The Easy Vegetable Garden Method
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.
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.
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.
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 are harvested first and are finished by the time your lettuce are ready. In a similar manner, the turnips will only be starting to mature as the last of the lettuce are harvested. All your taller growing vegetables should be planted on the north side of your vegetable garden if your rows are in a east-west direction.You do this so that your shorter plants aren't in the shade from the shadows of the taller ones.
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.
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.
By being imaginative in where you place your plants, you can have vegetables you would otherwise think you can't grow. So don't think you're limited by the position of your vegetable garden, you can create the ideal growing conditions by being selective with your planting!
Article Source: http://www.search-raven.com
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