conn96
Full Member
Posts: 28
Joined: Sun Aug 29, 2010 9:47 pm
Location: Denham Springs, LA

What was your first garden like?

What was your first garden like? Made my first this week and it only has 3 rows all about 6-7 feet long, but it's a nice little garden. :D

Hispoptart
Senior Member
Posts: 224
Joined: Mon Apr 26, 2010 6:46 pm
Location: Rangley, CO

Hey Connor, I am just amazed how someone your age is so into growing a garden. I think it's the greatest thing. Most people seem to start out way bigger then they are prepared for and end up getting discouraged. From what I have read of your other posts I would say you are doing just fine. Start out small and work your way up to what you ultimately want it to be. See what your willing to put into it as far as work goes and go from there.

TWC015
Senior Member
Posts: 207
Joined: Sat Mar 27, 2010 8:43 am
Location: Jefferson Co., Arkansas

Last year, my garden was about 100 square feet. This was about as much space as I was going to clear by hand.

This year, my garden is about 750 square feet which is more than enough space I can handle with school and me doing all the work. I also have the help of a 5 horsepower tiller that I received from my grandpa.

gumbo2176
Super Green Thumb
Posts: 3065
Joined: Mon Jul 19, 2010 2:01 am
Location: New Orleans

Conn, you're making me think too much. Let's see, I was pretty young, early teens, and I decided to put in some vegetable plants along a fence line. The entire area was only 1 row about 30 ft. long and I grew tomatoes in half the row and bell peppers in the other half. I also made the mistake of putting in a couple of Mirliton in the ground to grow on the fence between the tomatoes and peppers. Those things took off and in a short time took over the entire length of fence and climbing on the tomato and pepper plants.

The tomatoes and bell peppers didn't do as well under those conditions but the mirliton did great. I remember picking those things almost daily in mid fall and filling large paper sacks with them to give away to my aunts and folks in the area. The plants grow almost as fast as kudzu.

I lived in an area with some pretty old houses complete with old wooden sheds and where I grew the mirlitons, the property owner next door hardly ever tended to his property so it was overgrown with weeds and scrub brush. Some of the mirliton fell onto his property and got lost in the weeds. The next spring, many of them sprouted and it grew vines that took over his entire shed, a japanese plum tree and a formosa tree. It looked like the vine that was trying to eat New Orleans. This lasted a couple years but one winter we had a real hard freeze and it put an end to all that.

garden5
Super Green Thumb
Posts: 3062
Joined: Fri Aug 07, 2009 5:40 pm
Location: ohio

It was just a 5 x 5 patch with some tomatoes, onions, and I think carrots. The toms were supported to the chicken wire fence that surrounded the garden and produced well into the fall. The onions were small, and they were what started my quest to grow large onions....and I finally have!

User avatar
lorax
Greener Thumb
Posts: 1316
Joined: Mon Jul 12, 2010 5:48 pm
Location: Ecuador, USDA Zone 13, at 10,000' of altitude

Hmmmm.... I was 8 or so when I started to garden on my own, although I had helped my parents from about age 5 on in their big garden (about two big city lots, terraced into the side of a hill). My first plants were burgundy bush beans, sugar snap peas, Peaches n Cream corn, and Scarlet Nantes carrots, which I planted in an area of about 10 square feet - Mom helped me with the soil amendments and I chose my own seeds out of the catalog (anybody wondering why I always reccomend McFayden - it comes from good memories from waaay back.) I had the area along the fence at the very top of the garden.

I remember them as the very best beans, peas, corn, and carrots I had ever eaten, because they were 100% my own crops.

thanrose
Greener Thumb
Posts: 716
Joined: Fri Oct 16, 2009 10:01 am
Location: Jacksonville, FLZone 9A

When I was really young, toddler age?, I helped my grandfather with composting and then with growing peas and corn in my backyard. He lived with us off and on when his health was not so great, but he did a lot of yard and garden work to keep busy. It was definitely more than just a toddler looking at a sprout with a five second attention span, but somewhat less than a veteran gardener's lavish care.

I was one of the experienced kids when early grade school classes I was in grew cucurbits or legumes in paper cups on the windowsills at 5 and 6 years old.

Maybe around 7-8-9, I had corn, radish, and bush beans on my own, but in land my grandfather had pretty much already prepped. I just had to hoe the rows, and rake in some compost before planting.

And definitely from toddler age I was doing stuff like weeding and putting down rows of marigolds.

As long as kids can notice that a seed from five days ago has sprouted, they will be old enough to garden some on their own.

Oh yeah, I do not remember a summer when I did not have any tomato plants until I became an adult. (And then I eventually learned you could actually grow tomatoes in bags of soil on Boston rooftops.)

Lorax, I don't remember how we got our seed back in The Dark Ages of the 1950s and '60s. I know mail order catalogs did exist, but I rather think we had to go to a feed store or farm supply. By the 70s, you could sometimes find them in drugstores and gardening sections of department stores. That's when I first started getting some from catalogs.

thanrose
Greener Thumb
Posts: 716
Joined: Fri Oct 16, 2009 10:01 am
Location: Jacksonville, FLZone 9A

gumbo2176 wrote:.

Some of the mirliton fell onto his property and got lost in the weeds. The next spring, many of them sprouted and it grew vines that took over his entire shed, a japanese plum tree and a formosa tree. It looked like the vine that was trying to eat New Orleans. This lasted a couple years but one winter we had a real hard freeze and it put an end to all that.
Thanks for the laugh, gumbo. Mine have never been that prolific. I have to start with one from the grocery store generally. Most of the time I'll decide to eat it instead of plant it.

