Garden FAQ

Six hours of direct summer sun is the floor for most vegetables, and eight is better. Leafy things — lettuce, spinach, kale — will produce on less. Anything that makes a fruit, which includes tomatoes, peppers, squash and beans, will not.

Watch the actual spot across a whole day before you build. Nearly everyone overestimates how much sun a yard gets, and shade in July is not shade in April: the tree that is bare when you are planning will be full when it matters.

In-ground is cheaper and holds water better. A raised bed warms earlier in spring, drains faster, and lets you decide what the soil is instead of negotiating with what is already there — which is the real argument if your ground is clay, compacted, or of unknown history.

The cost is real, though: filling one 4′ × 8′ bed to 10″ takes about a cubic yard of soil.

Ten to twelve inches of growing medium suits nearly everything. Carrots, parsnips and daikon want more, and greens are happy in less.

Note that fill depth is not the same as frame height. A twelve-inch frame sitting on open ground does not need twelve inches of purchased soil — roots go on down into what is underneath, which is why cardboard is a better base than landscape fabric.

Roughly half topsoil, thirty percent compost, twenty percent something for aeration. The exact ratio matters far less than not using the wrong thing.

Do not fill a bed with bagged potting mix. It is formulated for containers, it costs several times as much at this volume, and it dries out badly in something this size. And past about half a cubic yard, bulk soil delivered by the yard is normally much cheaper than bags — one bed is already past that line.

No, and there is a good case for not doing it. Digging breaks up the fungal networks and soil structure that took a season to build, and it brings buried weed seed up to the light where it can germinate.

The alternative is to add an inch or two of compost on the surface each spring and let worms and water carry it down. That is most of what maintenance means once a bed is established.

Almost always one of two things: the pile is too small, or the mix is too brown.

A pile under about a cubic yard loses heat faster than it generates it — it will still compost, just slowly and cold, which means weed seeds survive. And a pile that is mostly leaves, straw or cardboard has plenty of carbon and not enough nitrogen to run the reaction.

Both are checkable rather than guessable, which is what the compost calculator is for.

Meat, dairy, oil and cooked food scraps attract animals and go rancid rather than breaking down. Dog and cat waste carries pathogens that a home pile does not get hot enough to kill. Anything treated with a persistent herbicide — including some straw and some manure — can survive composting and damage the plants you spread it on.

Weeds that have already set seed are a judgement call: a genuinely hot pile kills the seed, a cool one plants it for you.

Yes, and it is one of the highest-return things you can do. Bare soil crusts, dries, erodes and grows weeds. Two or three inches of straw, shredded leaves or wood chips holds moisture, moderates temperature and breaks down into the bed.

Keep it pulled back an inch or two from stems, and use wood chips on paths rather than dug into a vegetable bed, where they temporarily tie up nitrogen as they break down.

Get it from your state extension service or a frost-date lookup that uses NOAA climate normals, keyed to your zip code. It is genuinely local — it can shift by two weeks across a single county, which is why no calculator on this site guesses it for you.

And it is an average, not a promise: an "average last frost" means roughly a coin flip that frost comes later. Waiting a week past it costs a little season and saves a whole flat of seedlings.

You can, and it is the strongest urge a new gardener has. It costs you airflow first and yield second, and poor airflow is what starts the fungal problems that end most first-year beds.

Published spacings assume the plant reaches full size, and it will. If you want more from a bed, succession planting buys far more than crowding does.

About an inch a week including rain, which over a 4′ × 8′ bed is roughly twenty gallons.

Deliver it in one or two long soaks rather than a daily sprinkle. Frequent shallow watering trains roots to stay near the surface where they dry out fastest. Push a finger in to the second knuckle before watering: if it is damp down there, wait.

Things that tell you quickly whether the bed is working. Bush beans are up in a week and nearly impossible to kill. Leaf lettuce is fast and forgiving at both cool ends of the season. Radish is ready in a month and mostly worth growing as proof of life.

One zucchini. Truly one — it will take a quarter of the bed and feed a street.

Yes, and flax is the realistic one: it needs no licence, it suits a cool spring, and one bed will take you all the way to spinnable fibre in a season.

Two things to know before you buy seed. Linen comes from the stem, not the seed, so you want a fibre variety rather than the flaxseed in your pantry — and flax for fibre is sown thickly on purpose, which makes it the one crop on this site you are meant to crowd. Hemp is a different fibre entirely and, in the United States, needs a licence even for a single plant.

The whole process, seed to combed fibre, is written up in Growing Flax for Linen.

Yes, and it is easier to grow than to process — wheat is undemanding in the ground. The thing to know first is the scale: a 4′ × 8′ bed gives roughly a pound of flour, which is one loaf. A weekly loaf for a year would take something like a thousand square feet.

That makes it a way to understand bread rather than a way to supply a kitchen, which is worth knowing before you give a bed to it. Winter wheat goes in about six weeks before hard frost and uses ground that would otherwise sit bare.

The whole process, sowing to milled flour, is in Growing Your Own Flour.