A coworker of mine went to the same class last year and implemented it in his garden that spring. He was amazed at the results he was able to obtain just by following the simple guidelines laid out by Mr. Wells. He was so impressed that he created a series of three PDF documents that simply and quickly illustrate when and what to plant.

Quick Utah Gardening Reference Cards

The following cards make up a nice summary that you can use to keep tabs on your gardening work.

Planting Calendar

This document details what you should plant or do month by month to maximize your garden’s productivity.

Preparing for the Season

This time line illustrates what you need to do and when for your Spring, Summer, Fall and Next Year’s garden.

Garden Layout

The Garden Layout document shows you how large a row should be, how to arrange spacing, how to lay out a drip system and how often to water many types of garden plants.

I’ve been gardening all my life – my Father got his Masters Degree in Agronomy and for as long as I can remember he has kept a very large garden, large enough to feed his family of 9.  Growing up we spent each spring building hills for the garden and planting, summers were spent weeding and maintaining and fall was always a huge harvest that the entire family participated in.

Dad would fill the wheelbarrow with corn and bring it to the deck for us to shuck, then it would move inside where we had long boards with nails sticking out of them to put the corn on to remove the kernels.  By the end of the corn harvest we would have hundreds of bags of corn ready to go into the freezer.  Same with beans, during the week Dad would pick beans into a brown paper sack and bring them in for us to snap while we watched TV.  Mom always had a huge freezer full of produce that we harvested from the garden.

That is where I learned to garden – a first hand education from my Father that continues to this day.  My Dad is the first person I call when I have a question about gardening, and I have yet to not receive an immediate answer.  Now I am trying to pass that legacy of learning on to my kids.  By keeping a large garden I hope that they will learn the value of producing their own food and hopefully at least the rudimentary skills of how to do so.

This year I’m living in a new home – one that didn’t previously have a garden.  I wish I had done a better job of photographing it so I could show pictures of each step but when I’m working I often forget to grab a camera!

To layout our garden we identified a large section of pasture that didn’t get flood irrigated very well because of its upward slope.  We plowed it twice with a tractor then disced it.  This leaves a lot of big clumps of dirt but the soil is generally broken up.  I then went in with a tiller and first went over it tilling it just a few inches deep, then I went over it again tilling it about a foot deep.  This resulted in a very nicely turned soil that is easy to plant in.

Our next step was to furrow and hill it.  I prefer to do both with a landscaping rake.  The head of this rake is about 40 inches wide and I find it the perfect size for digging furrows and smoothing hills.  There is a technique to building furrows with a rake.  By continually holding the rake handle in precisely the same spot and maintaining the length at which you extnd your arms you can always strike the rake at the exact same distance from your body.  To successfully build parrallel rows, you make sure that you maintain your body and your striking distance at a continuous length from an established line (such as the garden border or the previous row you built).

Let me explain that a different way – instead of trying to eyeball whether you are parrallel and constantly adjusting where you are digging based on what your eyes tell you, keep yourself and your rake at a consistent distance from the line.  Then it all comes out pretty!  (I’m sure that I just left you all confused.  Just give it a try sometime :) ).

Once I’ve built a furrow, I use the landscaping rake to smooth over the hill.  This lets me pull any rocks and organic chunks off the hill into the row and provides a nice smooth planting surface.

Deep furrow and hill gardening is really all I’ve ever known.  There are a lot of advantages to it in my mind and I like the way my garden looks with it.  Angela recently posted about her raised bed gardening which is essentially the same but she has used planks to build boxes for her rows.  One advantage to the method I use would be when you want to alter the soil – I can dump a full load of manure or other matter onto the garden (in spring or fall when nothing is growing), spread it out and just till the entire garden.  That said, I really like her garden and think it looks wonderful!

I also had to bring water down to my garden.  I did this by attaching a short garden hose to a well hydrant and installing 200 feet of pvc pipe down the side of the pasture.  The hose on the well hydrant attaches to the pvc pipe which runs to a manifold system in the corner of the garden.  From there I installed a hose bib and 3 manual manifold stations.  Each of the stations has two lateral lines that have kickback sprinkler heads on them 5 feet in the air.  This will allow me to water over my corn once it gets 5 – 6 feet high.

After spending several weeks getting the garden set up, we spent about two weeks planting.  We are able to spend 3-4 hours each evening working and all day Saturday.  By the time we got finished planting the beans, peas, squashes and melons our corn (which we planted first) was already coming up.

You can also see in this picture that the soil in my garden is a little too clayish.  We’ve begun working on altering that through mulching.  I have a brother who has a lawn maintenance company from whom I was able to get several tons (literally) of cut grass.  We’re now working on mulching everywhere with it.

We finished planting almost a month ago.  We’ve weeded the entire garden twice now and are currently working on our third weeding and mulching.  You can see in the following pictures where we need to weed again and where we’ve finished our third pass.