User avatar
lorax
Greener Thumb
Posts: 1316
Joined: Mon Jul 12, 2010 5:48 pm
Location: Ecuador, USDA Zone 13, at 10,000' of altitude

Ah, but Than, you're aware that I'm still a relatively springy chicken.... I date from the 80's, when even in Northern Canada, seed catalogues were common. (Although McFayden had at that point been around for more than 50 years).

User avatar
tomf
Super Green Thumb
Posts: 3233
Joined: Mon May 18, 2009 8:15 am
Location: Oregon

My dad had one in our back yard but my first one was in a community garden site.

tedln
Super Green Thumb
Posts: 2179
Joined: Thu Jun 25, 2009 6:06 pm
Location: North Texas

I was probably seven or eight years old. We had a patch of bare dirt in the back yard that I thought looked kinda ugly. I know I grew tomatoes, peppers, and beans. The first year, I had a bumper crop of banana peppers and couldn't figure out what to do with the bushels of peppers. I think I may have been expecting to grow peppers that tasted like bananas.

I thought it was funny someone mentioned they don't know where they got the plants. I was thinking about my first garden the other day and realized I have no idea where the seed or plants came from. I do know I didn't germinate seed for transplants. I must have planted all the seed direct in the garden. My first garden must have been around 1950 and I can't remember any feed store or grocery store selling plants. I also don't remember any store selling seed the way they do now. It wouldn't have mattered who was selling the seeds or seedlings. I never had any money to buy something like that. I remember saving up to buy mom a mothers day gift. I bought her a dish towel for a quarter.

Ted

User avatar
farmerlon
Green Thumb
Posts: 671
Joined: Fri Feb 12, 2010 11:42 am
Location: middle Tennessee

My first garden was just a few years ago, and was about 25 x 35 feet.
It was awful ... really hard clay soil... at the time, I was just learning (reading) about adding organic matter, and had not even started making my own compost.
Also, on the advice of a gardening book that I was reading at the time, I used cheap (10-10-10) fertilizer, and I "grew" some of the most awesome aphid/pest "blooms" that you ever saw. :shock:

A few years later now, and I garden with a totally organic approach, and both my garden and soil are constantly improving. I enjoy learning more about gardening every day... for that, helpful gardener is a great place to hang around. :)

thanrose
Greener Thumb
Posts: 716
Joined: Fri Oct 16, 2009 10:01 am
Location: Jacksonville, FLZone 9A

lorax wrote:Ah, but Than, you're aware that I'm still a relatively springy chicken.... I date from the 80's, when even in Northern Canada, seed catalogues were common. (Although McFayden had at that point been around for more than 50 years).
Haha, yeah, I know you are young. Ish. (In internet terms, young is ten years old, right?) Geez, I'll even bet that metro Edmonton had postal service in the 80s so you didn't have to rely on caribou courier. (Folks, I tease! I had a short residence in Edmonton myself once, but no veggie garden.)

Never ordered from McFayden, probably because I had Parks and Burpees in the US. Starting in the 90s though, I was getting a few catalogs with foreign languages and translations for things, especially Asian veggies, but I know one was Arabic from NYC. I'd imagine all were US catalogs though.

I'm pretty sure the ubiquitous "black-seeded Simpson leaf lettuce" was in every early veg garden I had, too. And usually some sort of sweet pepper. I recall transplanting cantaloupe and watermelon seedlings from the edges of the compost pile on a few occasions.

Paging through seed catalogs is a lovely winter pastime, even where the weather is always warm.

TWC015
Senior Member
Posts: 207
Joined: Sat Mar 27, 2010 8:43 am
Location: Jefferson Co., Arkansas

I just remembered that I grew some pumpkins and sunflowers when I lived in Missouri. I was about 8 or 9 then. I also took care of the flower bed that had daturas, four o'clocks and marigolds. The daturas and four o'clocks became perennials there from the roots.

garden5
Super Green Thumb
Posts: 3062
Joined: Fri Aug 07, 2009 5:40 pm
Location: ohio

It's funny too look back at your first garden(s) and look at all the blatantly incorrect things that you did :lol:.

Ted, I hear you about those banana peppers. I grow some once when I was a little kid, and I remember looking at one and it looked like it would taste really good. Took a big bite........did I mention it was a hot banana pepper :lol:! I learned a thing or two about hot peppers that day.

Alfred
Full Member
Posts: 14
Joined: Sun Sep 05, 2010 11:24 pm
Location: Auckland. New Zealand.

That's a interesting question ,the last one I have done had a lot of clay soil which required a lot of gypsum and compost with plenty of worms,over time you can get a good quality soil also in the winter when the leaves fall I cover it with newspaper and leaves good for keeping the weeds down.

thanrose
Greener Thumb
Posts: 716
Joined: Fri Oct 16, 2009 10:01 am
Location: Jacksonville, FLZone 9A

garden5 wrote:It's funny too look back at your first garden(s) and look at all the blatantly incorrect things that you did :lol:.
Oh yeah! My mother was furious with me when I was about ten for digging up all the iris and planting them out with more sun and more room. She was sure I mangled the rhizomes, introduced rot of some kind, destroyed any chance of blooms that year, etc. Of course they loved it.

Those first gardens are great experience, for both the mistakes and the successes. You get to put it all in perspective eventually. As in, "This too shall rot." And that's not a bad thing.



Return to “Vegetable Gardening Forum”