How to Think Like a Vegetable Gardener

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In this episode of Evergreen Thumb, Erin discusses essential strategies for successful vegetable gardening, emphasizing the importance of understanding soil temperature, proper siting of gardens, the impact of microclimates, and the significance of choosing the right crops. The conversation also highlights the value of experimentation and learning from past gardening experiences, as well as the critical role of frost dates in determining planting times. Listeners are encouraged to observe their gardening conditions and adapt their practices accordingly for better results.  

As a homesteader, Erin has turned her own property into a small, thriving farm. She grows veggies, tends to fruit trees and shrubs, and raises livestock. Her focus these days is on finding new uses for native plants, figuring out ways to feed her animals from her land, and growing her own food.

When she’s not working on the homestead or recording The Evergreen Thumb, you’ll find Erin out exploring Washington’s mountains, forests, and beaches.

• Ag Weather Net
• WSU Pub Home Vegetable Gardening in Washington
• Multiple WSU publications for specific crops
• Episode 37 – Phenology
• Episode 63 – Crop Rotation
• Other Episodes about Local Food
• Vegetable Gardening in Washington and Oregon
• Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades

Hey gardeners, welcome to episode 65 of the Evergreen Thumb. Today, we’re gonna talk about how to think like a vegetable gardener If you’ve ever followed gardening advice perfectly and still had things fail, it’s probably not you. Gardening really isn’t about memorizing rules. A lot of gardening advice is technically correct, but it may not work the same way in your particular garden. 

So today we’re gonna talk about how to site your vegetable garden wisely, how to choose crops that make sense, how to understand timing, and how to adapt when the weather doesn’t cooperate. 

Siting Your Vegetable Garden 

To start off with, we’re gonna talk about probably the most important factor when creating a vegetable garden, siting your garden. 

 The reason this comes first is, if you put your garden in the wrong place, no amount of better soil or better plants are going to fix the problem. A lot of garden problems actually start before you ever put a seed in the soil.  

The very first thing to look at when you’re deciding where to put your vegetable garden is sun exposure. Most annual vegetable crops require six to eight hours of direct In Washington, typically it’s really easy to get six to eight hours of direct sun, especially in the height of summer. But other things to consider are morning sun versus afternoon sun. 

Afternoon sun tends to be very intense, and that’s also when the temperatures tend to get the highest, whereas the morning sun is more gentle and not as intense. Consider the seasonal sun shifts and, if you can, pay attention to where the sun comes up and where the sun sets at various times of the year to ensure that you are optimizing where the sun comes up or sets based on where you’re siting your garden. There are actually apps that you can download that, based on your GPS coordinates, will show you where the sun comes up and where it sets, etc.  

The next consideration when siting your garden is wind. Where does your dominant wind come from? Wind can be very cooling, it can be very drying, and it can cause a lot of plant stress if it’s intense wind. So, it’s important to observe where your prevailing winds are coming from, and whether or not maybe you need to use fences or buildings or plantings of larger trees as wind breaks and buffers for wind. There are apps for that, too that will show you where your dominant wind comes from so that you know whether or not you will need to protect the site from harsh winds. 

Another thing to consider is water and drainage. So look for where water pools or where it drains quickly. As I mentioned before, in my area, water always drains quickly and with it goes most of the nitrogen in the soil. So for us, it’s really important to amend our garden every year with manure or nitrogen, to make sure we can replenish that. 

You don’t wanna put your vegetable garden in a place that doesn’t drain because then most of your seedlings are probably gonna rot. Another thing to consider are things like slopes, low spots, compacted soils. 

 Another factor is microclimates. So again, that’s using fences or as heat sinks or observing where there’s frost pockets in low areas or shade patterns from trees or your house. You probably don’t want to put your vegetable garden on the north side of your house right against the house because you’re not going to get any sun 

For our garden, we built our raised beds with cinder blocks. And those actually create small microclimates in the garden that warm up, and then they warm up the soil. So when I plant my early spring seedlings, I plant them kind of close to those cinder blocks because they have that residual heat into the evening and that will help them be more resilient against any light frosts. 

