Once you have chosen a location, the next step is to build your garden. There are a number of ways to do this.
Growing in containers: potting mix
If you don’t have good soil to work with, you can still grow a lot of food in pots, planters, or other containers. This is a great way to grow your own vegetables and herbs on a sunny patio or balcony. You could even grow them indoors under a horticultural lamp.
When growing plants in containers, it is important to fill them with the right stuff. If you want to use a natural/organic soil, you can either buy a potting or planter mix specifically for container gardening, or you can mix your own. Never use natural soil from a garden to fill your containers, it will not drain properly.
Mixing your own potting mix is not all that hard. There are just 3 basic components you need to mix together in equal parts:
- Peat or Coir – The first ingredient can be either: 1) peat moss which is harvested from peat bogs, or 2) coconut coir which is made of ground coconut husks. Both are available at most garden centers or nurseries and are inexpensive and natural/organic. Coir is a more renewable and sustainable product.
- Perlite or Vermiculite – This is your drainage material. Like peat and coir, these are natural products. (even though perlite does look like styrofoam) They are both natural mineral sand whose grains have been expanded using extreme heat. These are also available at most garden centers, but you may have to purchase a large amount.
- Compost or Soil – Only one third of your soil should actually be soil. This can be natural soil, compost, or a combination of the two. Experiment with different ratios and materials and see what works for you.
Mix these three equal parts together outdoors on a flat surface. If you are making a lot of mix, doing this on a large tarp makes cleanup much easier and allows you to wrap up whatever is left when you are done and store it. Spraying the pile of materials with a little water makes the process a little less dusty too. Make sure everything is mixed thoroughly before filling your planters with it. This is also a good time to add fertilizers to ensure that they are mixed in thoroughly. (see amendments and fertilizers)
Growing in the ground: making raised beds
In these photos we are making raised beds out of kiln dried lumber. This is an excellent method for quickly creating a very fertile and productive garden in a relatively small space. If you have a good garden location and are able to use your native soil, this is definitely the way to go. Your plants will be able to root deeply and draw moisture and nutrients from a large reservoir of natural soil.
If you have native soil that you can use, the easiest way to set up a raised bed is to attach the pieces of lumber on all 4 corners with wood screws to make a frame and place the frame where you want it. This allows you to turn the soil underneath the bed, place the frame back on that spot, and fill it with a mixture of soil and compost, creating the deepest possible bed of fertile garden soil.
If there is grass growing on your future garden site, we recommend removing the top layer of sod (grass and roots) and using this material as a layer on your compost pile. (Click here to read about composting)
We also recommend using kiln dried (not treated) lumber to make your frame. 2×8’s or 2×10’s create a nice deep soil bed allowing you to add more high quality materials and are easy to attach together on the corners using wood screws. This is similar to the method Mel Bartholemew uses in his book Square Foot Gardening (see resources page) to make his beds, but in this case we have made them larger and recommend using natural soil, if you have access to it, instead of filling with a mix. We like to fill these beds with a 50/50 mix of soil and compost. You can purchase topsoil, but if you can use extra soil you already have, that is usually your best (and cheapest) choice.
Using a variety of soil amendments and fertilizers is a good way to ensure a healthy variety of critical plant nutrients. To each of these beds, we added about two pounds of greensand, one pound of gypsum, and one pound of seabird guano when it was about halfway full, then added the rest of our soil and mixed everything together using a shovel before smoothing the surface with a bow rake. There is a lot to consider when choosing soil amendments and fertilizers, but using small amounts of organic materials like these is a pretty safe bet to jump-start the fertility and biological activity of most soil.
Growing in the ground: making traditional rows
If you want to build a really big garden, it might not be practical to build wooden frames for the whole thing. The picture to the right shows a series of traditional style garden rows we built in order to expand an existing vegetable garden to almost 600 square feet.
The process is much the same as it is for the raised beds. First, use stakes to mark the corners and tie a length of twine between them to get a straight outline for your rows. Then, remove the sod using a stirrup hoe and put it on the compost pile. Once all this is done, move down each row with a shovel, digging it in as deep as you can and turning over all of the soil in the row one scoop at a time. When the soil surface is all broken up, add your 3 inch layer of compost (this took us several trips with a wheelbarrow for this garden) and spread it evenly over the turned surface using a bow rake. Now spread any fertilizers you are going to add and walk down the row a second time, mixing everything together as best you can and breaking up large clods of soil using your shovel, a large garden hoe, and a bow rake before smoothing out the surface.
Obviously, this is a huge amount of work and it is best if you have some help. Turning of the soil can also be achieved using a motorized rototiller, but these can be quite expensive and are still a lot of work to use, especially in heavy or compacted soil.