G,
I'm new to the forum, too (but have been lurking since buying our home in Newalla about a year ago). You'll hopefully get input from more experienced people than I, but I just finished a bunch of dirt shopping so I'll share what I know:

Murphy's in OKC was the cheapest for their rich mix, but some of our neighbors hadn't had great experiences with them. You can buy a pick up load at a time, but they have a minimum order at a time of $50. Delivered price of 6 cubic yards to Newalla was going to be around $300.

Minick's (in Norman, OKC, and Edmond) also delivers and lets you pick up soil. They are a little more expensive, but there is already cotton burr compost in their soil and it SOUNDS to me to be the closest to garden ready. Delivered price to our house about $370.

K and K in Moore/Norman (their website isn't very good, but they have a great facebook page) offers garden soil by the scoop (so if you have a smaller truck that is a good thing). They still recommend adding some compost. They also sell plants and the like (the other places just carry dirt.

If you have a truck and don't need a lot of dirt, K and K may be your cheapest, easiest option. For the amount of dirt we needed, getting it delivered is going to be cheaper than multiple trips in our midsized truck or renting a trailer. If you have neighbors that need dirt, you could possibly go in with some for a neighborhood dirt delivery.

This forum is amazing and the people are so helpful, but I will say that I almost decided NOT to garden after reading the forum for six months. I know it can be intimidating and overwhelming and scary. I finally resigned myself to the fact that my garden won't be perfect (yet) and I'll make some mistakes and I'll fail some and maybe succeed some, but I think we just need to jump in and do it! Good luck to us all!

G,
First, welcome to the forum and thank you for your service! You've found the right place for advice and help, I haven't seen a better online group of folks anywhere else. I'm still learning thru trial and error and always will be and it sure helps to come here and read, read, read and ask questions. I'm afraid I don't have much advice for what you're specifically dealing with right now but just wanted to say please don't be intimidated. It's a process and just a matter of taking the first step, which you've already done by coming here and seeking advice, and then taking the next step and the next, and so on. I had a veggie garden in the 80's and then didn't have one for about 20 years and started all over again 3 years ago. The first year was just a little bag garden (basically you lay out bags of soil, cut out the top of one side, and plant into the bag) and then started a "real" garden in 2011. That was the year from you-know-what for gardens because of the drought and heat. Out of 18 tomato plants we got a few handfuls of cherry tomatoes, literally. We did get some cucumbers, squash and zucchini but the tomatoes that year were a wipeout for us. And we dearly love tomatoes. But last year we planted another 18 tomatoes and it was a whole new world. We canned 30 pints of salsa from our very own tomatoes and had plenty to eat as well. It was tomato heaven. What I'm saying isn't helpful in terms of what you need to get started now, but I just wanted to say don't give up. And don't be intimidated. Once you get started the rest will follow. You've already got some great information from wulfleton (which I'm also filing away for future reference, thank you wulfleton) so that's a good start. And I know you'll be hearing from a lot of people here who are much more helpful than I am. If you have an opportunity to go to the Spring Fling you'll meet a lot of them, and come home with a great assortment of plants too! Good luck! I have to go now and help my husband spread compost on our garden before he tills it again. I'm sure hoping for another decent tomato year!

Suzie

G, Thank you for your service to our country, and welcome to the OK forum.

Can you tell us what sort of veggies you want to grow? That will make it easier for us to make specific suggestions about the timing of your plantings and whether it is better to start from seeds or plants.

Please don't be intimidated. Every single one of us started out knowing very little to perhaps nothing about gardening. Even if we grew up in a gardening family and surrounded by gardening neighbors, it is amazing how hard it is when you leave your family home and have your own home and are starting from scratch. Helping a parent, other relative or neighbor with a garden doesn't even really prepare you for breaking ground and starting your own, though it likely makes the learning curve a little shorter.

Your success as a gardener begins with the soil. The first thing to do is to figure out what sort of soil you have. To do that, start with the jar soil test I've linked below. It will help you determine if the soil you have is primarily clay, sand or silt and you even can determine roughly what percentage of each comprises your soil. You may find your soil has good texture and friability and that all you have to do is add organic matter and nutrients.

