Gardening Challenging, But Worth It

Every gardener needs somebody like John Cullen for a neighbor. You can run over on a Saturday morning and say, “John, why haven’t my beans come up?” “John, what are those little black bugs chewing on my okra?”

“John, what happened to my carrots? They’re all gnarly.”

Chances are Cullen knows.

Cullen, a securities examiner with the Kentucky Department of Financial Institutions, learned the hard way - from experience.

“It’s been a learn-as-you-go process,” he said one evening as he showed off his garden. “I had to learn where to plant, what to plant, how to take care of it.”

Today, his compact garden of mostly raised beds on Brookwater Lane is a textbook example of how to overcome the obstacles faced by many south Lexington gardeners: clay soil, a steeply pitched lot, limited space.

Starting in early spring, he plants lettuce, peas, broccoli, potatoes and onions. When these are finished, in go warm-season vegetables such as corn, beans, garlic, peppers, tomatoes and watermelon in the summer. In the fall, he raises spinach, lettuce, onions and radishes.

Also in the back yard are grapes and blackberries for making jelly, flowers for cutting and blueberries.

“I raise as much as we can eat,” said Cullen, whose wife, Jane, and daughters, Kristen, 14 and Kathryn, 8, also reap the benefits of the harvest. He cans and freezes the excess.

Gardeners like Cullen think there’s nothing better than reaping - and eating - what they sow.

Vegetables are more challenging than flowers. So if you’re ready to expand into a new dimension of gardening, let a few seasoned hands like Cullen share their experience.

Full sun: “Eight hours at the minimum,” Cullen said.

Start small: A garden that’s too big will quickly dampen a gardener’s enthusiasm once heat, weeds and insects arrive.

Plus, a small area that’s well tended can be extremely productive, as Jack Swisher and neighbor Bill Banks on Oldham Avenue know.

The men garden in the strip of ground between their two driveways, plus in a few containers.

“The biggest bed we have is 2 feet by 4,” Swisher said.

But in this miniscule area they grow 36 kinds of peppers, tomatoes, green onions, half-runner beans, peas, lettuce and cucumbers.

“We eat and eat and still give it away,” said Swisher, a master gardener with the Fayette County (Ky.) Extension Service.

Soil secrets: A garden with bad soil won’t produce very well .

“The whole secret to gardening is soil. That’s why I compost,” Cullen said.

In the compost pile go kitchen scraps, spent plants from the garden - but no weeds - and bags of grass clippings and leaves he collects curbside from his neighbors.

Cullen started nine years ago, building raised beds with landscape timbers at the end of his yard where it slopes the steepest. He has one large bed, 8-by-32, plus two small ones.

Because the soil in his yard is clay, these raised beds were filled with truckloads of top soil, which Cullen amended with heaps of compost and other organic matter to make the soil light and spongy.

To all things a season: Planting in the right season will produce the best-quality vegetables. Warm-season vegetables need long, hot days and warm soil to mature. Tomatoes, peppers, corn, beans, cucumbers, pumpkins and squash fall in this group.

Now is the time to get these in the ground.

Cool-season crops include lettuce, spinach, peas, beets and those in the cabbage family.

Cullen plants these in March and again in late August or very early September.

Successive plantings: Cullen sows seeds of a given vegetable at two-week intervals to produce a continuous supply rather than short-term excess.

Water: Whether it drops out of the sky or squirts from a hose, an inch of water a week is mandatory, said Dan Niffenegger, a retired researcher for the U.S. Agricultural Research Office and a master gardener.

“If your vegetable garden is not in hose-reach of a faucet, you might as well forget it,” he said.

1. SOURCES Books A sampling of sources for more information on raising a back-yard crop of vegetables this summer: “The Weekend Garden Guide,” by Susan A. Roth, published by Rodale Press is available at most bookstores. “Ortho’s Complete Guide to Vegetables” is sold at some garden centers and at bookstores.

2. Maximize garden while minimizing work Lexington Herald-Leader Insects, weeds and weather can take a big bite out of your vegetable garden. Ravenous birds and animals can devour what’s left before you get out there to harvest. But you can take the offensive by gardening smart. Experienced gardeners John Cullen, Jack Swisher and Dan Niffenegger offer the following advice on maximizing your garden space and minimizing the work: Choose disease-resistant varieties of vegetables. Avoid planting tomatoes or any crop in the same place two years in a row. Rotate their location to help eliminate disease and insect problems. Maximize your space by growing vining vegetables (cucumbers, squash, melons, pole beans) on a trellis. A trellis can be made of chicken wire, string, bamboo poles or wooden slates. Grow just what your family will eat and what you want to freeze and can. Use bird netting to protect crops such as blueberries, blackberries and broccoli . Mulch around plants and between rows to hold in soil moisture and control weeds. When you completely harvest a crop, pull out the spent plants and fill that bare spot with vegetable or flower plants to keep weeds from growing in the exposed soil.