Vegetable Garden PlanningVegetable garden planning, most people hide the vegetable garden as far from the residence as possible because they do not think it pleasing to the eye. I disagree, vegetables may not be flowery but well-organized rows looking healthy and green can make a fine exhibit. To have the vegetable patch adjacent to the kitchen door is also particularly convenient, provided there is an open, sunny space for it.
Even a small garden can make a productive vegetable and fruit area, for most families need only what may be called "convenience" vegetables, that is, summer salad material, snap beans, some tomato plants and herbs. If you have the space, larger crops, such as squash, broccoli, cucumbers and corn can be sited somewhere else, together with a soft fruit area perhaps, if preferred 
But be warned before you embark on a vegetable garden planning and making. However excited you are there are physical constraints to face.
If you wish to be self-sufficient through the vegetable garden planning of your garden, the planting, care and harvesting of food crops must govern the time you spend outside. To provide enough vegetables for an entire family throughout the year requires an area larger than most gardeners possess. Moreover, the labor is heavy, the time needed substantial if the vegetable garden is to be kept fully productive and in good order, and to be truly organic you will need room and time to maintain a compost cycle.
The resulting vegetables' are therefore not cheap. Most people, of course, do not price their own time and it is certainly true that homegrown vegetables are more healthy and fresher than those bought from a grocery store. A deep-freeze is a important piece of equipment for anyone growing more than the minimum, since whole crops regularly come to completion at the same time and you can end up giving away the bulk of your produces.
It is impracticable to estimate the ideal size for a vegetable area during the vegetable garden planning phase, for it will depend on the size of your family, what you want to grow and how much time you have to tend it. Nevertheless, a vegetable garden measuring 3300ft2 should meet requirements of a family of four. The location of the garden will establish the plants that will grow best, the balmier the climate, the greater the yield. Production should increase over the years as you gain know-how and enrich the ground.
It is always clever to look around at what other gardeners in your area are achieving and learn from their knowledge of various crops.
If, after taking into consideration during the vegetable garden planning phase of all the factors, you decide to make a vegetable garden, make sure that its shape is strong and simple for it must be able to retain its character despite the continuous change from bare soil to mature crop that occurs as you prepare the soil, grow the crop and harvest it. An audacious, simple design is almost inevitable, since crops are traditionally grown in rows and should be served by hard paths for use throughout the year.
The vegetable area may be encompassed, and perhaps sub-divided, by some form of low surround. Edging box, a traditional garden surround, wills harbor slugs, which will feed on Brassica (the cabbage family) leaves, so it is healthier to use sage and rosemary for hedging, where hardy. Traditionally, the vegetable garden was walled to keep out pests, and divided within into four sections by wide paths, surrounded with flowers for cutting, or with herbs or trained fruit trees, while other trained fruit trees lined the walls.
There would be a neighboring potting shed, a greenhouse, some frames and a place for storing sand and another for mixed soil, both for proliferation and for making compost.
One of the four working sections contained soft fruit or an asparagus bed or clumps of rhubarb, and possibly herbs, for its contents were semi permanent. The other three cultivated areas housed crops, which were rotated annually, both to deter soil-borne pests and to maintain a balance of nutrients in different parts of the garden. Those are just some of the items to consider during the vegetable garden planning phase. The way such a traditional rotation works today is usually in the following manner. Planted in the first bed are leguminous crops (peas and beans), with onions, shallots, leeks, lettuce, celery and radish since they all need well-dug soil with plenty of manure or organic compost built-in. The next quarter of the area contains mainly Brassica plants (cabbage, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, kale, spinach and broccoli), and might need an inorganic feed to replace used minerals and possibly an application of lime if the soil is too acid. The third working quarter, where root crops are grown (potatoes, turnips, rutabagas, parsnips, salsify, celeriac and carrots) might need an initial application of inorganic fertilizer. Once the rotation is established, however, inorganic feed will not be needed, as the plots will remain in good health from the manure or organic compost they receive every third year.
This traditional system of rotating the crops of the kitchen garden is as appropriate now as it was in the old walled vegetable gardens that existed until 75 years ago, though few of us can practice the system on the large scale of a traditional fruit and vegetable garden. If you are a newcomer to vegetable gardening, you need to scale the system down and to adapt it, particularly when space is limited, to more intensive ways of inter-cropping vegetables.
Start by selecting varieties of vegetables that are of small growth (though not necessarily small cropping), which can be planted closer within the individual row. Then, between rows of slower, taller growing vegetables, plants quick-growing “catch" crops.
Quick-growing vegetables consist of radish, which reaches maturity within six weeks; kohlrabi and turnips, which grow in eight weeks, and Chinese cabbage and carrots, which take nine or ten weeks. Quick-maturing vegetables are also useful as "succession" crops to make use of well-prepared soil once the main crop for the year has been harvested.
Succession crops should not be confused with "succession sowings", which are sowings of the same vegetable at intervals to avoid a glut at harvest.
During the growing season be prepare to fill any ground vacated by a previous crop, for if you do not nature will. It is usually wise to discard a row of seedlings where germination has been poor in a small area and start again with another freshly planted crop.
There are many items that goes into vegetable garden planning.
Below we have more articles on vegetable garden planning. So remember to achieve a beautiful vegetable garden you need to do a lot of vegetable garden planning, vegetable garden planning.
Easy Strawberry - It's easy growing strawberries in your garden. Find out how! ArticlesChoosing Vegetables Druring Your Vegetable Garden Planning Gardening Zones
To see a USDA plant hardiness zone map, please click on the link above.
|
The garden should also be separated into portions, so that different types of vegetables can be grown in different areas each year in rotation. In this way the soil will not become exhausted of any particular nutrient, nor will you promote disease or pests to remain in the soil to feed a second year on a favored host plant.
You will need to judge the different times of planting during your vegetable garden planning phase, rates of growth and size at maturity of your main crop vegetables, and then put in a quick-maturing crop before all the ground and light is used up.
