Grow Your Own Food in 100 Days or Less

Welcome to Mary's Heirloom Seeds "Grow Your Own Food in 100 Days or Less"

In this series we will help you grow food using easy methods, simple instructions and hands-on tutorials.  You will need seeds, soil, water and sun.  If you are starting from scratch it is important to feed your plants.  We'll explain about plant food in a future segment.

WHAT TO PLANT
Deciding what to plant can sometimes be difficult because there are so many unique heirloom seed varieties to choose from.  Pick veggies and herbs that you know you'll eat.  If you plan on preserving your harvest, plan ahead and plant more of those varieties.

WHEN TO PLANT
We offer a Planting Guide on our Growing Tips and videos page as well as Mary's 2018 Planting Guide for the US.  We update our planting guide on occasion with new regions

Here's our video to help you get started with Day 1 of Growing Your Own Food in 100 Days or Less

For our first day, we're planting Early Scarlet Globe Radish and Royalty Purple Podded Beans.  In our area we have gophers everywhere so all of our planting is done in raised beds and containers.  If you don't have those issues you can grow in-ground.  If you're interested in building your own beds, check out our tutorial "Build Your Own raised Beds & GROW"

From our Plant Spacing Chart for Square Foot Gardens, plant 1 bean seed per square and up to 16 radish per square.

Total Seeds used:
Royalty Purple Podded Beans- 8
Early Scarlet Globe Radish - approx 128

That means we used less than a 1/2 a pack of beans and less than 2 packs of radish.  Those 3 seed packs were a total cost of $2.97 for full packs and you still have more left over

Radish should be planted 1/4 to 1/2 inch deep and will germinate in 4-10 days.
Beans should be planted 1/2 in deep and will germinate in 7-10 days.

Picture above is a "square" in our garden bed with 16 holes for radish seeds.  We used a piece of bamboo to make the holes

Growing food takes patience.  Sometimes seeds take less time or more time to germinate.  Peppers for example.  Usually they germinate in 7-21 days but I have seen some take as many as 30 days or more.  Soil should be kept moist but not flooded.  If you're in an area that receives a lot of rain sometimes you don't have the option to keep your garden from flooding.  If you have flooding issues, it might be a good idea to look into raised beds as these are easier to manage water-wise.

Take notes!  Especially if you're new to gardening, it is helpful to keep track of what you planted, where you planted, what you planted and when you fertilize.  Plant markers are great and we use them but sometimes they get displaced (or gophers eat them).