This is the salad bar area.  We’re using staggered planting so that we have fresh cuts longer which is why only parts of it are currently planted.  In this area there is lettuce, radishes, celery, spinach and peppers (I think there are a couple other things but I don’t remember right now :) )

These are the carrot and onion beds.  My kids planted the carrots the first time and they never came up so we recently planted it again.  The onions are doing quite well though.

The corn is coming up nicely.  In Missouri we had a saying about corn – for it to be a good crop it had to be “Knee high by the Fourth of July”.  It seems that my crop is on target.

There are two tomato beds on the left here, peas on the right and the corn on the rightmost.  I have 58 tomato plants in the ground.  There is also another row of tomatoes over by the onions.

These are my perennial beds that I’m working on getting established.  On the left are 50 strawberry plants, straight ahead are about 30 raspberries, to the right are a dozen grape vines that will be grown onto the fence.  Mixed in with the grape vines are lots of herbs.

There are 3 rows of beans here and one row of peas to the right.  This area and the squash area will be weeded and mulched next.

My squash and melon beds are also using staggered planting.  Several plants are up quite strong while several just sprouted last week.  On the far right is a Jicama bed.

As an update on my post about potato boxes – here they are, coming up strong!

We’re getting very close to plucking the first fruits of our labor!

Garden laid out in beds. Pay no attention to the weeds--they are outside the beds!

First is the increased production in less space.  Beans don’t need 18 inches between rows like the seed packet says.  That 18 inches is for you to walk between rows.

Second is the decrease in weeds.  This is primarily due to the plants being close enough together to shade out a majority of the weed growth.  Strange but tested true in my own garden last year.  I was actually surprised at how few weeds we had.

Third, because the beds are to plant in and not walk on, the dirt stays soft and uncompacted which makes it easier for the plants to grow and be harvested.  We were careful not to walk on the beds at any time, and now I’m planting in the same dirt as last year without tilling this spring.  And no tilling also helps keep weed production down.

Building your garden beds can be as extensive and as expensive a process as you want.  Raised beds are nice, but not necessary.  I’ve seen beds built out of railroad ties, metal highway barrier, vinyl fencing, and a host of other things.  Ours were simply made from 2×6 rough cut lumber we got from an old barn screwed to wood stakes pounded in the ground.  The dirt from the walkways was shoveled into the beds before the sides were erected, so no fill dirt had to be brought in.  I love cheap.  Beds could also be laid out without being raised at all–just mark walkways and the beds are all the dirt in between.  We wanted some obvious way to mark the edges of our beds since we have kids that needed to know where they could walk in the garden and if it’s all flat, we’d probably have more stepping on the beds than we wanted.  We opted for beds that ran the full length of the garden and just have to walk around or step over to get to the next row.  It was easier to build them this way, and fewer walkways means more planting space, but if you don’t get around well, you can break the beds into sections with walkways between to get from row to row.

When building your beds, you need to make sure you can reach at least half way across so you can easily plant, weed, and harvest.  Make your walkways wide enough to walk on when the plants are full grown and hanging over the edge of the bed.  Our beds are about 30″ wide and the walkways are about 18″ wide.  I’ve got a salsa bed with tomatoes, peppers, and onions in it, and a salad bed with lettuce, peas, cucumbers, spinach, carrots, etc. in it.  Beans, beets, and melons in another, and still some empty space to fill.

There are a few plants we are not putting in the beds.  Corn still works well in rows, and we’re planting squash between the baby fruit trees this year instead of using garden bed space for them.  Just waiting for my drip system to get repaired to make watering it all a little (well, okay, a LOT) easier. ;)

So if you’re looking to increase production, decrease weeds, and generally make your gardening easier, take a look at gardening in beds.

He is adding on quite a few useful articles on things he is doing to help plants grow around here, and has many useful links directly to useful locations such as the Utah State Extensions which provide very useful on agriculture, horticulture, insects, in short everything you might need to know about growing anything in your own county.

It looks like in the future he is planning on expanding his blog to also give alerts for when you need to take certain actions in your garden according to our climate.  And if we’ve learned anything this spring, it’s that a little help in knowing the real planting/safe dates can really help (I still can’t believe I got snow again today!)

I found the Jiffy Greenhouse Kit cumbersome, but it does appear to be performing better than the pots I filled with soil by hand. The peat pellets in the kit are compressed and dehydrated and come as small wafers. Before use, you must rehydrate them with an eighth a cup of water and slice open the top of the fabric that holds them together so that you can get the seed inside. The raised plastic lid also appears to be regulating the humidity better than the cellophane on the others. The cellophane is also going to have to be removed once shoots get much higher than the edge of the peat pots.

The only real obstacle that I foresee is distinguishing between each of the plants while they are young as my toddler has removed my markers.