Gardening in the Lower Columbia

If you have never had a vegetable garden, or your experience vegetable gardening was a long time ago, you may be unsure about how to start and which vegetables to try. Here are a few ideas that may help your garden flourish:

Vegetable gardens need at least six hours of sun. The more sun the garden gets, the more vegetable choices you have and the faster the vegetables will grow. If you are near or below six hours of sun, concentrate on leafy greens (lettuce, kale, chard, etc.), beets, and carrots.

If possible, create your garden where it is easily visible from the house. After planting, there are lots of things that can be done in short blocks of time like weeding out plant competitors and thinning out your crop to give each plant the space to thrive. You are more likely to do it if it is nearby.

Start small with your first garden. A 10 foot by 10-foot garden can grow quite a bit. You could easily have a couple of tomato plants (one cherry type and one regular type), some peppers, rows for greens like lettuce, chard and/or kale, a pole bean trellis on the north side of the garden, maybe beets and/or carrots, and a zucchini. The space is probably too small for sweet corn, but that can come next year if the garden gets bigger. If you do want to grow sweet corn, pick a variety like “Sugar Buns” or others that mature in a slightly shorter time.

If your prospective garden is now grass, you can either turn it all under with a shovel or, first remove the grass sod and then spade up the soil underneath. It is generally better to remove the sod. You can pile into an odd corner and cover with black plastic to compost over the summer. It can be added back to the garden next year. If the ground seems too wet to dig, it probably is. Wait until it dries out a bit or you will get clay clods that won’t crumble easily, if at all, at least for this year’s garden. A future article will talk about raised bed options.

Add agricultural lime at the rate 15 pounds or so per 100 square feet. Add fertilizer to provide nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium at the rate recommended on the bag. The product can be organic or conventional. Nitrogen is the key element for plant growth and most of the “N” leaves a garden in the winter rain.

Get your tomatoes started indoors soon and transplant in early May, if the weather allows it. Peppers are a little more marginal since they need full sun and more warmth than tomatoes. They also take longer to germinate, grow, and produce peppers. Beans can be started indoors from seed (get the trellis ready if growing pole green beans), as can kale, lettuce, chard, and beet.

Plant carrots and beets by making a shallow furrow in your soil, plant the carrots, and then cover the seed with a thin topping of potting mix. They will germinate much better, same with beets. Carrots can be planted in blocks with “mini” rows four inches apart and leaving, after thinning, one carrot per three inches within the rows. Carrots will also need to be thinned once they are growing to about one plant for every three inches of row, same for beets. Kale will need wider row spacing, as will lettuce and chard (six plus inches between plants). Lettuce can be purchased as transplants. It is usually best to transplant in the evening, so plants have a chance to get established overnight before sun the next morning. Potatoes can be planted about 12 inches apart in rows 24 inches apart. They can take up a lot of space.

Water as needed, and weed early and often to help your crops get off to a good start. If deer are wandering through your yard, they like to eat almost everything you like. So, find a way to fence them out with a gate that you can open and close as needed. They generally won’t jump into a fenced area as small as 10 x 10, but there’s no guarantee on that.

This is the first piece in what may be a series on gardening in the Lower Columbia River basin. It is an outgrowth of a column that I used to write for the Clatskanie Chief. It is also an area that I served as the Columbia County OSU Extension Agriculture and Gardening Agent for 45 years until my retirement in 2024.

Both sides of the river have lower sandy/loamy soils in the diked areas and uplands that are more clay-based soils. Both share a climate that has a longer time between the last spring frost and the first fall one than more upriver places like Longview and St. Helens. Both sides of the river are good for gardening. The 60-plus inches of rain can produce very skilled gardeners and excellent gardens.

For more information, go online to get Growing Your Own, an Oregon State University publication: https://catalog.extension.oregonstate.edu/em9027/html . This is one excellent free online publication. Other very helpful information sources are your local Extension offices: Columbia County Extension (503) 397-3462; Clatsop County Extension (503) 325-8573; Wahkiakum County Extension (360) 795-3278; and Cowlitz County Extension. (360) 577-3014.

Advice on future garden topics is welcome and can be given by emailing chip.bubl@orgonstate.edu.