Instant garden? Yes! (Well, almost.)

How I created a small kitchen garden with minimal resources in two weekends and harvested over 30 types of veg in its first season.

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We officially moved to our new home in southern Burgenland in fall of 2021. By then I had already started my new market garden, but the private gardens had been a lower priority until January, when we started cutting back overgrowth and removing arbor vitae. In February 2022, it was time to do something with the fenced-in dog pen measuring 80 sq m / 850 sq ft.

The location is ideal for a vegetable garden. A gentle slope faces southeast, so it gets maximum sun. The house protects it from the north winds we tend to get and it is right around the corner from the kitchen door. There is also a spigot for water, so I can easily water with an overhead or a hand-held sprinkler. It is possible to capture rain water from a drainpipe on the corner of the house as well, but we generally get very little rain in summer and that quickly runs dry.

My motto was “use what you have” to transform it into a vegetable garden as quickly and easily as possible. The only expense was compost, because I wanted to get off to a running start with spring veg and hadn’t had time to make my own on our new property. The rest was made out of whatever we already had, from an old metal cold frame windows I had rescued from a nursery in Bavaria to miscellaneous pieces of fencing and lots of branches.

I called it the “Demo Garden”, because it serves as a demonstration garden for my courses and it is also a highlight for visitors on open garden weekend, an annual event in my region. Little did I know it would become one of my happy places. From artichokes to zucchini, a surprising diversity of edibles and herbs continue to make for a vibrant, lush, always changing vegetable garden. The best part: the kitchen garden is just a few steps from my kitchen, which is especially nice in winter.

Late summer in the Demo Garden. I think in square meters, not rows, so the plantings are in grouups. I also try to use edges of beds for things like bunching onions and herbs.

Working with what you have

February was ideal for me to set up the new garden, but your location may be different. Start when the ground is thawed, if you have hard winters. Our new home is in southern Burgenland, Austria’s easternmost province, an hour and a half south of Vienna. Hungary and Slovenia are within an hour’s drive and the region is multilingual. Locals become nostalgic when they talk about the snowy winters of their childhood, but the climate has changed significantly. Formerly comparable to USDA Zone 7a, our winters are more in the 7b to 8a range now. Yes, it freezes, but the lowest we got was -8° C / 12° F this year. Late-spring frost is still a threat; fruit trees and grapes flower earlier now because of warmer spring weather, but the blossoms are often threatened by a late frost in May. Friends here haven’t had apricots since 2019 because of those late frosts and they have become a serious threat to the wine industry.

The view from our back yard: rolling hills with the foothills of the Alps in the distance. This rainbow appeared while I was creating the new garden. I took it as a good sign.

The previous owner of our home was a dog-lover and apparently had a relatively large breed that liked to jump. The outdoor pen with doghouse was fenced in like Fort Knox and I even discovered sheets of metal construction grid panels in the ground. Apparently, the dog also liked to dig. Like most of the garden, the pen was guarded by overgrown arbor vitae and other shrubs, including European privet (Ligustrum vulgare), dogwood (Cornus sanguinea), forsythia (Forsythia intermedia), and butterfly bush (Buddleja davidii). I keep the latter under control, because it is a neophyte and invasive. We also discovered a walnut tree trying to grow through the brush as well as an elderberry.

The dog pen at the beginning. We removed one panel of the fencing (lower left) to have direct access from the kitchen, which is just around the corner.

We had cut back the shrubs in January, which gave me a lot of material to work with, either to frame the beds or to shred for mulch on the paths. The rest got piled up in a corner as a respite for critters. After clearing the brush, I started to frame out the beds. I had fiddled with the plan long enough that I was able to maximize the space and still allow visitors a relatively wide path from gate to gate around the main beds. The beds would be good old-fashioned in-ground beds, because my budget didn’t allow for anything fancy and they make me happy.

There was a lot of brush to clear, cut, and shred. I’m not counting that as time to create the garden. That began on the day I started laying out the cardboard. One section is dug, because I had to remove construction metal, so I didn’t need cardboard there. Also note that the cold frame is installed in the bottom picture.

Creating the cardboard and compost beds took two weekends and cost €400 for the compost, the only expense. I have used various no-dig approaches, from raised beds in our personal garden to laying out a whole market garden. There are several albums showing my work over the years here. In my current location, I used spent silage and digestate from a biogas facility instead of cardboard and compost to start my second market garden. (You can read and see more about that in “No Two Gardens Are Alike”.) Although I have become a firm believer in that no-compost approach, it takes 6-8 weeks for the occultation/tarping before you can plant. With this garden I wanted to demonstrate how quickly and easily a smaller kitchen garden could be started and, I confess, I wanted instant gratification.

A rough timeline of the project

The compost I ordered is made 8 miles from our house, and it is organic and relatively high in carbon. I planned for a thick layer of 15 cm / 6 in. Three “big bags” (1 cubic meter each) were delivered and placed exactly where I wanted them, thanks to a brilliant truck driver whose precision with the crane is astounding. He has reduced my labor costs significantly. The broader paths around the middle beds were mulched with wood chips I shredded on the spot, again saving labor. In between the middle beds, I used a layer of black landscape fabric under more wood chips for the first season to make sure the lawn below would give up; I removed it in the fall.

A note about compost: Compost isn’t just compost. It varies in nutrients, with some being more appropriate as a mulch material than others. A nutrient-rich compost higher in nitrogen like my homemade compost or composted manure would not be appropriate in this quantity. The plants would be overfed, similar to doping in athletics. They might look great, but they’re actually stressed and slugs are the first to be attracted to them. For more on the four types of compost, listen to this interview with Farmer Jesse of No-Till Growers.

