or position the tomato trees with sufficient distance to them (as well as to buildings and walls). For warmth, it’s practical to cover the soil around the trees with black plastic sheets – this will induce them to grow fruits much faster. If you do so, best plant the tomatoes on an elevated spot (so rain water can flow off).

Deeper planting

If you want to replant plants that you’ve first grown in pots, growing bags and/or a greenhouse, plant the trees deeper into the earth than before. Tomatoes can still develop roots on the upper parts of the stem, and this will enable them to develop good roots and take in more nutrients. Some gardeners even plant them horizontally (also known as “trench planting”), which will increase the area the plant can take nutrient from – you will, of course, need to provide more space for them in this case.

Cut your tomato trees for better yields

If you want to harvest big and tasty tomatoes, it’s necessary to cut back some of the branches to concentrate the plant’s energy on the production of fruits:

• Cut back dead and broken branches
• Look for branches that are crowding each other – however, don’t thin out too heavily but maintain a balance between a sufficient level of branches and leaves for photosynthesis and few enough (about six) branches for fruit production.
• Cut the side shoots that are growing between the stem and the respective branches as soon as you notice them. If you don’t have a gardening scissor, you may just pince them off with your fingernails.
• Cut the lower leaves (up to a height of about ten inches). These branches would receive little sunlight anyways, and it helps to ward off fungus diseases.

This way, you can maintain the size of your plant and encourage the growth of fruits. It’s best to use tools cleaned in alcohol for cutting. By the way, you can use the cuttings to cultivate new tomato trees!

Pollenizing

Pollination could be a problem if your tomatoes are growing in a (windless) green house – if you have bad luck, the blossoms will not be pollinized and thus not produce tomatoes. Best shake the plants a bit to make the pollen set at other blooms (or use a brush for pollination).

I hope these tips will help you with growing award-winning tomatoes. If you have your own “secret tips”, it would be really cool if you’d share them with us in the comment section!

Edit by: Gardening Marc:

For me it was always very hard to find out what the “suckers” are. Earlier I was never really sure, which “new plants” I can cut off and which I should leave growing. I think this video is genius to learn more about and see how it exactly works:

Hey guys, I’m Felix, the new co-author of best-gardening-tips.com. I really appreciate it that I can collaborate with Marc on this website, as he has some great ideas about the way best-gardening-tips should develop and puts enormous effort into it. I hope you will enjoy the articles I will write. If any of you has suggestions about what kind of article would be helpful, just write a comment and I’ll see if I can help you. Today I’m going to write about beans, a really basic but rewarding vegetable for your garden!

Beans are just a great vegetable you can grow easily in your own garden. I like growing beans especially for the difference they make to your garden when they’re growing vertically on poles, and of course they’re also versatile in the kitchen: You can use them pre-boiled and cold in salads, fried in vegetable pans or cooked with risotto, just to mention a few methods.

There is, of course, a great variety of beans. The most important difference is whether they’re growing in bushes and need no extra frame or pole varieties, which need a wooden pole, a rope or a neighboring plant for support. Another main difference is between snap beans (where the whole pod can be consumed while the “true” bean is not yet wholly developed and shell beans, where only the beans are consumed. I would recommend you to sow 2-3 different types when you’re planting beans for the first time (provided you have enough space), so you can choose what best suits your taste for the next year.

Preferable conditions for beans

Sun and watering: Beans should have full sun and warmth; they need a lot of water (though not constant wetness!). Don’t plant them in the shadow of trees. Pay attention to the fact that pole beans will take sunshine away from smaller surrounding plants. If you live in a colder climate, you may prefer fava beans, which thrive well in cool weather.
Try not to plant beans too early in the year – beans don’t take that long, so it will be sufficient if you plant them later (the second half of may or one week after the last frost in your area is good).

Soil: Regular acidic soil of between 6 and 6,5 pH is perfect for beans. I recommend adding mulch on top of the soil to retain moisture, hindering weed growth and keeping soil temperatures on an appropriate level (high heat can cause problems with beans).

Soil nutrition: Beans should be planted in a fertile soil rich in the macro-nutrients. Before planting, prepare the soil by digging it over and adding organic fertilizer (such as manure or compost). Pole beans grow quite high and go on producing fruits for some
time, so it’s a good idea to add compost from your compost pile from time to time.

Sowing

While you can of course plant the beans inside and later transplant them into your garden, I don’t think that’s necessary – beans grow fast enough. Plant them in the upper layers of the soil (about one inch deep) with sufficient distance to one another (about 6 to ten inches). If you plant rows, calculate enough distance so you can still move between the
rows.
It’s useful to plant more beans than you will grow in the end and then to remove the smaller, less robust ones (however, don’t sow too many – beans have a germination rate of about 70%).

Support for pole beans: With pole beans, pay attention to use poles that are long enough (about 7 feet), as beans can get quite large, and sufficiently stable. Instead of wood or iron poles, you can also stretch wires over one row of beans and connect them vertically with simple ropes.

Harvest

Depending on the type, beans take about two beans to three and a half to grow edible fruits. Pay attention to harvesting snap beans early enough, when they’re still young and tender. Pole beans provide beans in an ongoing process, so harvest whenever the pods are in the right condition. Typical green snap beans are harvested while the beans are about to bulge while shell beans such as kidneys are harvested when the seeds are wholly developed and dry.
One common rule is that “the more you pick, the more they produce”, so don’t be shy about picking the pods.

Pests

I’ve found that slugs are a big problem. One solution (besides pesticide) is to plant alliums such as garlic or shallot, which repel slugs, next to your bean row. If fungal diseases like leaf spot come about, try to keep the plants less moist. Beans need a lot of water, but excess moisture can lead to fungal disease. You can circumvent this by watering during daytime instead of in the evening so the soil dries more quickly (this is also advantageous if you have problems with slugs!).

Rotation and combination advice

Altering the location from bean plantings from year to year to avoid diseases. There are also some nice combinations of beans with other vegetable plants that are helpful for nutrient use and mutual support:

Beans, corn and squash: This combination is called “The native American three sisters”. You can find a good article on reneesgarden.com. The beans use corn plants as a growing support, so you don’t have to use poles.
http://www.reneesgarden.com/articles/3sisters.html

Beans and spinach: Beans can provide the necessary shade for spinach (especially for a spinach harvest in late summer).

Beans and cabbage (in succeeding years): Cabbage need a lot of nitrogen, which is provided by the beans.

You should rather not grow beans on the same patch as peas, leek or onions, as these plants have similar needs in nutrients as beans.

Hopefully, these tips were helpful for you. Go forward, it’s not yet to late to plant some beans in your own garden!