Start Your Vegetable Garden The Easy Way
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008It’s important to emphasize that you need to draw a plan of your vegetable garden first. When doing this, always leave space to get at your vegetables for harvesting and maintenance. You’ll also find that drawing your plan to scale will be a great help in allowing you to decide where your vegetables are to be planted. You will make excellent use of the space you have available by doing this.
Sit down and write a list of the vegetables you would like to grow. A couple of tips here… 1. Check your local area and only list the vegetables that are easy to obtain. 2. Resist any temptation to list any rare, exotic vegetables. They will be hard to get, expensive and even harder 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.
While you’re still in the planning stage, study your vegetable choices to find out what each plant needs. Some prefer full sunlight, others will want part shade and then there are the ones that require full shade. Doing this will help you to decide on the positioning of your plants to give you the best possible harvest.
If you’re low on space, you can utilize the French cultivation method. This is an easy way to make the most out of the little space you have. Let’s say you wish to sow spinach and carrots. You’d take one packet of each and mix them together.
The thinking behind this method is that spinach grows a lot quicker than carrots, it also breaks up the soil and gives the carrots a better chance to grow. Just sow your mixed seeds into a 1/2 inch deep furrow and cover with soil.
You can harvest some young spinach in approximately 4 weeks, which starts to thin it out to give the carrots room. You’ll find that as the carrots begin to mature, the spinach will be almost finished and you’ll have a bountiful harvest of succulent carrots.
Another illustration would be parsley or lettuce with radishes. This system can be used with lots of vegetables that mature at different times. Early varieties of radish sown with turnips and lettuce is often done in France.
The radishes grow extremely quickly, and are gone by the time the lettuce starts to mature. Then the turnips don’t get large until the lettuce has been harvested. If you’re planting your rows in an east-west orientation, you should plant all of your taller plants on the north side.
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!