Hobbies And Pastimes

It’s important to emphasize that you need to draw a plan of your vegetable garden first. When doing this, always leave space to get at your vegetables for harvesting and maintenance. You’ll also find that drawing your plan to scale will be a great help in allowing you to decide where your vegetables are to be planted. You will make excellent use of the space you have available by doing this.

Now you need to make some decisions about what you’d like to grow. Make a list of your choices while keeping in mind what’s readily available from your local plant nursery. Try to avoid any unusual vegetables, they can often be expensive, hard to get or hard to grow.

Now go back to your garden map and decide what plants go where. The importance of a good plan is to avoid any problems as your plants start to grow, so plan carefully. It’s also important to follow your plan closely.

You should study your plants carefully. Some vegetables will need a lot of sun, and some will require more shade. It’s very important to be sure you’re planting all of your vegetables in areas where they’ll grow well.

If space is a problem, here’s one simple way to fully utilize the area you’re able to use. This method is widely used in France. As an example, if you have carrots and spinach on your list you simply mix together a packet of each.

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.

In about four weeks you will be able to start harvesting your young spinach which in turn allows your carrots the space to grow. You’ll have a good crop of juicy carrots by the time your spinach harvest is finished.

Another illustration would be parsley or lettuce with radishes. This system can be used with lots of vegetables that mature at different times. Early varieties of radish sown with turnips and lettuce is often done in France.

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.

This is to ensure that the taller plants don’t block the sunlight from reaching shorter plants. Corn is the tallest plant that is normally grown in vegetable gardens, so it should always be placed where it won’t block sunlight from other 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.

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!