Last summer, I completely ran out of space to plant at home. I wasn't excited to expand. All my garden boxes and beds built up with edging had been a lot of work I didn't want to repeat. Then I thought that maybe I didn't need very much at all if it wouldn't be permanent anyway.
The south-facing front yard got the best light, and there was plenty of space. A few years ago I converted the front lawn to wood chips and small fruit trees. So it was there I built an instant planting bed and enjoyed a harvest in less than three months.
What makes a vegetable garden?
What makes a vegetable garden is that vegetable plants have everything they need to grow and thrive: soil, water, sun, and fertility. If your plants have enough of these four things, they don't need to live in a garden box, a raised be,d or any specially prepared space.
I don't know why this seemed like a revelation to me a year ago. Farmers have always grown food this way—planting straight in the ground, no preparation that doesn't increase productivity. Anything besides the basics is really for appearance or to solve a specific problem.
It might be that when I thought of growing vegetables at home, I thought about it through the eyes of ornamental gardening. Some people want their vegetable gardens to be attractive with expertly crafted wood boxes or shining galvanized metal containers. Totally fine, but tomato and squash plants don't really care how they look.
Raised boxes can have a function, though. If you want to keep your dog from walking through your strawberries, a box that raises the plants above snout level might be useful. To keep the neighborhood cats out, well, there aren't a lot of good solutions.
Realistically, plants will grow about anywhere. Ask the weeds. I've never seen a front lawn spend the summer as a field of corn, but with enough fertility, there's nothing stopping such a thing except the homeowner's willingness to plant the seeds.
An instant garden bed
An instant garden bed is one that you can build in less than an hour and plant immediately. It requires open space with exposure to the sun, fertilizer (organic only, right?), some organic matter like compost or manure, and a source of water.
A few years ago, I killed the front lawn to turn it into a space for fruit trees. This would be the site of my new planting beds. I already had a pipe stubbed up from the old sprinkler system, which was on a timer. All I had to do was connect a drip line.
All together this project for three roughly 15-foot planting beds cost about $70. Most of the costs were for the irrigation lines, and those will likely last the next decade.
Here's what I did step-by-step:
1: Clear a space for the new planting beds and add fertilizer
Since everything was under wood chips, I went at them with a hard rake and spread them so I had about a foot of bare soil. To grow well, vegetable plants need enough nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), and potassium (K), which is represented on fertilizer bags as three numbers, like 5-5-5 or 5-10-5. I bought a balanced organic fertilizer and distributed it evenly across the soil.
If you want to know more about fertility, UCANR has a really good summary of vegetable gardening that includes fertility guidelines and really all the information you need to grow about anything.
2: Add organic matter as top-dressing
After adding fertilizer, I dumped bags of simple compost bought from the box store to increase Soil Organic Matter. My soil in Vacaville is heavy clay, with very little Soil Organic Matter content. Soil Organic Matter is the amount of organic materials, like wood or even dead plant roots, that are in the soil. When gardeners talk about improving the soil, this is mainly the way to do it.
I did not till in the compost, mainly because I don't own a tiller and also because I didn't think it would be necessary. I've had the soil covered in woodchips for three years, which in itself improves the soil by the bacteria and worms feeding on the woodchips and pulling Soil Organic Matter into the soil to improve it.
But it's still clay. So I stomped a pitchfork in and rocked it back and forth. Realistically, this top dressing of compost would probably not improve the soil in real-time as the plants grew. However, the total process provided additional growing medium while increasing channels and capacity for roots, water, and air.
Last, I watered everything deeply and raked the woodchips back. Organic mulch like woodchips is very helpful in reducing water loss from evaporation and maintaining an even soil temperature no matter how hot it gets outside. All of this is good for vegetable plants.
3: Add the irrigation lines and plant
The last step was to install the irrigation line. I chose a brand sold by a local irrigation supply and ran three lines for three separate planting beds spaced about two feet apart. Each emitter was spaced at 12 inches and the flow rate was 0.9 gallon-per-hour. This is what I have used before, so I knew that in my garden conditions, about 20 minutes every two to three days, depending on the weather, would be fine.
An alternative to an irrigation line is hand watering. An alternative to hand watering is to not water at all. This should be possible, depending on what you plant. A study last year found that tepary beans can still produce a crop in terminal drought, which is a lack of water during the time they are filling out their pods.
Dry farming, which is growing a crop without irrigation, is a completely viable approach to growing vegetables. The Crane family in Santa Rosa has been dry-farming their stunningly good melons for decades. It's something I'll probably try in the next couple years, but for now, irrigation works fine.
The almost-instant harvest
My plan was to grow watermelons (Citrullus lanatus), and a friend was looking for space to plant his cucumber melons (Cucumis melo). We planted both. Only his melons did well.
The reason is that in this Vacaville clay, watermelons don't usually thrive. The best soil for watermelons is sandy loam, which we don't have.
My friend's melons did great. Every plant set fruit and every fruit matured. I got four or five stunted little watermelons that ended up splitting when I upped the irrigation timer later in the season.
This summer, in this same spot I'll grow melons of my own plus tomatoes and peppers I want for saving seeds. It's nice to have a second garden for this purpose, even if it won't be permanent (I don't think).