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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Make use of this tactic for plants that like plenty of shade by deliberately planting them beside taller ones. You're then creating their ideal growing conditions. As an illustration, plant a cool weather plant like spinach in the shade of taller growing plants such as 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!
Article Source: http://www.articlenorth.com
Want to fill your small garden with plants and perfume? Tom Johnson has a Free eBook for you called Container Gardening Secrets.
Please Rate this Article
Not yet Rated
Additional Articles From -
Home |
Home