I would encourage you to watch your yard for a full season if possible, and don’t rush a major garden overhaul. Be sure to step back and observe. At the very least, just look outside late on a frosty morning and see where the frost hasn’t melted. And that’ll tell you where your colder microclimates and frost pockets are that you want to avoid using. Look for snow melts, lingering frost, wind direction. 

 All these things are going to impact the best location for your vegetable garden. A lot of times raised beds are kind of seen as a cure-all for a vegetable garden, but not even the best beds or the best soil can fix them being in the wrong place. 

Choosing the Right Crops to Grow 

Next, I want to talk about choosing what to grow. So you want to set yourself up for success, especially if you’re a brand new gardener, and the place to start is with your goals. Why do you want to vegetable garden? Do you love the flavor of fresh vegetables versus do you want to be able to preserve; canning, freezing, root cellaring, things like that.  

Also, how much labor and attention do you have available in your schedule versus what is required to grow that crop?  

Another one is reliability versus experimentation. Are you looking for a reliable crop that will help feed you through the winter? Or are you looking to do an experiment and see if you can grow something like okra in Western Washington? Do you like okra? You want to try growing okra? That’s great. It’s okay to grow something hard because you like it, as long as you realize that you could get mixed or poor results because we don’t have the right conditions for that particular crop. 

So, the next train of thought is how to match the crops that you want to grow to the conditions. Some of the things to take into account are cool-season crops versus warm-season crops. Cool-season crops are going to be your peas, lettuce, brassicas. Those are the most common cool-season crops. Warm-season crops are going to be your beans, tomatoes, peppers. 

Also, there’s short-season versus long-season varieties. Those are the things you want to look at in your seed catalog or your seed packet. It’s going to tell you how many days to maturity.  Some varieties have a much shorter season than others. Lastly, there’s also annuals versus perennials. Most vegetable crops that we typically grow are considered annuals in our climate. I have had some success with potting up pepper plants and putting them in the greenhouse over winter. Generally, peppers are not a perennial in our climate. 

The important thing is to be honest about the trade-offs of one crop versus another or one variety over another. Some crops grow well, often. For me, green beans, they grow well often. I rarely have a bad crop of green beans. Some grow well, occasionally. For me, that’s tomatoes because we don’t always have the proper number of heat units in the early season or whatever. There’s many different factors. Last year, tomatoes did not grow well for us.  

You don’t have to choose between crops that grow well often or ones that grow well occasionally as long as you understand that plants like peppers and tomatoes natively grow in a much warmer climate. There’s going to be off seasons, and you can make that choice. Neither choice is wrong, but they’re just different decisions. 

A good question to ask yourself: Is it worth it for the time and the labor that it’s going to take to bring this crop to a harvestable level? If you’re just starting out as a vegetable gardener, focus on the easy wins. Choose crops that want to live where you do and be strategic about what you choose to grow. Choosing not to grow something isn’t a failure; it’s a strategy. 

Vegetable Garden Timing 

So now I wanna talk about understanding when to plant. And this is kind of a complex area. There’s a lot of things that affect when to plant. 

 First, I wanna talk about USDA zones. I’ve seen in a lot of Facebook groups, gardening forums, and even in plant clinics. “I live in zone 8B. Can I plant tomatoes yet?” 

And to be blunt, the zone is not relevant to whether or not you can plant. The USDA zones tell you what the average low temperature is in the winter. They do not tell you when you can plant anything, let alone vegetables. 

I think that’s one of the biggest misunderstandings is what the USDA hardiness zones actually mean.  

The question that you really want to ask is when is your frost date? Your first frost date, your last frost date. These are going to tell you generally when you can plant. And Frost dates are highly localized. There are maps online that can tell you what your frost date is down to your zip code. Frost dates are also not guarantees; they’re averages. So it is your average first frost date or your average last frost date, which means there’s actually a 50 % chance that you will get a frost before or after those dates.   So it’s important to make sure that you use these dates as anchors, but not hard and fast rules.  