A note about “no-dig”: an Australian woman named Esther Deans is the first gardener to have dubbed minimal tillage as “no-dig” in the garden. Her gardening book “Growing Without Digging” came out in 1998. Let me know if you want to know more about her!

Big bags of compost helped cut down the work immensely. The main beds are 1x6 m / 3x18 ft, the beds along the fence on two sides are 75 cm / 30 in. wide. This is where climbers, from cucumbers and watermelons to peas and pole beans, are grown vertically.

Infrastructure

The location was full of resources for an abundant garden, most importantly fences. None of them match, but when they’re covered with vines in the main garden season, it doesn’t matter. I integrated the fence for vertical growing on two sides and tried to frame the bed on one with grids covered in coconut matting. I had both materials on hand and thought, why not? As expected, the coconut matting wasn’t very durable, so I wouldn’t recommend it, unless you happen to have it on hand. It survived two seasons before it was completely decomposed.

It took time to find the best layout to maximize space and allow for visitors to walk through comfortably. The location on the southeast of the house is ideal for a cold frame, so that was also a priority, plus we already had the materials for it. Because of the gentle slope facing southeast, I could use a simple box frame. The half-day of work to build it is not in my calculations for the garden bed set-up.

No sooner was the cold frame in action, Mr. Moe, my garden helper, found a warm corner for his afternoon nap. In late fall (picture right), the tomatoes have been removed and winter greens are well on their way.

The previous owner had left many treasures behind, such as a metal grid bent to a half-circle. I have no idea what they used it for, but it became a potato tower. A friend spent a couple of hours weaving dried pampas grass through the grid, because she likes to do that sort of thing. We then positioned it against the fence in an unloved and half-shady corner, lined it with cardboard, and filled it with compost and seed potatoes. I didn’t water very faithfully through the season, but I did top off the compost a couple of times as the potato vines grew. Our harvest was only 3 kg / 7 lbs., but it was fun to try the tower, and that’s not a bad yield for about a square foot of space. In front of the potato tower, I planted crosne (also known as Chinese artichoke) and then made a tipi out of branches for growing pole beans. They loved it.

Just three weeks after planting, the potatoes are emerging and the beans are getting ready to climb.

Maintenance and harvest

The demo garden is ridiculously easy to maintain. Thanks to minimal tillage there is very little weeding. By planting densely and using mulch, watering is not often necessary. Picking is also efficient because the garden is so compact. We had an incredible harvest that first year, which I documented in countless photos. (Go here and scroll down to see more photos on my website.) Unfortunately, I didn’t weigh it all, but in addition to eating our fill fresh in high season, we had enough tomatoes to make salsa and tomato sauce for the winter, enough jalapenos to can, enough beans to blanche and freeze, enough cucumbers to pickle and mixed veg to make relish. Here’s what I grew in Year 1, from March to March, in alphabetical order:

Vegetables: Amaranth, artichokes, Asian greens, arugula, beets, broccoli, cabbage, carrots, celery, chard, chilis, crosne, cucamelons, cucumbers, eggplant, endive, ginger, kale, kohlrabi, leeks, lettuce, melons, napa cabbage, onions, peppers, peppergrass cress, pole beans, potatoes, New Zealand spinach, radicchio, radishes, snap peas, spinach, squash, tomatoes, yacon, zucchini

Herbs: Basil, chives, cilantro, dill, garlic chives, huacatay, leaf fennel, lovage, mint, parsley, rosemary.

If I were to specify the varieties, the list would be twice as long. There were 18 different varieties of tomatoes, 3 different varieties of cucumber, 5 different pole beans, etc. Onions included both bulbing, bunching and Welsh onions.

Because I have a huge stash of seeds, save my own seeds and produce my own transplants for the market garden, I didn’t add that to the expense. With 30 types of vegetables at an average cost of €3 per packet (about $3), that would be an additional cost of around €100, plus transplants if you can’t grow your own. Those expenses can skyrocket, which is why I recommend direct sowing as much as possible. On a budget, I would limit transplants to tomatoes, peppers, chilis and eggplant. Everything else can be sown directly in the garden, including cabbage and kohlrabi. The only plant I bought was rosemary; the rest were all started from seed.

Summer and fall

If I were starting completely from scratch, here is what I would recommend for a tight budget:

• Avoid vegetables you can get in organic quality at an affordable price, including potatoes, onions, cabbage, carrots.

• Start your herbs from seed. Herbs are expensive plants to buy and generally easy to grow.

• Salad greens are also relatively expensive and best when fresh from the garden. Try seed mixes to save money and still have a variety.

• Invest in seeds for varieties and types that you can’t get anywhere else. For me, that’s snap peas, all the tomatoes, and yellow beets.

• If a friend is good at starting transplants, ask them if they would start a few for you, too. Pay them in whatever manner is appropriate.

• If you have friends with gardens, ask them to share anything extra they might have, both seeds and perennial herbs. I regularly have to divide clumps of chives, lemon balm, and mint, and taking cuttings is effective with thyme and lavender. Berries are also easy to propagate with cuttings and strawberries always send out runners that become new plants in greater numbers than any gardener can manage. Rhubarb can also be divided - hard work, but worth it.

What I’m doing this week

It’s another easy week for me coming up. I’ve potted up the lettuce, which took me an hour for 3 flats / 230 transplants. My husband decided he needed some exercise, so he helped me clear a tunnel in the market garden. The temperatures are becoming milder, which means it’s time to order compost. On my list for this week:

• The peppers, chilis and eggplants have sprouted, so I’ll be potting those up after hardening them off a bit.

• Pot up the crosne that sprouted in the refrigerator.

• Order compost for the market garden.

• Sow bulbing onions.

• Organize seed for the demo-garden: radish, beets, carrots, peas.

Peppers and crosne

As always, thanks for reading and have a great week!