The way we built our raised beds here was to rototill the existing soil, rake out the plant roots and rocks, and then we added organic matter to it. Organic matter is just anything that once was alive and which has decomposed and it comes in many forms, including compost, mushroom compost, composted cow manure, peat moss, and soil conditioner (generally a blend of pine bark fines and humus). We put several inches of organic matter right on the surface of the freshly rototilled soil and then rototilled the existing soil together with the organic matter. This raised the grade of the planting beds several inches above the ground. It is one method of filling raised beds. Another method is to purchase a garden soil mix that usually is a mix of top soil and compost.

Eventually you'll need mulch, but you don't necessarily need it the first week you plant. Long-term, mulch will serve several purposes. It will insulate the ground from the sun and heat, helping keep the soil and your plant roots cooler. Mulch will reduce the number of weeds you have to deal with as long as you put a thick enough layer of it on the soil surface. You'll still have to pull weeds, but not as much as you would without mulch. Mulch helps prevent some plant diseases by reducing the amount of soil that splashes up onto your plants. You can use any sort of organic matter for mulch. I mainly use autumn leaves in fall and winter. I mow over them with the lawnmower in the fall and winter, chopping them into pieces and catching them in the mower's grass catcher bag, and put them in the beds or in bags to save for spring. In spring through fall, I mostly use grass clippings, captured in the grass catcher bag each time we mow. Because our large veggie garden needs more mulch than our yard can provide, I also use spoiled hay. (More about that in a minute.) If you have a front yard raised bed where the appearance of the mulch is highly important, you can use bark mulch if you desire. With regards to the use of hay or straw, there are some persistent herbicides that persist in hay and straw for years and will destroy your garden if you use them. Now, about the use of contaminated hay, straw, manure or compost, use a GardenWeb forum search here and enter "killer compost" to read old threads about the dangers lurking in killer compost, or do a search at the websites of Mother Earth News or Organic Gardening magazine. I've become very picky about obtaining manure and hay from just about anywhere other than our own property because of all the herbicide contamination that gardeners have encountering since about 2000.

Both seeds and plants are available in many places, including full-line nurseries and garden centers, big box stores like Lowe's, Home Depot and Wal-Mart, and even dollar stores and other discount stores carry some seeds. You often can get plants or bulbs, tubers, corms or rhizomes in bags at Sam's Club....usually stuff like daylilies, gladiolus, caladiums, etc. Transplants of vegetables, herbs and ornamental plants can be found at many of those same places and also at farm stores and feed/seed stores.

Since you are brand new, it might be easier your first year to buy transplants at a store and put them into the ground for plants like broccoli, cabbage, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, etc. Green beans, corn, black-eyed peas, okra, etc. are easy from seed.

One important thing is to understand which plants are cold-hardy and can withstand temperatures below freezing (although even they have their limits) and which are not. Late March and early April are sort of an awkward time in gardening---near the end of the period when cool-season veggies and flowers can be planted but just slightly too early for most warm-season plants to go into the ground.

If I was just starting a new garden this weekend and didn't even have the ground prepared yet, I'd skip the cool-season stuff and start out with warm-season stuff. When you plant cool-season plants too late, the heat often burns them up in late May or early June before they even have a chance to produce much of an edible harvest, if they produce one at all. For most cool-season veggie plants, the recommended planting dates (from OSU) are February 15-March 10, and we're almost three weeks past that March 10th date. In the life of a cool-season plant, 3 weeks is a big deal. If your heart is set on cool-season plants, go ahead and plant them with the knowledge that it is getting pretty late for them. (Carrots, spinach or beets from seed likely would be fine if planted now, and lettuce planted from transplants still could produce well if the weather stays cool a while.)

Watch your forecast carefully as some cold nights are forecast in the next few days, which means any warm-season plants put into the ground now could suffer freeze or frost damage. I have a greenhouse full of warm-season vegetables, herbs and flowers that I wish I were putting in the ground today, but with temperatures forecast to be at least as low as the mid-30s at our house on at least Mon-Wed of next week, I will not be putting them into the ground until sometime after that cold weather passes.

Gardening can be as simple or as hard as you want to make it. It is always best to start small and easy, and then make the garden larger and more complicated as you gain experience.