A lot of time on seed packets, it’ll say plant two weeks before your first frost date or wait until all danger of frost has passed. What I find most helpful is to understand when certain crops need to go in the garden, whether they’re as seedlings or as direct sowing in the soil. 

Generally speaking, warm season crops like tomatoes, peppers, beans, you don’t want to put those in the ground until after all danger and frost has passed, which, for where I’m at is actually kind of late in the middle of May. 

But a lot of the cold-hardy, cool-season crops can actually go in the ground sometimes as much as six weeks before the average last frost. 

 Like I said, my average last frost date is May 15th, but I can usually push that a little bit earlier because I’ve lived here long enough to know that we rarely get a killing frost after April 1st. I think we’ve had maybe one killing frost after April 1st. So, I know I can really push those cool-season crops sometimes into March to sow things like lettuce and peas. 

 Understanding those factors or taking advantage of those microclimates I mentioned. If you have a spot that tends to be a little bit warmer, and it doesn’t get frosty when other areas freeze early in the season, try growing a cool-season crop there to start with. 

All right, the next factor to understand when determining when to plant is soil temperature. 

Seeds have a germination threshold temperature that kind of tells them when it’s okay to sprout. And this is why sometimes planting too early can backfire because the plants just sit there, they might rot, they might freeze if the soil is not warm enough for them to get the signal that it’s time to produce. 

This kind of goes back to the concept of phenology and using cues in nature to know when soil temperature has gotten warm enough for things. I did record an episode about phenology last year, and I will link to that. 

One example is I know that forsythia, the shrub, that it’s really early blooming, it blooms when soil temperatures get above 50 degrees. So that is a phenological cue that tells me that it’s time to plant certain cool-season crops.  Also, the soil temperature can also affect root growth and nutrient intake.  

It’s important to understand that air temperatures can be misleading. Just because it’s routinely 50 degrees during the day does not mean that your soil temperature is 50 degrees.  

Related to that, too is the concept of growing degree days.  Vegetable crops need a certain number of growing degree days, which means they need temperatures above whatever threshold that crop needs in order to grow, and flourish, and produce. It is an accumulative calculation, and this is why the days to maturity number on a seed packet doesn’t mean that you’ll always have a crop ready to harvest that many days after putting a seed in the ground. It also can explain why some crops mature faster one year versus the next. It depends on how many growing degree days they get early in the season versus late in the season and how that affects the plant’s life cycle. It can also explain why something worked last year, but it didn’t work this year. 

Ag Weather Net  

One resource that can help you track and determine some of these weather cues is Ag Weather Net. This is a WSU program. Their website is weather.wsu.edu, and you can create a free account and get access to all of the data. They have weather stations all over the State of Washington, and you just need to find the station that’s nearest to you, and it can give you data like what the current or most recent soil temperature is, the number of growing degree days, and the chill hours that have accumulated over that period. I will put a link to that in the show notes as well. 

The key thing to remember about these climatic conditions is that plants respond to conditions, not calendars. A calendar is just a number. It’s important to take all these conditions into consideration and to kind of distill down what we’ve talked about. 

Hardiness zones answer the question of, will this plant survive the winter here?  

Frost dates answer the question, what is the historical risk window for cold damage?  

And then finally, growing degree days answers will this plant have enough heat to grow, flower, and ripen its crop? 

Crop Rotation 

Next, I’m going to briefly talk about crop rotation. I did just do an episode on crop rotation. That is episode 63, and I will link to that in the show notes, but I’ll just give you a really quick rundown.  

Crop rotation is important because it helps break pest and disease cycles. It helps balance nutrients in the soil to prevent depleting the same nutrient over and over. And it actually can help with healthier soil over time. So the basic concept is don’t grow the same family of crop in the same place every year. If you plant beans in the same place every year, or you plant brassicas in the same place every year, that soil becomes inoculated with whatever disease or pests those crops are susceptible to.  Rotating crops, it helps break those cycles. 

At the basic level, you want to just make sure that you give anywhere between three to five years between plantings of that same crop in the same place. A second option is to do a rotation that I go over in depth in episode 63, and it’s called leaf, root, flower, fruit. 

