15 Gardening Tips EVERY Gardener Should Know

Today we're talking about 15 garden tips that can help you take your home garden to new heights. Bigger is better, which is the exact reverse to what I've been saying for all these years to professional market gardeners. Get off your knees, stand up, don't weed your garden, cultivate. We call this occultation and it's just a miracle what it does. My name is Jean-Martin Fortier, everyone calls me JM and I've been a professional market gardener for almost 25 years now, which means that I know how to grow vegetables and that's what I do for a living. And today I'm so happy to introduce a new book that's just coming out with New Society Publishers, which is distilling everything that I've learned over my years as a professional grower to the home, the avid home gardeners, teaching you tricks and tips that perhaps you don't know about. So this book is full of gold nuggets. In this video, 15 of my top tips. Hopefully this will help you this season. Number one tip, bigger is better, which is the exact reverse to what I've been saying for all these years to professional market gardeners. The reason is if your garden is bigger, you'll be able to plan more successions, companion planting, you'll be able to do crop rotation, you'll be able to do green manure, you'll have so much more capabilities because the garden is just bigger. So that's what you need. If you're a family of four, we're talking about roughly 1600 square feet, roughly 50 by 30 by 32. That's what you need to have a really, really, really kicking home garden that's going to produce not just a lot of great vegetables, but extra income. And we'll come to that. Number two, build permanent raised beds and never till again. So why go through the hustle of renting a rotor tiller and going all over the map with that? Just build beds using a shovel. You raise them. Beds are going to be 30 inch wide. Pathways are going to be 18 inch wide. And once you've done them once, they're going to stay there forever. And you'll be from there only working the surface, incorporating your compost, and it's going to become your new gridlock to your crop spacing. You'll be able to maximize your yields and you'll be able to easily calculate what you need on a weekly basis to harvest, to feed your family. Pro tip that you'll learn in the book, always keep the sizing of your bed as multiples of four feet. It's going to make a big difference in how everything is spec'd and organized. Number three, and that's a biggie, draw a map of your whole garden before you even plant into it. You would never build a house without having drawings of it. It's the same for your garden. You should know ahead of the start of the season where the garden will be, the number of beds, where the beds will be, and eventually you even want to plan out what's going to be growing where and when you'll be harvesting everything. Sounds complicated? It isn't. It's so simple and it starts with a plan, bird's eye view of your whole garden, all the beds laid out to the measurements, and that's going to make you understand your whole garden really easily. With the glimpse of an eye, you'll understand your yearly production. Make a plan, make a map of your garden, put it on your fridge in the winter months. It's going to become your mantra and you'll get excited, but you'll also be prepared to what you need to do. Number four, the trick professional growers use to manage that extra space is to use black stylish tarp to cover part of the garden that's not being used. We call this occultation and it's just a miracle what it does. These black tarps, they allow you to prepare the soil without even working it. You're just laying it black tarps on the ground onto your beds and whatever was there, was it grass, was it crop residue, whatever it was, after two, three weeks, because of the absence of light, you're getting rid of everything that's there. It's being composted on site. If there's weeds from dormant seed weeds that are popping up, the black tarps are getting rid of them. So you're even cultivating and getting rid of weeds just by laying out those black tarps and you can move those tarps around wherever you need into your home garden space. Number five, master bio-intensive crop spacing or perfect spacing. Spacing will determine your yields. Spacing is number of rows, spacing on the rows. For each of the different crops that you grow in the garden, you have a perfect density that you can have and that's achieved when that spacing, eventually the leaves of that crop creates a canopy and that canopy is the golden ticket because it reduces the weeds, it keeps the moisture onto the soil, it protects the crop from heavy wind, it just creates this microclimate that will help improve not just the yield per square foot, but also just the resistance of your crop. It's making everything simpler. So knowing all these specs, every crop, the spacing on the row, the number of rows, you'll find it in my book. Number six, get off your knees, stand up, don't weed your garden, cultivate. Cultivate the soil around your plants using a stirrup hoe. This is how the pro do it. This is a simple tool, it has a blade, it's sharpened on both sides and just the action of removing soil, cultivating around your plants, you'll be destroying all your weeds before they even become a problem. It's called cultivation, it's the greatest thing on earth, it's a good time in the garden and if you do it every week, you'll keep your garden space clean and you'll never ever ever have to work pulling weeds on your knees again. Cultivation hoes, stirrup hoes are the best ones out there. Find one you like and it's going to be your best friend for years to come. So speaking of tools, number seven, the broad fork. A tool that you probably don't own, but you definitely want to. Broad forks are how professional growers open up the soil without using a rotor tiller. The reason why we don't rotor till is because when you do that, you're breaking up your soil structure, you're pulverizing your soil, you're destroying all the micro habitat in the soil. A broad fork allows you to open up the soil without destroying the soil ecology. It's a really smart tool and it works wonders. Try it and you'll never go without it. Number eight, succession planting. You should be harvesting every week a little bit of what you want to eat. Pretty simple. How do you get to that? Well, every week you'll plant a little bit of everything and you'll time it so that every second week you're planting lettuce head, every third week you're planting new beans, every week you're seeding radishes and turnips. All that math is not complicated and when you follow the succession of everything that needs to be planted every week, you get to a weekly harvest of everything your family will eat. That's how the pro do it and that's how you should be doing it too. Again, the book will make this so clear. It's black