I’ve been sharing photos of my giant vegetable harvests on Twitter for years. Here’s are a few samples, above. Growing vegetables does require some investment (both of time and of money). You’re not merely trying to keep your plants alive – you want to get some food out of it. So you might as well do it right, to get the maximum possible harvest from all of that gardening!
That’s the whole reason that I am writing The Food Garden book series. Gardening is a slow process (you have to wait for the plants to grow to see what happens). And it is seasonal. So if you make some critical mistake in the spring, you may not find out until the fall, when your harvest doesn’t pan out. And then you don’t have a chance for a second try until the following spring – a whole year later!
Volume 1 of The Food Garden is what I call the “Bible.” It is a much different book from all of the others in the series, which are very subject-specific. The Bible is all of the fundamentals – all of the stuff you need to know before you even get started.
A few years back, a friend of a friend decided he wanted to start a veggie garden: just some basics like kale and cherry tomatoes. But he did not want any of my advice. (He believed that there was some sort of force field over the soil’s surface, and if you dug nutrients in you would disrupt that… hmm).
So, long story short… his entire kale harvest, like his 20 or so plants all put together, was smaller than even one single leaf of one of my kale plants! True story.
Those are the kind of people who then give up on gardening… who conclude “I guess I don’t have a green thumb” and go back to buying their vegetables rather than growing them.
So here’s the secret:
There is no secret!
No one has a “green thumb.“
Just like anything else in the world, there is stuff you need to know.
And you can do it like I did, through trial and error over decades (and lots of lost crops on the way, lots of time put in for no gain, as I went through that learning process). Or you can learn from my mistakes and get it right from the start.
(That, by the way, is one of my lettuce plants. Salad for a week! Just ignore the background…)
As mentioned elsewhere, this is a brand new project. I have been thinking of writing a how-to book about vegetable gardening for years. This COVID19 crisis and our global worries about food security have abruptly brought The Food Garden to the top of my to-do list.
I am working on the Bible right now (well, juggling it with all of my spring planting, since it is that time of year) and I aim to have that book out by early June. If you want to be the first to hear about a firm release date and want to be in line for special offers, please do sign up for occasional updates on my Contacts page (I promise I will never share your address or spam you).
The Food Garden 