Planning a Home Garden.
by Lynn Ocone.
(As published by The National Gardening Association).
When I was young, my parents offered me a tiny plot of ground in our backyard for my own garden. That first season, I grew carnations, tomatoes and cucumbers. The spark was ignited.
I’ve been gardening ever since, wherever I’ve lived; Colorado, California and here in Vermont. After 30 years, I continue to learn about and experiment with new vegetable varieties and plant combinations.
I make discoveries every season. But over the years I’ve settled on a garden layout that utilizes three-foot-wide raised beds. It is, I think, the key to beautiful and productive gardens.
First, I’m going to review the essentials of a vegetable garden, then I’ll describe how I make my raised beds. I believe that if you follow these directions, you’ll be well on your way to an abundant harvest and an enjoyable gardening season.
Choose a Sunny Location.
There’s no better way to start than by choosing a sunny spot for your garden. Most vegetables need six to eight hours of direct sun a day for best results. Leafy greens like spinach and lettuce can thrive with a bit less. As you assess your yard this winter, remember that the deciduous trees that are leafless now will cast shadows as the seasons progress.
If possible, locate the garden so that access to and from the kitchen is easy and convenient. It’s best if you can view the garden from a window. When the garden is easy to see and reach, you are more apt to notice what needs to be tended and to take full advantage of the harvest.
The ideal garden location has loose soil that drains well. If your soil isn’t perfect, you can improve it over time by adding organic matter such as compost.
Make the Garden the Right Size.
A 20- by 20-foot garden gives you room to grow a wide range of crops, including some tasty "space hogs" such as corn and winter squash. A 12- by 16-foot plot is sufficient for a garden sampler with a variety of greens, some herbs, a few tomatoes and peppers, beans, cucumbers and even edible flowers such as nasturtiums for garnishes. By growing plants in succession and using three-foot-wide beds with 18-inch paths, you should have plenty of luscious vegetables for fresh eating and extras for friends.
Use the following plan as a guideline, substituting crops to suit your own tastes. I always include flowers in my garden because they are beautiful and a joy to cut and bring indoors. Flowers also attract pollinating insects to the garden.
If you’d rather design your garden from scratch, I recommend plotting it on graph paper. Use paper with a grid of 1/4-inch squares, with each square representing one foot in the garden. Outline the beds in pencil, then fill in the plant names.
Get Everything You Need From Gardens Alive.
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Plan Your Garden With Plan Garden.
Watch This Video
In the digital age, you can do all your planning on the computer. A new vegetable garden design software called Plangarden makes vegetable gardening a snap. This Web-based program is simple and easy to use.
It has a Zoom and Planning feature that can help you create a garden as large as 5 acres or as small as a dooryard garden. You can create odd-shaped beds, container plantings, raised beds, and even square-foot garden beds.
There are drag-and-drop graphics, text labels, and a journal area where you can write notes about each crop. The harvest estimator can help you stagger your harvest. You can also invite comments from other Plangarden users about your garden design.
Winter Work for the Vegetable Garden.
by Geoff Wakeling.
Contrary to what many believe, the winter months can actually be a crucial time for gardening, especially for those wanting to get the best out of their vegetable patches. At a time of year when most fruit and vegetable plants have become dormant, the winter season provides the perfect opportunity for gardeners to get labor intensive work carried out. And without the plants and weeds thriving, all important maintenance jobs that have been left for months can finally be carried out without concern that they are taking priority over other more important tasks.
Whether starting a vegetable garden from scratch, or clearing beds which have been used over the past growing season, the winter months provide an ideal time to create pristine beds for planting in when the weather warms. With weeds not growing, and beds free from crops, it is the ideal time to clear away any plant material that may have got out of hand. Invasive plants can be stripped out of the earth without fear of damaging nearby growing crops, whilst repairs can be easily made to any vegetable patch borders. Meanwhile, those with grass paths or small lawn areas can cut back grass that may have got too long.
It is also the perfect time of year to enrich the soil, ready for sowing healthy new seeds and plants into the following spring. Many gardeners have compost heaps, and whilst the material from these can be used at any point during the year, adding them to beds is often easiest when little is growing. Rich and loamy compost can then be easy turned into the soil without concern that weeds will immediately spring up, or that crop roots will be disturbed. Meanwhile adding manure is a fantastic way to enrich the nutrients in the soil, and with an absence of vegetables there is no need to worry that scorching of leaves and roots will occur. In addition, frosts and snow will break down large clumps of manure, creating the perfect medium to be dug into the soil when the weather starts to warm up.
Just because it’s a cold time of year doesn’t mean that plants can’t still be grown. Before the really bitter extremes of some winters start, it is the perfect time to plant crops such as broad beans and overwintering onions. Small onion sets can be pushed into the ground so that just their tips show, whilst beans must be sown into the ground instead of germinated in a warmer place and then transplanted. If the latter option is taken gardeners may find that the frosts kill newly germinated plants. Whilst these crops will do little throughout the cold months, the odd days of winter sun will encourage early root growth. This results in stronger and healthier crops which can get a head start in the spring, offering an early crop of delicious food.
Whilst the garden may not look that inviting during the winter months, it is an important time to try and get some work done. Vegetable beds can be cleared of previous crops and weeds, dug over, and left for the frosts to break up soil clumps. Manure and compost can be added to enrich soils for the following season. Gardeners can also take time to plan their following year, rotating crops which need to be moved such as potatoes and brassica’s, and developing ideas for new plants to include. And even at this most bitter time of year, the vegetable patch can have some crops ready and waiting to explode into life.
Geoff Wakeling is a writer with Brookside Patio Furniture which specializes in outdoor chaise lounge chairs which one can store in this recommended Toledo storage facility.
Other informative articles by Geoff, published on this website, are (1) How To Create A Vibrant Flower Border, and (2) Free Fertilizers. They make very interesting reading.
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This post was written by admin on September 2, 2011
Not all insects are pests. In fact, the majority of bugs living in your garden are helping your plants to grow in numerous, unseen ways. If you are having a problem with pests in your garden, you probably have an imbalance of fauna or an imbalance of soil nutrients. The more insects and other fauna in your garden, the less likelihood the “pesky” ones have of surviving. You will find that most insects eat those moths and maggots that are eating your plants.
A more accurate test is the crumble method. Form a handful of soil into a ball in your hand. If it crumbles apart with a slight touch of your finger, it’s time to plant. If it holds together and requires pressure to break apart, it is still too wet. (And if it won’t form a ball, you can plant, but you’ll need to water.)