You don't have to have a huge number of plants to produce nice yields. Leave the huge gardens to folks who can, dehydrate or freeze a lot of their harvest, or who share their produce with their adult children and grandchildren (or even great-grandchildren). Maybe eventually you'll have a really large garden, but it is a mistake to start out with one that is too big because it can become overwhelming during weed season.

I have a big garden now, but when we first moved here I built 2 raised beds that were, I think, 4' wide by 8' long, and in those beds I planted tomato plants, pepper plants, squash, onions and several kinds of flowers. It was my first and my last "simple" garden as I immediately began enlarging it year after year. Even this year, in our 15th spring here, I am enlarging the garden, but partly because the encroaching woodland means I've given back some of my original garden to nature because it is becoming too shady for the edibles I've been growing on that side of the garden.

If your garden spot will be small, focus on plants that give you a large harvest in comparison to the space they fill. For example, tomato plants and hot pepper plants give a pretty good yield compared to the space they fill. So do bush and pole beans, squash and cucumbers. By contrast, pumpkins take up a whole lot of space and so do most watermelons.(You can get around that by growing mini-watermelons on a trellis.) Also, if you enjoy cooking with fresh herbs, they are well worth planting. You can buy a transplant of just about any herb for $3 or $4, while buying a few sprigs of that same herb at a grocery store will cost you almost as much as a plant that will give you a continued harvest for months or years.

With a garden, it always is best to start small and then enlarge your garden as you gain experience. Start out growing the foods you like best, and after you master growing and harvesting them, add others.

In Oklahoma, we get a second chance with cool-season crops in fall, so even though we already are well beyond the OSU-recommended planting dates for most cool-season veggies for spring, the recommended planting dates for a fall harvest will arrive before you know it.

Al lthat most plants need is to be planted into halfway decent soil (more about that in a second) at the right time. Then they need a certain level of fertility (if not present in the soil, it can be provided for them via regular feedings of fertilizer), consistent watering and a gardener monitoring them for any pest or disease issues that might develop. (Often you won't see meaningful pest or disease issue at all.) They don't have to have fancy, expensive soil. They don't need beautiful mulch---ugly mulch works just as well. They don't need constant watering (too much water is as bad as too little). Mostly they just need a chance to spread their roots in the ground and grow. It doesn't have to be hard and it doesn't have to be complicated. You'll be surprised by how well plants will grow even for a newbie. Remember that plants want to grow and need to grow. They will grow if you give them even half a chance.

With water, there is a strong link between the kind of soil you have and how water affects your plants. Ideally, by the time you put plants or seeds in the ground, you will have loose, friable soil that allows moisture to penetrate it but also has enough organic matter in it to retain moisture. An ideal soil will have some sand, some clay and some organic matter. Too much sand and it drains too fast. Too much clay and the soil compacts tightly and can both hold moisture too long and then also bake so hard in dry periods that moisture rolls off and won't be absorbed. We won't even talk about too much organic matter because, unless you're trying to grow something only in pure, finished compost, you're never going to achieve "too much" organic matter.

Don't overthink it and try to keep it simple your first couple of years. Many new gardeners start out with Square Foot Gardening because it is a simple planting method that is easy to master. Then as they gain experience they branch out into trying different methods. One caution about SFG is that the recommended Mel's Mix usually drains too well in our climate and can be hard to keep moist. Another is that some of the spacing recommendations don't work as well in our climate as they do in some others. Still, over all, it is a good method for a beginning gardener.

I have a big and sometimes complex garden now, but started with a simple, small one. I never would have attempted to start with a huge garden my first year because I grew up in a gardening family and knew how much time a big garden required. Even though I started small here, I'd already been gardening for about 15 years on my own before we moved here and had helped my dad and my younger brother with their bigger gardens, so I understood that it was best to start small in a new location with new soil I didn't yet understand and weather patterns I'd have to learn rather than started out real big that first year. I just cannot stress this point enough. Even a person who has successfully gardened for many years and has done well in another climate other than ours still needs to make a lot of adjustments here as they learn to deal with our soil types and our weather patterns.

