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A modest suburban garden produces flavorful soups

If a bowl of soup is one of your favorite meals, why not plant a soup garden this year? It will not only make the most delicious soups you have ever tasted, it will also save you a few dollars.

The first step is deciding which vegetables to grow. This decision should be guided by your favorite soup recipes. If your family loves chicken noodle soup, grow carrots and onions. If vegetable beef is more their fancy, grow green beans, potatoes and peas along with the carrots and onions.

For tomato soup, grow Roma-type tomatoes - they are very meaty. Grow red or white potatoes if chunks of potato are desired in your soup. Traditional yellow varieties of onions are best for onion soup.

Or just grow your favorite vegetables and create your own signature vegetable soup recipe. Other vegetables to consider include broccoli, cauliflower, garlic, kale, peppers, squash, sweet corn and Swiss chard.

If you don't already have a garden, choose a sun-drenched spot - a site that gets at least six hours of direct sunlight - and as close to a source of water as possible. Your plants will almost certainly need watering and dragging a hose all the way across the yard may discourage you from watering plants when they need it.

The size of the garden depends on how much produce you want to harvest. Do you want to dine on soups from fresh-picked vegetables in summer only? Or do you want to enjoy soups made from homegrown vegetables in the winter, too? If you desire soup year-round, plant a bigger garden and plan on preserving the surplus to have on hand for winter recipes.

Now that the location and size have been determined, remove the grass, layer on several inches of compost and rototill to mix it in. No rototiller? Use a garden folk and muscle power to combine the two. If your soil is terrible - full of clay or compacted as hard as concrete - consider building raised beds. There are kits available for purchase, but you can also make these at home with boards, straw bales, concrete blocks, bricks or anything that will hold soil in. Do not, however, use landscape timbers that have been treated with creosote. It is toxic and can leach into the soil and may be absorbed into plants.

If there is not a sunny spot in the yard, but you have a patio or deck bathed in sunshine, grow vegetables in containers. Any container will work as long as it is at least 12 inches in diameter - bigger is better - and deep enough to accommodate the roots of the vegetables you want to grow. A pot doesn't have to be very deep to grow to shallow-rooted crops like lettuce or radishes but must offer ample root room to grow tomatoes and potatoes.

Containers must also have drainage holes. Roots rot quickly in waterlogged soil. Fill pots with a good quality potting mix. Never use garden soil - it is way too heavy for container growing. Mix in an organic, slow-release fertilizer formulated for vegetables before planting any seeds or plants.

Don't forget to plant some herbs to flavor your soup. Basil, chives, dill, oregano, parsley, rosemary, sage, tarragon and thyme are just some of the choices. Plant herbs in containers according to their watering needs. Basil and parsley need a bit more water to keep them happy than sage and thyme.

Don't forget to take notes as the gardening season progresses. Record what grew well and what did not and what you wished you had grown more of and what you had too much of, so you can make adjustments next year.

• Diana Stoll is a horticulturist, garden writer and speaker. She blogs at gardenwithdiana.com.

Don't forget to grow some herbs to add flavor to soups.
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