Start Planning a Vegetable Garden

Light Requirements

Vegetables, like many flowers, need lots of sunlight to thrive and produce tasty vegetables. Most vegetables need full sunlight, which gardeners define as six or more hours of sunlight per day. This direct sunlight stimulates the plant’s cells to produce the food it needs through photosynthesis to build a strong root system and produce fruit.

Many people are confused about what type of light they have in the garden. Try this simple test. Pick a day when you’re home and can observe the garden. Take a look at the garden area you want to grow vegetables in first thing in the morning, and write down whether or not the sun is actually touching the ground. Look for full, bright sun, not dappled sunlight filtering through tree leaves. Now set a kitchen timer or alarm clock and return to your observation once an hour or once every two hours until dinnertime, marking down how much light the spot in the garden receives. Then, add up all the times you saw direct light. This will give you an idea of whether you’re working with full sun, partial sun or shade.

While you can grow some vegetables in partial sun, most will struggle. If the entire yard gets only partial sun or shade due to immovable objects like garages, homes, or trees in neighbors’ yards, look for a place that gets bright direct sunlight and grow vegetables in pots instead.

Growing Mushrooms

Unlike other crops, mushrooms have no growing season and can be produced year-round. “They don’t know Tuesday from Saturday from Christmas,” Miller says. Mushrooms are saprophytes, which means they live on dead or decaying matter. They have no chlorophyll, which makes plants green, and they need no sunlight to grow. As such, they grow on blocks of sawdust that sit on racks in three darkened climate-controlled growing rooms in Miller’s Quonset hut.

“It’s not brain surgery by any means,” Miller says. And that’s a good thing, because Miller is not a brain surgeon; actually he was a banker by trade for 17 years. A couple of years ago, he tired of the banking industry and was looking for a business to buy and operate. A neighbor who is a business broker showed Miller all the for-sale listings at the time, and the mushroom farm did not catch his eye. But the broker friend suggested he might want to check out the farm, which had been in existence about four years.

“I laughed,” Miller says. “I just kept laughing at him, never imagining I could be a farmer.” But then he took a look at the farm and its operations. Once I saw how simple it was,” he says, “I started thinking about it.”

And then he bought the place and started doing it. He orders six-pound blocks of oak sawdust that are impregnated with shiitake mushroom spores from a supplier in Pennsylvania. Oyster mushrooms are grown from hanging plastic sacks of sawdust.