One of my DH's co-workers so enjoyed the fresh produce we gave him from our garden that he and his wife decided they wanted a garden. Their very first garden was a 4' x 4' square raised bed and they planted a lot (too much) in that first bed. Even though everything was crowded, their yields were good enough to make them happy. A couple of years later they expanded to two 4' x 4' beds. Despite incredible drought, they had great success with those beds. That went so well that this winter they were talking about buying a rototiller and putting in a "real garden". I am thrilled for them, and I think they did it right by starting small, particularly since they both have demanding careers and grandchildren they visit often in another state, which cuts into their available time.

You also can garden in containers.

I believe that you are about to embark upon a great gardening adventure, and I hope you know we're all right here any time you have a question or an idea you want to kick around!

Dawn

I forgot to link the soil jar test. It now is linked below.

Here is a link that might be useful: Jar Soil Test

Hello G.

Just a quick note about gardening and saving money.

If this is one of your primary goals and you do not have a lot of space for a garden, then you might want to give some extra thought into what you plant.

Potatoes and onions purchased at the grocery store are relatively cheap most years. The quality of the garden grown is better, but in my opinion not a great amount, and the savings are not very significant.

Now, when you consider store bought tomatoes versus home grown, then you start to see very significant differences in quality and price. This is also true of other vegetables as well. With some vegetables you can see significant savings and enjoy much better quality by growing a garden. Cucumbers and green beans come to mind.

If I had a small garden and wanted to get the most value (dollar and quality) for my time and investment, I would limit the types of vegetables grown to those which would meet my financial and quality needs the best. Don't feel like you have to grow every type of vegetable shown in the seed catalog. Pick and choose to meet your tastes and needs.

Gardening is a bit like fishing. You can use a cane pole or economical rod and reel, and fish from the bank and enjoy yourself as well as get some fish to eat. Or, you can buy a boat and motor and all the latest equipment. Either way you have fun and get to eat some fish, but one way is much cheaper than the other.

So, in addition to the good advice you have received up above in the thread, and the additional advice to come, this is my small contribution. Weigh in your mind which vegetables you like to eat the best, but cost the most, and concentrate your efforts on researching and growing them.

Scott,
I love your analogy about gardening and fishing, so true!

Suzie

I remember watching my father plant a garden in the backyard of a rented house when I was 7. He had a shovel and a rake, nothing more. He bought no dirt, no "soil amendments" no mulch. He bought seeds and he planted each section as he dug starting in early March. Every night after work, he would dig and plant a section. He planted lettuce, radishes, spinach and potatoes. Then he dug more spots and planted corn, beans, tomatoes and okra. (We had never even heard of broccoli or sugarsnap peas then.) I knew from watching him that planting a garden was a lot of WORK, but it never occured to me that it was complicated or expensive. I don't remember what the soil was like in that backyard in Miami, Oklahoma, but I do remember the wonderful vegetables we got from it.

That experience has stayed with me and still leads me to think that gardening is often made out to be more complicated than it is. The most important thing is "Dig the ground good." (I am convinced that a lot of failures come from putting 6-8" of purchased "topsoil" in a "raised bed" without digging into the ground under it first.) Then plant the right varieties of the right vegetables at the right time." (Fortunately that information is readily available online; Dad being a farm boy carried it in his head.) Finally, "weed, mulch, water, harvest."

And even though we raise both potatoes and onions because we have lots of space, I totally agree with Scott. In limited space raise the veggies that are the most expensive and the least tasty in the store.

And as everyone says, "Start small."

G,
I am in the same boat as you. I am originally from Ohio and have only been in Oklahoma for 3 years. I am starting a garden for the very first time as well. I felt super excited at the beginning then got increasingly more frustrated, overwhelmed and upset and flew over to this forum for help.

okiedawn and a few others really helped to calm me down and stopped my panic. Now I have 4 raised beds, 3 with nothing in them, and a small shelf with some lights filled with tomato and pepper seedlings in clear plastic cups bought in bulk from Amazon.
I figure I will plant what I can and hope for the best. I also spend a bit of time on youtube and see what works and doesn't for others. I will also keep visiting here as well.

Good luck!
Jen

Bre, Also, and you'd be amazed at how many people fail to do this: grow only what you and your family like and will eat. I can grow eggplant until the cows come home but no one in my family likes it and eats it, so what is the point in growing it? I actually grew it for about 10 years for friends of ours who liked eggplant but who didn't garden. It is a pretty plant, but I'd rather use the space growing something we'll actually eat.

