Reprinted Articles

It’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.

Next, you need to decide which vegetables you wish to grow. Make a list of everything you’d like to grow, and then narrow the list down to those that you can easily get locally. For example, exotic lettuces may be expensive and hard to find, and tomatoes from grocery stores usually taste terrible.

Don’t go to the trouble of drawing a plan and then ignoring it - follow it! Once you’ve roughed out your beds, it’s time to work out where your various plants go so that you keep any problems to a minimum as your crop matures. This is the reason a map is so important.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

Last 5 posts by Tom Johnson

• Easy Ways To Plan Your Container Garden - May 10th, 2008
• Edible Gardens Are All The Rage! - May 6th, 2008
• Raised Beds Make Gardening Easier On Your Knees and Back! - May 3rd, 2008
• The Rewards Of Growing Your Own Herbs - April 30th, 2008
• Organic Compost - The Easy Way - April 15th, 2008

Tags: Home and Garden