Second-year rookie; when to start indoors? Landscape fabric?

[Lex]

Hi, folks! I'm new here. Here's my intro: [url=https://www.helpfulgardener.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=33348]Semi-newbie in Massachusetts[/url]. Last year, I got surprisingly good results from the garden that came with the house we bought, despite not really knowing what I was doing. I have a 50x17 odd-shaped plot with a diagonal slice out of one corner. It came with a couple of rhubarbs and some chives, and we also have mature blueberry bushes and raspberry canes. I've always wanted a vegetable garden, and I'm having a great time with it!

Last year, I grew:

• tomatoes (moskvich, plum, "S10" (???), German striped, and a few others)
• Bell peppers
• Acorn Squash
• Cucumbers
• lettuce
• broccoli
• potatoes

I loved some of the tomatoes, especially the "S10" ones my local farm sold, although I can't find any mention of those anywhere on the net. I wish I could buy seeds for them. The moskviches were incredibly tasty, too. We had way more cucumbers than we knew what to do with, and some of them ended up, er, inappropriately large. We had (actually, still have!) tons of acorn squash and lots of really tasty potatoes.

We also had weeds! So, so many weeds. I got completely swamped over, and I'm not sure what to do about it. I think my first mistake was attempting to till the initial crop of weeds in when I started the garden. I ended up having to sift the weeds out of the soil by hand, and I think a lot of seeds stayed in. During the summer, it got to the point where I had to sift out my crops from among the forest of weeds.

When I put the garden to bed last fall, I covered the entire thing with landscaping fabric in hopes that I could at least start with a clean slate this spring. I was hoping to cut holes in the fabric to plant my crops this year, but I get the impression from searching here that you folks pretty much uniformly hate landscaping fabric. What can I do to keep the weeds at bay? I see suggestions about using newspaper... can someone link me to a good explanation of how to do that correctly? Or is there a better way? (P.S. I try to avoid chemicals).

I've got a ton of other questions, but I'll try to keep the scope limited for this first post. I do have one thing that I'm really hoping someone can shed some light on, though: when do I start my seeds indoors? I'd like to try to do as many crops as I can from seeds (indoor or out) so that I don't have to spend so much on seedlings. I also want to try to keep my food production staggered, instead of having crops come all at once like they did last year.

I found this chart that seems to call itself a planting calendar: [url=https://www.umassgardencalendar.org/veg_chart.html]Umass Extension Garden Calendar[/url]. The thing is, it seems to be telling me when to move the plants I started indoors to my garden -- but it doesn't say when I should start them indoors. What's a good source to find out when I should start my seeds?

[rainbowgardener]

The seed packets usually tell you when to plant, things like "four to six weeks before last frost." So you need to know when your average last spring frost is.

Here's a table for massachussets:

https://cdo.ncdc.noaa.gov/climatenormals/clim20supp1/states/MA.pdf

Use the 50% date and count back from that. When it says 4-6 weeks, I like to use the longer end of that to have nice sized plants.

Re the weeds, you are right gardeners (including me) pretty uniformly hate landscape fabric. It probably will be fine for you for the first season if you want to leave it. After that the pores loosen up or something and weeds start growing right through it. But then they are entangled in the fabric and and can't be pulled and it is a mess.

Just put down lots of mulch. That could be newspaper, though I think shredded paper would be better. It could be wood chips, grass clippings, fall leaves, or anything else organic you have handy. But I don't put the mulch down ahead of time. I turn under last fall's mulch (by hand, but I'm a small scale gardener), plant seeds or plants in bare ground. Once the seeds are well sprouted, plants are growing and soil is well warmed up, I weed around everything, because some weeds will have sprouted by then, I lay down new mulch around the plants. That usually takes care of weeds pretty well and I don't have to keep weeding. The mulch may need to be added to in mid season if it is breaking down, and then I put down a good layer in the fall when putting the garden to sleep for the winter. If you keep your weeds pretty suppressed like that, over time you have less and less of them.

But don't let weeds get big and particularly don't let them go to seed!

[garden5]

I agree with all of the others on the fabric.

One potential problem I see with it is that if you are walking on your soil, you will be compressing it, in which case, you may want to then cultivate it to loosen it up.

This is where landscaping fabric can become problematic, as you can imagine.

As for the indoor growing, crops including tomatoes, peppers, onions (don't get me started on those), cabbage, broccoli, celery, etc. are usually started indoors about 4-6 weeks before your last frost.

Oh, but onions, cabbage, and broccoli are the exceptions: they are started a little earlier than that because they like it cool and usually are put in about month or so before the final frost.

If you browse around in our seed-starting forum, you will get many great ideas on indoor growing set-ups.

Good luck with your garden this year.

[Lex]

Thanks for the tips, folks!

There's one thing I'm not sure about with putting mulch on my garden: am I just eventually going to turn this stuff into the soil? Is newspaper okay for my soil? How about the shredded wood-chip kind of mulch... will that actually break down enough to become soil? Or will it sort of eventually turn my soil into a woody fibrous mess?

[quote=rainbowgardener]But don't let weeds get big and particularly don't let them go to seed![/quote]

Yeah, been there, done that Hence the landscaping fabric. I'm hoping to at least kill off the early risers from last year's seeds.


About that landscaping fabric, though... yeah. So, the other morning, out in my garden, I found a somewhat bored-looking dog. Apparently, it's fairly easy for a lost dog to get into a garden fenced with chickenwire, but it's scary and/or impossible for it to get out. From what I can tell, this dog was in my garden all night, and it was bored, so it dug the heck out of my landscape fabric and tilled my soil for me. I patched the holes today, but I guess the only purpose this stuff's going to serve is letting me start with a clean slate -- it's not salvageable for using around my plants. Guess I'll get mulching!

Thanks again for your help, folks

[rainbowgardener]

Yes, you will be amazed how quickly wood chips break down into soil....

[garden5]

Even that dog doesn't like landscape fabric !