Dorothy, Well I envy your dad's soil! i would have loved to start out with soil that a person could dig. Clearly it is better than what we started with here because you could barely break up our dense, compacted clay with a large and powerful tiller and couldn't use a shovel or digging fork with it at all. I still have a collection of broken shovels in the garage from our first year here, and use the handles of them as tomato stakes. Looking back at how hard it was to break up the ground the first year, I am amazed we didn't just give up and stop trying. We'd had black clay in Texas, though, so even though this was red and more compacted, at least we knew how to deal with clay. We can laugh about it now, but the first few years of breaking up the ground was a totally miserable experience. Even now when I say the word 'rototiller', I think Tim all but breaks out in hives and develops a migraine headache. When our waterline broke twice during the recent droughts and we had to dig in compacted dense red clay that never had been amended, it was a horrid reminder of what we started out with here, and I think we'd forgotten how truly bad the red clay is in terms of density.

I agree with you about not bringing in purchased topsoil and dumping it on top of the ground without at least breaking up the ground first and amending it with organic matter or by blending the purchased topsoil mix with the native soil. Not only does it not work well, it can be very costly and the purchased mixes, if not added to native soil, seem to me like they drain much too fast in drought-type conditions.

Dawn

Thank you to everyone for your responses. This is a great group/forum to be a part of. I would like to start with some tomato, pepper, green bean, red onion and some type of squash for veggies. I would like to try some fruits but do not know ANYTHING at all about how to grow fruits. Any suggestions for our area? I do want to grow some herbs and I have read a little about growing them... I'd like to try cilantro, parsley, and garlic. Tilling the flower bed and garden today! Any recommendations on flowers that do well in the Oklahoma heat?

Marigolds, zinnias, gomphrena, portulaca and celosia all do well during the summer for me. Dawn and Susan can add a lot more to my list.

I grow the same ones Dorothy listed and also these: veronica, salvia, four o'clocks, cannas, verbena bonariensis, periwinkles, swamp mallow, Texas red hibiscus, Luna hardy hibiscus, yarrow, dahlia, datura, brugmansia, black-eyed Susan vine, gladiola, daylily, morning glory, moonflower vine, nicotiana alata, flowering nicotine, nicotiana langsdorfi, cosmos, cypress vine, firecracker vine, cardinal climber vine, purple hyacinth bean vine, poppies and larkspur (in spring...they start burning up in our heat by June), nasturtiums, dianthus, sweet alyssum, lobelia (in the cool season), johnny jump-ups (viola), etc. I could go on forever because I love flowers. Most flowers do well here as long as you avoid the ones that need cool conditions and lots of water. It might have been easier to list the flowers that don't grow well in our climate!

If you could only plant 3 to 5 kinds of flowers due to space limitations, then I'd suggest zinnias (there's a zillion different kinds/sizes in many colors), cosmos, gomphrena, salvia coccinea and celosias. I love marigolds and grow a lot of them but they are spider mite magnets some years....usually in the hotter drier years. That doesn't stop me from growing them, but sometimes it means that once they are heavily infested with spider mites, I yank them out and dispose of them before the spider mites start moving to other plants.

I love petunias but the heat here is brutal on them so I omly grow a heat-tolerant type bred from wild petunias. It is called "Laura Bush" petunia and comes in various shades of pink, purple and white. The only place I've ever seen the seed for it is Wildseed Farms. I haven't started any for seed in quite a while now because it reseeds all over my garden, and blooms roughly from late March or early April through November or December.

I also sow one or two of Wildseed Farms' wildflower blends in our pastures most years to give us lots of wildflowers. I like the "Firecracker" seed mix and the Texas/Oklahoma mix. The Texas bluebonnets from those mixes have slowly taken hold and spread (it is something of a miracle because my soil is all wrong for them) and I noticed today that some of the bluebonnets have buds that likely will bloom tomorrow or Monday.

