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Top Five Rules of Successful Home Gardening Sprout from Four Landmark Books

Whether it’s a Victory Garden, Square Foot Gardening, lasagna garden, or no dig garden, more and more sunny spots are harvest destinations.  The National Gardening Association reports $70 spent on a garden returns $600 worth of produce.  With an almost 9 to 1 rate of return, little wonder seed giant W. Atlee Burpee & Co. saw 2008 sales of vegetable and herb seeds grow almost 40 percent, twice the rate of 2007.    Ball Canning storage product sales rose 92 percent last October compared to October 2007.  Out West, Santa Barbara rooftop seedling grower and garden designer Jimmy Williams has quadrupled sales in twelve months.  John Dromgoole, owner of The Natural Gardener and host of the longest running weekly radio show about organic gardening, sees 2009 plant and seed sales up 300 to 500 percent.  In the Northeast, Coast of Maine Organic Products reports a 30-40 percent increase in a compost mix containing lobster waste. Yes, lobster waste is fashionable.

To help the legions of new gardeners and returning seasoned veterans who are hitting the dirt,  we looked for tested and proven techniques that provide consistent growing bliss.  What we found is that in four of the most influential gardening books of the last seventy years, five basic rules of backyard gardening keep showing up time and again.  Whether you are all organic, conventional, or a mixture of both, these rules give you consistent, low cost, low stress paths to growing success.   These steps have proven successful and bountiful providing healthy harvests from World War II through several recessions and even beyond soil remediation.

Most Influential Gardening Books for Backyard Gardeners

A publication does not have to be a bestseller to be influential, but it does not hurt.  An influential garden book also does not have to be a book, as the first entry shows.

1.   Victory Gardens  Miscellaneous Publication No. 483, U.S. Department of Agriculture  February 1942  Originally priced at five cents, Victory Gardens‘ eleven pages of practical how to instructions and resulting books, community organizing efforts and encouragement from Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck led Americans to plant millions of gardens and produce billions of pounds of produce.  By 1944, local harvests provided an estimated 40 percent of all domestic consumed fresh vegetables from 20 million garden plots.  The 1942 writing stressed conservation and speed.  “As long as the United States has the task of helping to feed much of the world, seeds and fertilizer should be carefully preserved.”  Likewise, if you did not intend to see a garden through to harvest, don’t start one.  ”The Nation cannot afford such waste of labor and materials when it is at war.”  The only plants grown in the 1942 Victory Garden were foods that could be consumed within months of planting.  In this Victory Garden, there is no time to grow asparagus and there no reason to plant fruit trees. 

2. Crockett’s Victory Garden: Companion to the Nationally Acclaimed PBS Television Series
  James Underwood Crockett 1977.  This book is the companion to the television series now known as The Victory Garden, which premiered in 1975.  Crockett was the original host of the longest running nationally televised gardening show.  Written on a month-by-month basis, this 1977 version is a little hard to come by and since it was pre-World Wide Web, it naturally lacks links.  The more recent 2006 The Victory Garden Companion updates the zone hardiness map and provides website links while still including practical, unchanging advice.

3. Square Foot Gardening: A New Way to Garden in Less Space with Less Work Mel Bartholomew 1981  Square Foot Gardening is the best selling garden book of all time.  The Square Foot Gardening web site is a gem of functionality, ease of use, and information.  It’s also nice when Mel makes a mistake, he admits it.  Here he updates and corrects errors in tomato and squash spacing caused by misprints in his 2006  All New Square Foot Gardening book.  The square foot method brings together simple how to instructions and illustrations with the promise of less work (set it up in a day), more vegetables in less space, and a sense of structure and organization to what could become a sprawling mess.  With Mel, a Square Foot Garden is high yield, low maintenance, manageable, and good looking.

4.  Lasagna Gardening: A New Layering System for Bountiful Gardens: No Digging, No Tilling, No Weeding, No Kidding! Patricia Lanza 1998  Lasagna Gardening is included here because of the growing popularity of no dig gardening.  A 2008 story in the Los Angeles Times about no dig gardening, complete with photo gallery and how to start a no dig garden, is still one of the most requested “could you do an update” stories over the last year.  Lanza’s methods may seem new, but they date back in one way or another more than fifty years.   Her method has also been called sheet gardening or sheet composting.  This method was first described by J I Rodale in his mid 1940s book “Pay Dirt.” Rodale is credited with coining the term “organic gardening.”   Lasagna Gardening is popular among organic gardeners and others because it uses less water than conventional gardening, incorporates low cost and no cost products to build up the growing site, and is adaptable to containers and very small spaces.  At the same time, it can be expanded to meet the owner’s needs.