and white. You can't go wrong. Just follow succession planting, follow the good guidelines and you're on your way to abundance in the harvest. Number nine, just like succession planting, you can learn to flip beds. That's how the pros get one, two, three, four, five, six crops per year per bed and that's how you maximize your potential of that small gardening space. Classic example is after harvesting your garlic, seed carrots. The soil is already prepared and you even have straw that's there when your carrots will be bigger. From the carrots, you can go to another crop. It's just thinking about a bed being planted more than once, two or three times per year and that way you're really maximizing the whole potential of your small garden space. This technique is central to my small market garden. We're talking about less than two acres producing more than $300,000 worth of production per year. Bring that number down to a home garden. We're talking about making $5,000, $6,000, $7,000, $10,000 worth of vegetable produced by you on your site every year. Remember folks, a dollar saved is worth $2 earned. So your home garden has a lot of potential. Number 10, how do you get rid of insects? Simple, insect nets. Insect nets is how professional growers, organic vegetable producers deal with insects. You'll simply cover your crop with an insect net which is quite affordable. You can buy them now at home garden centers. The only thing you need to know is which insect is problematic for you and which insect net to put when. Again, simple, effective, 100% sure fire solution. All the details about which insects for which netting is in the book. Just read about it, apply it and see the results for yourself. Number 11, row covers. Just like insect nets, these are blankets that we put in the spring and we use them to get really, really early, extra early season crops. We can go out into the field and direct seed or transplant and then we put these blankets over the crops. These blankets would allow light to get in, they'll allow water to get in, but they won't allow the cold wind to penetrate. It's going to create this microclimate and you'll be able to plant two, three, four weeks earlier than you usually do just by using these simple, low-tech, effective strategies. These are affordable. Again, just like the insect nets, you can buy them in the garden centers and they work wonders. Your whole garden in the spring should be covered with those row covers. Number 12, irrigation tricks of the pros. Drip tape for all your fruity vegetables, overhead sprinklers for your leafy greens and never water at night. The worst thing that you can do to your plants is to water them when they're already on the cool side of the day. You want to have water when you're hot, when you're thirsty, that's when you drink. It's the same thing for your plants. I know you guys are at work, I get it, but still don't water after four o'clock. It's the worst thing that you can do for your plants. Put a timer on your either sprinklers or on your drip irrigation or go to work later, but in all cases, make sure that you're watering when the plant is actually thirsty. Number 13, start your own seedlings and use heating mats to get the optimal germination. You don't need to have whistles and bells or a big expensive nursery like I have here. You can do this at home with grow lights, but a heating mat will make the difference because you're going to make sure that your soil is at optimal germinating temperature and then you'll get the full potential of your seeds. So starting seedlings, not complicated, getting a heat mat will make the difference. And jumping to number 14, that's an important step. Remember this one folks, your plants, before you put them out into the garden, going from your kitchen, from your basement, from your little nursery greenhouse to the fields, you need to harden them off. They need to spend a few days outside in their cell trays, exposed to the wind, exposed to the stress of not enough water, too much water, too much cold air, too much warm air, whatever it is, they need to go through that before you transplant them into your garden. Two, three days will work wonders, but don't skip that step. Fifteen, feed the soil, not the plant. Okay, you need to have good compost that you're putting in your soil and you want to make sure that the fertilizers that you're putting, they're not just replacing that compost. Compost is feeding the plant and the soil. It's the food for the food web. It's everything in it. So make sure that if you're not great at making compost yourself, you're buying the best compost out there. Your crops will thank you for it. Compost, compost, compost, and then you can add some supplemental fertilizers. But if you have good compost, most crop will do fine with just that. With the tools and the techniques that we've talked about today and that are in the book, you'll be able to grow 10x what you're already doing. It's all a matter of having the proper techniques, the proper strategy, just like a better visual of these little tips and tricks that can really, really help you in your home garden. I've said it once and I'll say it again, like a 32 by 50 foot home garden can generate 5, 6, 7, 8, $10,000 worth of produce for your family. So it's worth digging a little bit, investigating, learning the best tip. And I'll leave you with one last tip. Again, I can geek out all day about this. When you're planting your tomatoes, bury them much deeper than you think. All these little white hairs on the stem, they'll produce roots and it's going to take a few more weeks. But once your plants start producing, you'll get double or triple the yields just because your root mass is so much bigger. So bury, bury, bury your tomatoes. That's how the pro do it and that's how I recommend it in my new book. It's out with New Society Publishers. Check it out, order it online. I hope this is going to help you take your gardening to new levels. To all my long-term listeners and followers, thank you for being part of our mission. Everything we do here is about challenging the status quo of modern agriculture, replacing mass production with production by the masses. If you're just joining us, my name is JM Forte and I've been a professional market gardener for more than 25 years. I've written a book, The Market Gardener, that has sold more than 250,000 copies and I teach an online course with over 10,000 students worldwide. But I realize that you might be wondering what this is actually all about. We are advocating a kind of farming that allows you to not only make a living in farming, but make a productive, meaningful lifestyle. I know that starting out in farming can feel overwhelming and that's why we've started our Start Here course. It's an accessible way to start and discover the theory and practice of the Market Gardener method. Go to themarketgardener.com slash start here to get all the details.