
Hi, I’m Ed Shafer and I love to garden and have been doing it for most of my life in various locales around the country, rural Maryland, urban Los Angeles and now suburban Kansas.
Here in Kansas, (growing zone 5) I start growing things around April 1st. Maybe there is some deeper meaning in the fact that I plant my early onions on April fools day. I’ll leave that for you, dear reader, to decide.
Before I get going full steam here, let me describe my “garden.” Living in a suburban neighborhood with about 1/4 acre of land, you might think I’d have the usual square or rectangler piece of sod torn up and planted as a garden. I would indeed have done that, except I discovered that I’m living on top of a limestone shelf that covers nearly my entire plot. It is covered with about two inches of soil and barely grows the grass.
So what is a life-long gardener to do? I chose a method I’ve experimented with for several years in LA. I built flower boxes all around the house, except the North side. I have my apple tree there and we’ll talk about apples at the appropriate time in the future. My wife loved the idea of having flowers surrounding the old homestead.
Well... Okay, we have flowers along the front porch and along both sides of the driveway. However, I have taken over the East and South sides of the house to grow some vegetables. These beds are made of CCH treated timbers and are about a foot high and of various lengths. The south bed is the length of the house, about 25 feet. On the east, I have 3 beds about 5 feet long each around the chimney.
I dug down into the earth next to the house when I built the beds and then added organic peat and humus to fill them. There are two reasons for digging into the existing ground. First I wanted to get out all the junk the house builders buried there. In fact, I retrieved about 50 perfectly good bricks from the fireplace chimney. The second reason was to add more humus to the clay soil. I could actually make my own pottery with the clay located around the house. Clay is the name of Kansas soil. Clay and Sandstone on top of harder limestone. Amazes me that we are the bread basket of the world. That must come from out West somewhere.
On April Fools Day, I planted onions and my Basil plant. The Basil plant was bought at the nursery. Basil is a great herb for spaghetti as well as Oregano, which I also grow. Oregano, here in zone 5 at least, winters over quite well, but not Basil. Both plants are on the east side of the house, because the morning sun is plenty for them. The hot afternoon sun would be too hard on them. April is also the time to get some lettuce plants growing. I bought 6 red leaf lettuce plants and planted them in some 2 gallon buckets I have collected over the years. I plant lettuce and other cool weather crops in buckets, so they can be moved when the sun gets too hot.
I use soap buckets, pickle buckets or whatever I might have handy. Just drill a few holes in the bottom and fill with top soil. Keep an eye on the plants in the buckets, because they will need much more water than if you planted in the ground. I need to get some green leaf lettuce and will go into more details about container gardening when I plant those, hopefully this weekend.
On the East side of my house, I made six rows about two feet long in one of my beds (flower beds according to the wife. Shhh. Don’t tell her.) I bought onion bulbs, 100 for a buck or so, because they are so much bigger than onion seeds. Also you can harvest the onions in about 2-3 weeks and I can actually see them to plant even without my glasses. These 6 rows were enough to plant about 30 bulbs. This also took up half the space. The other half was planted about a week later, when the first 30 sprouted.
Here in zone 5, you can’t plant much else in April and to prove my point, we got a cold rainy spell for more than a week in mid-April. Some nights the temperature dropped into the 30s. One note about planting next to the house, is that it is always a couple degrees warmer than the middle of the yard and this can save tender seedlings.
So as of May Day (also Kentucky Derby Day) I have 60 onions in the ground. The first 30 are nearly ready to eat. I’ll be picking them before the week is out. Also, the second batch is up and growing, so I’ll plant another 30 or so. I have two bags of onion bulbs and will buy a third before they disappear off the shelves. We eat a lot of onions and I keep them going all summer long, but they move around in the beds. I will leave some onions to become the big bulbs used for slicing. Any onion can be eaten as a green scallion or left to mature into a full sized bulb.
I have very little wasted space in my beds. To illustrate, on May Day I bought our next batch of plants from the Church plant sale. This is good for two reasons. One the money goes to the church and is for a good cause and two, we get some really good plants from them, not like what some department stores try to pawn off on you.
For the flower bed gardener, one thing to note is that you can plant intensively. So don’t be surprised when I tell you that right where the 60 onions are growing (about 4” apart in the rows) I planted 3 Anaheim pepper plants for this year’s batch of salsa and chilli rellenos. Since the onions were already up, it was easier to find a small space between the rows to insert the peppers. I used a small hand trowel and just dug a straight walled hole about 5” deep for the peppers. You can also use a bulb planter, which might be easier in such tight quarters. Insert the plant into the ground up to the first set of leaves. This makes for a sturdier plant less likely to blow over in the wind and rain.
I have a total of 9 pepper plants, 3 Anaheims, 3 Jalapenos, 1 bell pepper and 2 Hungarian Yellow peppers. All the peppers and tomatoes too have wire cages around them for support when they get large. The Jalapenos and Yellows along with some Anaheims are used to make salsa. The Bell is used in spaghetti and for stuffed peppers.
On the south side, I planted my 6 tomato plants, 2 Beefsteaks and 4 Romas for tomato sauce. Around July or so, I’ll post my recipes for salsa and sauce. Between the tomato plants (about 4’ apart) I will put cucumbers. The cukes are now in peat pots and hopefull be ready in a couple days for planting. I am afraid they won’t be because of the wet cold spell, so I may have to buy about 6 plants to get them into the ground before the tomatoes get too big.
That pretty much brings me up to date on my garden in the Land of Oz. I will post more articles as planting season and the growing season progresses.
Copyright 1999, by Ed Shafer. All rights reserved internationally.
Ed Shafer
Until next time, may you always find the Yellow Brick Road.
Please visit my page, the "Eye of the Tiger"
