The first step to starting a new vegetable garden is to map out your garden. Simply draw up an approximate plan of where you’d like everything to go, keeping as close to scale as possible. Make sure you take into account paths and such.
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.
What if you have limited space? The French have an ingenious way of making full use of a small vegetable garden. You plant fast and slow growing vegetables together. This simply means that you mix something like packets of spinach and carrot seeds with each other.
Then you’d make a 1/2 inch deep furrow in a row and sow the mixture of the two seeds into that furrow and cover. The spinach will grow quickly and open up the soil so the carrot seeds can germinate better.
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.
You can do the same thing with vegetables such as radishes, parsley and lettuce. All you have to do is select different vegetables that take separate times to reach harvest. The French have been known to plant lettuce, radishes and turnips together.
The radishes are harvested first and are finished by the time your lettuce are ready. In a similar manner, the turnips will only be starting to mature as the last of the lettuce are harvested. All your taller growing vegetables should be planted on the north side of your vegetable garden if your rows are in a east-west direction.You do this so that your shorter plants aren’t in the shade from the shadows of the taller ones.
In the average home vegetable garden, the tallest plant is usually corn. Make sure you plant this so that it doesn’t overshadow your shorter plants and cause them to lack sufficient sunshine.
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.
By being imaginative in where you place your plants, you can have vegetables you would otherwise think you can’t grow. So don’t think you’re limited by the position of your vegetable garden, you can create the ideal growing conditions by being selective with your planting!
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