Leaf crops are lettuces, brassicas, things like that. Root crops are, of course, carrots, beets, parsnips, crops like that. Fruits are going to be tomatoes, peppers, and then legumes. The flower is either legumes or cover crops or even trap crops that are flowering. If you rotate those in that cycle, it also helps because it spaces out the families and helps that pest and disease cycle. 

I want to emphasize that any rotation is better than none. Remember, some of the key concepts of integrated pest management include tolerance. You don’t need perfection in your garden, and to be tolerant of a small amount of pests or disease issues can be beneficial and less stressful for you. But also remember that observation is key. Rotation will not eliminate pests and disease, but it’ll give plants a leg up. So routinely inspecting and observing your crops for issues will help you get in front of a disease or a pest before your crop is a total loss.  

Keep in mind, with crop rotation, you’re gardening for next year as much as you’re gardening for this year. 

Season Extension 

The next key consideration in vegetable gardening is season extension. 

Season extension is about smoothing out some of the fluctuations in the weather. It’s not about growing tropical crops in cold climates. It’s really about protecting new plants from weather variations in the shoulder seasons. 

Some of the methods for season extension include row covers or cold frames. You can do some really simple things, like milk jugs. If you’re starting lettuce and you know it’s going to get cold that night, you can cut the bottom off of a milk jug and take the cap off, and place it like a little cloche over the head of lettuce. The key is to remember to take it off the next day, so it doesn’t get too hot and get cooked in that cloche.  

Some of the benefits of season extension is they allow you to start crops a little bit earlier.  They sometimes allow you to harvest later in the season. So if you want to use a frost cloth over tomatoes or peppers in the fall, if you’re going to have a really light frost, those are really susceptible to even the lightest frost, and by putting a little frost cover, it gives it just a few degrees and can help keep it alive for another week or two. 

 Season extension works because it protects the plants, not because it cheats climate. 

Learning and Experimenting for Vegetable Gardeners

The final thing to think about in vegetable gardening is experimenting and learning your place. And by learning your place, I mean learning your garden, learning the space you have available. 

If you would like to experiment, try to make them small and intentional. If you try to do too many experiments or too big of an experiment, it could set you up for failure.  

Be sure to keep notes when you’re experimenting. Track weather conditions, dates, or what worked and what didn’t work. That way you have something to look back on and decide how maybe you want to do it differently next year or if it was a complete failure and you don’t want to try that experiment again. 

 Use the local weather tools that I mentioned, like Ag WeatherNet, to determine soil temperature and frost events and growing degree days, because that local data is going to beat any generic gardening advice you get off of a Facebook group or a gardening forum or anything like that.  

Also, learn from your failures. There’s always more to learn, and with each thing you do learn, that means there are going to be fewer surprises the next year. 

Key Takeaways For the Vegetable Gardener 

So the key takeaways I would love for you to come away with are to site your garden carefully. Make sure that you understand the sun exposure, the wind exposure, the microclimates, all those different factors that are required for a successful vegetable garden.  

Choose your crops wisely. Choose what you like to eat. 

Experiment in small amounts so you have some successes.  

Use crop rotation to care for your soil. Understand the time-based conditions, such as the difference between growing degree days versus first and last frost dates versus USDA hardiness zones. 

Learn to observe and adapt. Good gardens aren’t built by following the rules, they’re built by paying attention.  

So I want to encourage you observe your yard this week. What new microclimate or element did you notice in your yard? Just this week, I happened to look out the window at our yard, it was probably mid-morning, and the fir tree in my neighbor’s pasture was casting a very long shadow. This is probably a hundred-foot-tall fir tree, and the shadow was probably close to 500 feet long, so it took the majority of the morning for the frost to thaw in that area. 

That would definitely not be an ideal place for a vegetable garden 

So let me know, you can email me at hello at theevergreenthumb.com or contact us on social media. I’d love to hear, what did you observe in your garden this week? 

That wraps up this episode. Thank you so much for listening.

Happy gardening.