The Easy Way to Start a Vegetable Garden
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
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.
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.
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.
In about four weeks you will be able to start harvesting your young spinach which in turn allows your carrots the space to grow. You’ll have a good crop of juicy carrots by the time your spinach harvest is finished.
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 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.
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.
You can also creatively use larger plants to shade shorter plants that don’t do well in harsh sunlight. For example, you could grow delicate cool-weather spinach behind large, bushy beans or peas.
Using this strategy enables you to have a harvest of vegetables you might think you can’t grow, just by being careful with where you place them. So if you don’t have any shade in your vegetable garden for any shade loving plants you want to grow, create your own!
Tags: Hobbies
Popularity: 11% [?]
Sphere: Related Content