Congratulations! You've arrived at my favorite part of edible gardening - the laziest part. Up until now, there's been a lot of effort and non-laziness put into making your edible garden possible. Now that all the plants are in the ground everything should be nice and easy for the rest of the season.
However there are a few different kinds of upkeep you'll need to be doing to maintain your edibles and maximize the harvest.
If you've planted seeds either in a container or a raised bed, after a few weeks you'll begin to see them sprout. After the majority of the seeds have sprouted it's time to take the unfortunate but necessary step of thinning.
Rolf Hokannson explains the importance of thinning newly sprouted seeds.
Rolf Hokannson explains the importance of thinning newly sprouted seeds.
Later in the process, once the edibles have really come to life and begun to produce more abundantly - you may find the garden very bushy but without much fruit. I've found this often occurs in late August when I've got massive tomato plants with green fruits which never seem to turn red. To address this problem, it's helpful to cut out some of the extra greenery the plant is producing - this way more nutrients and energy go to producing and ripening the fruits.
In my experience, the amount of weeding I've had to do in my three raised beds pales in comparison to the weeding I have to do around the rest of my small urban lot. Unless by some stroke of terrible luck you have inordinate amounts of volunteers, weeding your raised beds will likely take you no more than ten minutes a week max. On the other hand, if you're growing in containers you may not have any weeding to worry about - lucky you! In both raised beds and containers the best way to ward off more weeding is to simply pull those weeds often and early.
Pests can range greatly depending on where you live both in terms of climate and space. If you're growing your edibles in a small backyard of an urban townhouse, you probably won't need to worry about deer or rabbits. However, just because you're living in the city doesn't mean you get to live pest free.
Insects are bound to be a problem for both urban and rural gardens alike. Two of the most common pests I've experienced are snails and whiteflies. The former is relatively easy to control by lining the raised bed or container with a strip of copper or by simply being vigilant in picking them off the plants. The later can feel almost impossible to destroy, but neem oil seems to make an adequate natural method for controlling their take over of your garden.
If you're an urban gardener the worst pests you'll likely have to face are the winged variety. Birds of all types are notorious for eating up all kinds of leafy greens from lettuce to beet tops. Luckily, they're also one of the easiest pests to stop - draping netting over hoops on the raised bed or rigging up a similar set up for containers should do the trick. Just know that some smaller birds can get caught in the netting and you may need to very carefully untangle them.
If you're rural gardener or possibly even a suburban one, you may have to deal with some larger critters like deer or rabbits. In this case, you may need to go the extra mile and build a large fence around your edible garden. It's an extra step and a cumbersome one - but it may be necessary if you've got wild critters who are treating your garden as their own pantry.
In terms of burrowing animals, which can be trouble both in urban and rural environments - you can lay hardware cloth on the bottom of raised beds before adding the soil.
On to the last of the three garden terrors, disease. It's perhaps the most difficult to stomp out once it starts. However, natural solutions like neem oil can be helpful to naturally control common afflictions like powdery mildew. If natural solutions like that don't help your plant to recover, it's important to remove the affected portion quickly so it won't spread to the rest of the garden.
As discussed in Chapter 3, watering is vitally important to the health of your edible garden. Make sure to maintain a consistent watering strategy and be ready to switch things up if the plants aren't looking very happy. Additionally, at least once more in the growing season you'll want to scratch a little more fertilizer into the soil around the plants.
You've made it to the end! Your tomatoes, or at least most of them are red, your lettuce looks just like the heads sold at the farmers markets, and you pulled up a carrot top to find a carrot on the end! It's time to celebrate and share your success with the rest of us.
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Ready to get going, but still not sure where to get started? I've got a few more resources to share that should help you get moving.