The Beginner's Garden #1

The Beginner's Garden

This guide is for people with no gardening experience, very little experience, or discouraging—even completely traumatic—experience.

You will work in a small space, using plants with a strong will to live. You only have to go shopping twice. The only tools you will need are garbage bags, scissors, gloves, and a shovel.

There will be no soil-testing. No graph paper. No measuring tape. No renting of weed whacker or rototiller. No treatise on formal vs. informal style.

There will be two separate days of a lot of activity. The first day, this month, will be spent preparing the planting bed (unless you live in northern Maine, North Dakota, or Alaska, in which case you should wait till late May). On the second garden work day—for most of you, in late April or early May—you will buy, install, and water your plants.

To begin, here are marching orders for March.

1. Pick a place for your planting bed.

Ideally, this spot should be in the sun or only partial shade. Not smack up against a building. Preferably free of tree roots and not right under overhanging branches. Not on a steep hill. Most important, the location should not be swampy. Standing water will sink this enterprise. You don't want to plant in a place where water sits in puddles rather than percolating down through the soil.

A few practical considerations: Don't plant where the mail carrier, UPS guy, or departing guests will step. And not so close to the sidewalk that a dog will come to urinate, or someone walking down the street will be sorely tempted to pick your black-eyed Susans.

Make sure you have access to water, preferably an outdoor faucet and a hose (though center-city community gardeners do carry buckets of water from their apartments).

Your gardening bed should be a foot or so longer than you are tall, and 3 to 4 feet wide. That width, which you can pace out with a wide stride, will allow you to reach into the bed from both sides, so you won't have to walk much on the soil.

2. Take your first shopping trip to a garden center or nursery.

You will need to delay gratification: no plants yet. The store will do much to tempt you, but hold off.

Do buy:

Gloves.

Garbage bags.

2 bags dehydrated cow manure.

3 bags compost: You'll see a choice of composts with names like Hudson Valley Gold, Black Gold, or Maine Seashell Compost. Pick whatever strikes your fancy. Best is mixed tiny pieces of bark and aged animal manure. Don't get confused and buy potting soil or topsoil.

Buy or borrow a shovel with a pointed blade. (Don't get a manure shovel, which has a very wide blade with squared off end.)

3. Prepare the bed.

Make a rectangle. (Next year you can do curves.) You may want to mark the lines you want with string or sprinkle flour along them. Use your shovel to slice an outline.

Now comes the hardest work, but also the most satisfying. Pull up or shovel up grass and weeds. Remove broken glass, bottle caps, cigarette butts, bricks, and rocks larger than a gourmet boiling potato. Also remove pet coffins. (A decomposing shoe box with a canary skeleton, for example, is often encountered in city parks.) Find a worm? Be glad. Find a beetle grub? Squash it.

Recent research has made soil preparation a lot easier. Gardeners used to be ordered to make trenches 2 feet deep, digging up subsoil and deeply mixing topsoil with compost. Soil scientists now tell us that this time-consuming practice was unnecessary and unnatural. It messed up the soil horizon by pulling the clunky subsoil up into the root zone. Our method will instead be to add good stuff on the top of the soil, as nature would do in the forest with decomposing leaves and bark. So, dig down a bit less than a foot—about the length of your shovelhead. Turn the soil over and break up the big clumps. Once again, remove still more rocks, broken glass, and bottle caps.

You might see neighbors using a rototiller for this stage. The machine looks like a small mower. Its weight and vibration can compact the soil by punching out air, which roots need. And it costs money. You don't need one.

When your plot is free of weeds, grass, and trash, open and spread your bags of compost and cow manure on top of the bare soil. The motive here is more to improve the texture of the soil than to fertilize. You're working to give air and space for the roots to move out and down—to aerate the soil.

Dig in the soil and see it begin to look a nice healthy brown. Once you plant and water, the worms will take over the work of getting the good stuff down to root level. At this point, a professional gardener would use a hard rake to level the soil. We're going low on tools, so see if you can do this with your shovel, or if you can, borrow a rake.

Now it's time to water to help the soil settle. Think gentle shower and soak here; you want a nozzle that doesn't blast. You're not washing the car.

Next month: April shopping. I'll supply a list of a several kinds of perennials and several kinds of annuals, with requisite amounts. You'll be in charge of color and design. If you have any questions in the meantime, you can e-mail me at gardening@slate.com.