Five Rules for Successful Garden Plants

To save you the suspense, here are the rules:  start a small garden, plan before you plant, grow local and ask locals, use raised garden beds, and compost, then compost some more.

1.     Start a Small Garden.   “Small” is what you define as a small garden.  A great harvest starts with what you can handle.  Gardening should be a leisurely hobby with fresh, healthy food as an added reward, not a backyard backbreaking competition.  Whatever size you choose, make it manageable.  For containers,  Revive the Victory Garden calls for pots starting at 15 quarts capacity (a 12 inch pot).    Shrinking even further, this Iowa State Extension Service brochure recommends a six inch container (2.5 quarts) for growing parsley.  At the other extreme of “small,” the 1942 Victory Gardens brochure describe a small garden as 35 by 100 feet, or 3,500 square feet.  Its “scheme for a very small garden” put 1,500 square feet under cultivation.  These are huge home gardens by today’s standards.  The new White House garden is 1,100 square feet, and the White House has 16 acres of grounds.  A mid 1980s Harris Poll found the average American garden at 500-600 square feet.  Mel Bartholomew in his 2007 “All New Square Foot Gardening” book puts the average 21st Century American garden at 700 square feet.  His classic square foot garden works off a 4 x 4 foot square, or 16 square feet.    Whatever size you chose, make it manageable.

2.  Plan then Plant. It is much easier to change a plan than change a row of plants.  Along these lines, pick the sun and avoid the puddles.  You want a location that gets at least six hours of direct sun per day, and you want to avoid any spot where water collects.  For the more advanced parts of planning, put the taller and trellis growing vines on the north side of the garden plot.  That way, the tall growing plants do not block the sun for the low growers (see rule of direct sun above).  Or as the World War II brochure explained, “Tall-growing crops should be placed preferably on the north or west side of the garden so that they will not shade the lower ones.”

3.  Grow Local, Ask Locals.  Grow what grows in your area.  If you are not sure of what grows where or when, ask your cooperative extension agent office for more information.  The USDA has a nice help service here for you to find a cooperative extension services agent near you.  As Crockett wrote, consult your local garden center or extension agent.  You can also ask master gardeners,  neighbors, even farmers at a local farmers market.

4.  Use raised garden beds. For today’s gardens, a raised bed lends itself to no till or no dig gardening.  With a raised bed, you’re starting a new garden, usually with new soil.  As this recent New York Times story about lead contamination of urban soil points out, using a raised bed is one way to grow vegetables away from the contaminated soil.  Even if your soil is not contaminated with lead, it’s oftentimes better to start fresh.  Crockett did not plan for his original Victory Garden to be in raised beds.  It is well known the original outdoor garden studio set was in part of the WGBH television station parking lot.  The preface of the original Victory Garden gives more details of what workers found below the parking lot.  After tearing off the surface of the lot, the crew found the construction rubble from when the station was built.  Below that was part of the former town dump.  After getting through the dump, they hit a onetime flood plain of the Charles River.  By now, it was decided to go with raised beds since they had to order so much new soil to replace what they had to discard. 

Here’s the exception to “everyone says follow this rule.”  Just as the 1942 Victory Garden booklet went large when writing about small gardens, it went minimalist on raised beds.  The 1942 writer explains without explanation, ”In general, flat culture is preferable to and requires less work than growing the crops on raised beds or ridges.”  A 1943 Victory Garden publication eliminates any mention of raised beds.  Lumber was in short supply during World War II, and steel (nails or screws to hold together the lumber for the raised beds) was in critically short supply.  Hairpins production was cut by 50 percent in 1942, then hairpins were rationed at Hollywood studios.  Writing in his book “Fifty Billion Dollars,” Jesse H. Jones (one of the chief architects of material procurement and production) stated, “Steel mills needed scrap in such quantities that the amount available in the United States, however far and wide we searched, was not enough.  The (Metal Reserves) Company ordred its agents to ferret out scrap in Alaska, Cuba, and the cities of Central and South America.”  Railroad branch lines were taken up.   

 5.  Compost, mulch, then compost some more. Another universal recommendation.   Composting enriches the soil.  Mulching reduced the amount of water the plants need, and reduces the amount of watering you need to do for the plants.   Adding mulch to the garden also reduces the amount of plant products burned or dumped in landfills.  Close planting and generous mulching saves work, energy, water, and time. 

This sixth rule for successful gardening has nothing to do with soil, sun, or seed.  Rather, it’s an outlook on gardening and life shining through from a hopeful but still dark time.  While the writer wasn’t ready to recommend using lumber and steel products in the home garden, from the 1944 Victory Gardens Handbook of the Pennsylvania Victory Garden Committee comes this advice.  “Plant new fruit plants for the future, mainly to show your optimism about that future.”  Good advice for today.

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