Start Your Vegetable Garden The Easy Way
Before you get too carried away planting your new vegetable garden, you need to draw a plan. This is how you maximize the space available. Do your plan as close to scale as you can and work out where you want your vegetables to go. Don’t forget to leave space for access, such as paths.
Now you need to make some decisions about what you’d like to grow. Make a list of your choices while keeping in mind what’s readily available from your local plant nursery. Try to avoid any unusual vegetables, they can often be expensive, hard to get or hard to grow.
Map out where you’d like all of your plants to go in your garden. Be sure to plan carefully, because improper planning can lead to disasters later. Once you develop your plan, it’s very important to stick to it.
Put a lot of thought into your vegetable plants requirements. You need to know you’re planting your chosen vegetables in the best position for maximum growth. For example, learn which ones tolerate shade and which ones require full sun.
If space is a problem, here’s one simple way to fully utilize the area you’re able to use. This method is widely used in France. As an example, if you have carrots and spinach on your list you simply mix together a packet of each.
You then sow your seed mixture into a furrow about 1/2 inch deep. The spinach grows rapidly and helps break up the soil to give the carrots more room to grow.
In about four weeks, you can start to harvest some spinach to thin it, making room for the slower growing carrots. By the time the carrots start to reach maturity, the spinach will be completely used up, and the carrots will have plenty of room to grow.
This method can successfully be used for many different types of vegetables. Radishes can be planted well with lettuce or parsley, for example. The French will often sow early radish varieties with lettuce and turnips all at the same time.
The quickest growers are the radishes, which will be exhausted before the lettuce are mature enough to be harvested. Likewise the turnips will be ready to pull up by the time the lettuce are just about finished. Also, if your rows of plants are in an east-west pattern, you need to sow your tallest plants to the north side of these rows. This is to make sure that your shorter plants don’t get shaded by the taller ones.
You should always make sure to plant things like corn, which is probably the tallest plant you would grow in a vegetable garden, in a position where it doesn’t interfere with the sunlight reaching your smaller plants.
Of course the reverse of this can be useful if you’re wanting to grow vegetables that prefer dappled sunlight or shade. You can be imaginative and make use of larger plants to shade these smaller ones. A case in point would be to grow a tall row of peas or beans to provide shade for a cool climate vegetable like spinach.
This could help you grow shade-loving vegetables in your garden, even if you don’t have any shady spots available. By being creative with placement, you might be able to grow vegetables you never thought you’d be able to grow in your location!
Tags: gardening, Vegetables