Vegetable Gardening Basics
The joys of vegetable gardening range from planning in winter to harvesting
in the summer or fall. Nothing adds more to your meals than fresh beans, tomatoes, or zucchini. Enjoy a
new crop of vegetable delights every week.
Vegetable gardens are unlike any other garden on your property. These gardens
can be as attractive as a flower border -- with many different types of plants:
annuals and perennials and warm-season and cool-season plants. Try different
types of new varieties of vegetables. With a vegetable garden, you're not
locked into what you planted last year.
The tastiest vegetables come from the home garden. Much enjoyment
comes from producing your own crisp vegetables, and it's an activity where
everyone in the family can contribute -- even the very young.
Whether you plan to plant a large
garden or just a few containers of vegetables on the patio, gardening is more
than just planting seeds.
Vegetables have different temperature
preferences and tolerances and are usually classified as either cool-season
crops or warm-season crops. Cool-season crops, such as cabbages, lettuce, and peas, must
have time to mature before the weather gets too warm; otherwise, they will
wilt, die, or go to seed prematurely. These vegetables can be started in warm
weather only if there will be a long enough stretch of cool weather in the fall
to allow the crop to mature before the first freeze. Warm-season crops, such as
peppers, cucumbers, and melons,
can't tolerate frost. If the weather gets too cool, their yields will be
reduced or they may not grow at all.
Light is another important factor to consider when you plan your garden. Sunlight -- or some type of
light -- provides the energy that plants need to turn water and carbon dioxide
into the sugar they use for food. If light is limited, even a plant that looks
green and healthy may never produce flowers or fruit. This can be a problem
with such vegetables as tomatoes,
where you want to eat the fruit. With lettuce, where you're only interested in
the leaves, light is not as much an issue.
Vegetables grown for their fruit need a minimum of six to eight hours of direct
light each day. Root crops, such as beets, carrots, radishes, and turnips, store up energy
before they flower and do rather well in partial shade. Plants that are grown
for their leaves, such as lettuce and spinach, are most tolerant
of shade; in fact, where the sun is hot and bright, they may need some shade
for protection.
The size of your garden depends on your
interest in gardening and how much time you'll be able to give to the garden.
Before deciding the exact dimensions of your
garden, check the list of vegetables you've chosen and the amount you're going
to grow for each one. Then calculate if all the vegetables will fit into the
allotted space. You can use our
vegetable catalogs on our web site for growing information.
Arrange your plantings to make the best
use of your available space. Some vegetables (for example, cucumbers)
sprawl, taking up much space in the garden. You can make use of vertical space,
however, by training vines to grow on a trellis; this will free up usable
planting ground.
Drawing the plot plan is the pencil-and-paper stage of planning. If you use
graph paper, it will be easier to work to scale. A commonly used scale is one
inch of paper to eight feet of garden space, but you can adapt the scale to
whatever is easiest for you. Draw up a simple plot plan with your garden's
measurements in all directions. Remember, no law requires a garden to be square
or rectangular. Your garden can be round, curved, or any shape that fits your
landscape.
Take care in placing the vegetables. Place taller plants in the north or
northeast area of the garden so they won't shade other plants as they grow.
In the interest of harvesting a bigger and better crop of vegetables,
you'll want to improve the texture and structure of your soil. This
improvement, whether to make the soil drain better or hold more water, can be
accomplished quite easily by the addition of organic matter.
Organic matter is material that was once living but is now dead and decaying.
You can use such materials as ground corncobs, sawdust, bark
chips, straw, hay, grass
clippings, and cover crops to serve as organic matter. Your own compost pile can supply
you with excellent organic matter to enrich the soil.
Each spring, as you prepare the garden for planting, incorporate organic matter
into the soil by tilling or turning it under with a spade.
Once you have readied your garden soil, you can begin to plant.
Knowing your type of soil, your growing zone, and whether you'll be planting in
sun or in shade will be of great help when choosing your plants, buying plants
for your garden is relatively simple once you know what to look for.