Learn to grow vegetables and herbs at Garden Fest

Published: April 5, 2010

CLEMSON — Home gardeners can get free expert advice about growing vegetables and herbs, and buy transplants and seeds Saturday, April 17, at Garden Fest in the South Carolina Botanical Garden.

Held from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. in the Discovery Center parking lot, Garden Fest will be staffed by experts and experienced gardeners ready to help anyone learn how to create an attractive vegetable garden that will provide fresh produce all season long. They’ll share information about selecting varieties, improving soil, keeping the garden healthy and how to make vegetable gardening rewarding and productive.

Warm-season vegetable transplants for sale include heirloom and hybrid tomatoes, peppers, tomatillos, basil and eggplant, along with small quantities of seeds for directly seeded warm-weather crops. There also will be information about where to buy fresh local produce.

Garden Fest is made possible by the S.C. Botanical Garden, Upstate Locavores, Clemson University Sustainable Agriculture, the Clemson University Home and Garden Information Center, Students for Environmental Awareness, Together We Can and many others.

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South Carolina Botanical Garden

The Botanical Garden is located on the Clemson University campus at the intersection of U.S. 76 and Perimeter Road. The garden encompasses 295 acres of display gardens, nature trails, woodlands and streams, and is open year-round from dawn to dusk, free of charge. The garden is partially supported by the state of South Carolina via Clemson University, but relies on private funding, memberships and proceeds from educational events to continue operations. For more information, visit www.clemson.edu/scbg/ or call 864-656-3405.

Kitchen garden primer:

1. Start with a good site that’s easy to visit: An ideal site receives six to eight hours of sun and is close to a water source and your house.
2. Create a manageable layout for permanent beds and start small.
3. Consider raised beds, start small — four by eight feet is good size — and add additional beds as needed.
4. Keep your soil healthy and fertile by adding amendments and/or using cover crops.
5. Lighten clay soil with a lot of organic matter — leaf mulch, compost, mushroom compost, composted manure, etc. — and keep mulched.
6. Minimize pest and disease problems by planning ahead.
7. Choose disease-resistant varieties, diversify plantings and rotate crops.
8. Plant vegetables that you enjoy and not more than you want to eat or preserve.
9. Choose easy-to-grow vegetables, such as beans, squash, lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, radishes, kale and collards and spinach, and don’t overplant.
10. Extend your vegetable garden with succession planting.
11. Alternate cool- and warm-season vegetables in planting beds, sow successively to extend harvesting times, swap out plants and replace them with rapidly growing plants or transplants.

Planting times:

The free Clemson Extension Service fact sheet 1256, “Planning a Garden,” lists planting times for most common vegetables broken down for the Coastal Plain, Midlands and Piedmont areas of South Carolina.

Visit Clemson’s Home and Garden Information Center for more information about vegetable-gardening, including fact sheets about specific vegetables.