Don't overlook some of the herbs that flower too. I always have chamomile, feverfew, borage and a few other flowering herbs in the garden because their flowers attract many pollinators and beneficial insects that help control the pest insects. I grow catnip for our cats...but if you live in a rural to semi-rural area you should know that bobcats sometimes are attracted to the catnip and you'll find them in the garden sitting in the catnip (not what I want to see when I'm looking at the garden, either). I don't let all the herbs go to seed, but when we're about halfway through the summer I'll stop cutting some of the basil, catnip and lemon balm and let it flower. I do the same thing with Mexica mint marigold, aka as Texas Tarragon, but it blooms later in the summer.

Cilantro does best in the cool season so sow the seeds soon. I succession sow a new batch of seeds every 2 or 3 weeks for a continual harvest. Parsley suffers a little in our heat, but you can keep it going all summer with attentive watering. I grow the flat-leaf type for cooking and the curly types for the caterpillars in the swallowtail family. Garlic does best when planted in fall. You harvest it in early summer, usually in June here in southern OK, when the foliage begins to turn yellowish-brown and die back. If you plant garlic cloves now, it likely will produce green leaves for you but probably won't form cloves. Garlic needs some cold exposure to make it produce the cloves. Chives are another herb that's quick and easy from seed, and the flowers are gorgeous in the garden.

Dill is easy from seed. It is a cool-season herb. I succession sow it every 3-4 weeks for a continual harvest. I like to grow it for both the dill weed and the dill seed. Both are easy to harvest and dry for later use in the kitchen. I grow several types of dill, including one called "Bouquet" that makes a nice filler in flower bouquets and another called "Fernleaf". So far this year, I've planted "Mammoth", "Bouquet" and "Fernleaf" in the garden and all of them are several inches tall already and growing well. The next time I sow dill seed, it will be the variety "Vierling". Other kitchen herbs that are easy and fun to grow include rosemary, thyme, sage and oregano. I mix flowers and herbs into the same beds with my veggies. Mother nature doesn't plant her woodland and grassland plants in straight rows of single species so I follow her lead and mix it all up together.

With fruit, it would take a book to tell you what you need to know about growing fruit. Pick one kind of fruit per year and try it. Tree fruits that grow here include peaches, plums, cherries, apricots, figs, apples, pears, and persimmons. Brambles you can grow here include blackberries and dewberries. In some parts of central through NE OK some people grow raspberries, but I don't know how they keep them alive through our droughts. Blueberries have very specific soil needs and they need an acidic growing medium and plentiful water. You can do a search here on the forum in the search box for blueberry information to find Scott's many informative posts about growing blueberries in Oklahoma. Strawberries do well better in eastern and northern parts of the state than in western and southwestern parts where the heat arrives too early. I have grown them here even though I don't have the kind of soil they prefer and found them hard to keep happy in the drought years. You can grow annual fruits like jelly melon, Giant Cape gooseberry, and garden huckleberry.

I wouldn't try too many new things at one time....it will make you crazy, as many of us have already been down that path and learned that fact!

Dawn

G- I don't want to sound repetitive but THANK YOU for your service and Mercy, having babies too!

Reading all the great advice you've already received tells me you're in good hands. I'm Oklahoma born & raised, had family that gardened, piddled with it most of my early adult life and now I'm in my mid 50's. If I had the option of the advice you get here, I'd have been addicted LONG ago! LOL!

I'm northeast Norman area, not far from you. I would also suggest perrineal dahlias to your flower gardening. I've started (too!) many. I'd be happy to share. And like has been said...watch for post and a thread about the Spring Fling!!! I also highly recommend K&K on Sooner Road for advice and seeds. I've purchased many landscape bushes, flowers, seeds potatoes, seeds, etc. from them and their people are spot on for our area.

Paula

Hi gshears--
Greetings from a fellow MWC-ite. As you can see, this place is full of the friendliest, best help around. I am also just getting started at gardening, and am learning a lot. I can confirm okiedawn's assessment that Mel's Mix drains really quickly and requires a lot of watering-- but even with that, I found the Square Foot Gardening book to be a great place to start. If/when you ever decide to expand beyond raised beds, you may like to check out the Lasagna Gardening and the Back to Eden film. We are experimenting with these, and have high hopes. I am about to find out about the Spring Fling, and highly recommend you do the same!

