Why You Need To Plan Your Vegetable Garden Layout
When you are planting your very first vegetable garden, you are no doubt very excited and want to grow everything you possibly can! It’s good to have that feeling, and to be passionate about your gardening.
Your enthusiasm will have to be patient with you, because your first vegetable garden plans should be small, and should be sown with easy plants. You don’t want to get overwhelmed, and you may be underestimating how much time most gardeners spend making everything look beautiful.
After this first year, and getting your feet wet, you’ll be able to do more in the next year, and scale up your garden from there however you like. One year of patience is worth a season of disappointment.
How To Plan Your Vegetable Garden Layout
On a day when you won’t be busy, go out into the yard roughly every hour with a very rough sketch of your back yard (it doesn’t have to be anything more than vague shapes, for this purpose). Write on the sketch where the sun is each hour. You want to plan your vegetable garden layout somewhere where the plants will have 6-8 hours of full sun every day. With that in mind, your vegetables need to be planted away from trees or large bushes — they compete for energy too much and your vegetables, being small, will lose out.
If you can find someone with a tiller, that will be a great help with readying the patch and loosening the soil. You should still go in with a hoe or pitchfork and go through the soil, remove any rocks you find, and try to get the soil easy to work with.
Grounds-keeping companies sometimes offer services for gardeners, such as tilling, and also tilling the new soil, compost, or manure into the ground. It can save you a lot of labor, if it’s in your budget.
If not, you’ll need to work on it yourself, but remember that you can take breaks. You can start this as soon as the ground isn’t frozen, if you need to. Greens are very fond of cooler conditions. You could sow your favorite greens and have something to look forward to while it’s still cool outside.
In my garden, we usually plant things when we see the tulips or wisteria bloom. It’s easy to look up and find the last day frost is predicted for your area. After that day, you can plant nearly anything you want.
So, the danger of frost has past. You should have something like a 6′ x 3′ raised bed, or a 5′ x 5′ plot. You’ve enriched the soil. You made sure it’s loose. Now, what to put in it?
A Small Raised Bed Vegetable Garden
* Tomatoes are excellent. They’re prolific producers if they’re in good soil and kept watered. One year, we were able to harvest such an unreasonable amount of tomatoes that we lived on tomatoes that summer!
* Carrots are very easy. Mark your calendar with the harvest date for the carrots. They will grow nearly indefinitely if you don’t pluck them in time! You may want to space rows of carrots in a small area, and plant sequentially. That way, you’ll have carrots for most of the season. Replant the first row right away, if you like.
* Radishes are another excellent choice for a new garden. If you like them in salad, they can combine with the carrots and tomatoes, and have a gorgeous salad.
* Peppers of any type are often highly recommended. I usually go for some red and green bells and some jalapeno.
* Cucumber needs a lot of room to spread out over, but you can use tomato cages or trellises to make them expand upward instead of outward. We’ve had good luck growing them. We’ve just needed to keep an eye on them. Ideally, keep the cucumbers off of the ground by using cages or a trellis, because the cucumbers will not be as healthy if one side of them rests on the ground.
* Asparagus is a little bit of a cheat. The trick with asparagus is that you cannot harvest it in the first year, only in the second and thereafter, so if you love asparagus, you should put that in, as well. Do not cut off any of the spears — let the plant grow into a tall, leafy monster. It is gathering nutrition from the soil and sun to start producing a good crop in the next year.
I hope this has given you some good ideas! Gardening has been shown to reduce stress, and eating the fruits of your own labor from your new vegetable garden layout is an amazing experience, after a lifetime of store-brought produce.
photo courtesy sscornelius
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