Hi Earth Sister! I hope you're having a great Easter with the family. I wish I had something like K & K down here.

Redbirdroad, I like SFG but you do have to adapt it a bit to make it work well here. I think that Mel's Mix can be adapted to hold water better here but I have clay to begin with so I always have the opposite issue....and have to work to make soil drain better instead of working to make it retain water better.

I also generally start with the soil I have and amend it rather than bringing in entirely new soil, but this year we are not going to incorporate the native clay, but only because it is too compacted to break up.

We are building new beds above ground this year without incorporating any of the native clay because our rear tine tiller won't even break up that clay. We tried it last year and the tiller bounced around on top of the ground and made my husband a little crazy. We've dealt with awful clay ever since we moved here, but this area is ridiculously compacted.

We have lived here 15 years and I have wanted to put a garden there in that spot for 15 years but the clay is the absolute worst of all the clay on our property and I've never gotten around to dealing with it. So, needing to be creative, we are using a mish-mash of a bunch of methods. There is no real name for what we're doing so maybe I'll call them my mish mash beds. We put down thick layers of cardboard as if we were going to build a lasagna bed. Then we "built" the raised beds using 3-year-old hay bales as the edging. I have been aging them (i.e. letting them sit out in the open and rot) to ensure there's no herbicide contamination in them. Then we started out hugelkultur-style by collecting old, partially rotted wood from the woodland and put that inside the raised hay bale edging. On top of that we are layering various stuff.....grass clippings, weeds pulled from the garden, compost, more old hay, chopped/shredded leaves, etc. When all the layers are complete we'll top it off with a few inches of native soil and then we'll plant. Eventually the hay bales will rot and we'll have to build wood edging for the beds, and I am hoping by then that the clay underneath the beds will have improved substantially.

I know from experience that anything I pile up on the ground becomes a haven for snakes, so this year the mish-mash beds will have winter squash plants so I don't have to spend a lot of time in that area during snake season. I didn't want to grow anything in that bed that required me to be around those mish-mash beds too much doing snake season. I can plant winter squash, put in a drip irrigation line, mulch to keep the weeds out and it should be a real low-maintenance garden....and probably one with snakes, but on the other hand, they will keep mice from building nests in the hay.

Dawn

G, welcome to the forum. If you would be interested in growing a heat resistant pole bean I'd be happy to send you a packet of Cooper's Running Snap, an heirloom from southern Georgia. I grew it in 2009 and found it to produce flowers in 37 days and dry seed as quickly as 78. It produced a prodigious amount of 8" stringless pods. This may well be a strain of Rattlesnake. Anyway, I just did a germination test on my seed and it is good. I plan to put in a 16' cattle panel of it this year. Here's a link to some info I've compiled on this one.

George

Here is a link that might be useful: Cooper's Running Snap

Hey G, thank you for your service as well.

I encourage everyone to plant some tropical milkweed or family jewels milkweed this year. The Monarch population is the lowest it has been since recording began. The drought and continuing issues with habitat loss have resulted in lower numbers. These milkweed I mention attract other pollinators too.

To Dawn's list I would also add flame acanthus and lantana. My best pollinators plants are cosmos, verbena bonarienis, mountain mint, golden crownbeard, sunflowers, milkweed, lantana, zinnia, cleome, asters, mistflower, coneflowers, Joe pie weed, butterfly bush, and datura.

Susan

Hi G,

I can't give you much advice for your area but want to chime in that the people on this forum are very helpful! We started our first Oklahoma garden last year (well, my first - I'm from northern Minnesota originally and needless to say, growing conditions are very different!) with 4 4'x11' rasied beds. Following advice I gleaned here, we had a great harvest of carrots, lettuce, peas, squash/zucchini, tomatoes, peppers, okra, and herbs. Completely addiciting. So this year, being the ambitious (ie dumb) people we are, we added another 4'x4' raised bed and tilled up the 40'x40' cattle catch pen that isn't being used. We'll plant the space hogging stuff there: melons, pumpkins, corn, okra, etc. Let's see if it kills us as we're also expecting our first child at the end of the summer! I figure it's a great way to get some exercise, enjoy the outdoors, and (hopefully) have something tasty to eat. Good luck!