Creating a Sensible Vegetable Garden Design
Creating a sensible vegetable garden design should be done before you even lift the shovel. A good vegetable garden design should provide the essentials: sunlight, space, and ease of maintenance. In a sensible vegetable garden design, all the plants are exposed to at least five hours of sunlight every day; there should be no crowding so that each plant has room to grow. Finally, a good vegetable garden design makes it easier to maintain the growing area in tiptop shape. In this post, we provide you with pointers on creating a sensible vegetable garden design.
Vegetable Garden Design Tips
1. Measure out the space allotted for your vegetable garden. Know the growing conditions required by the crops you intend to plant. Researching about the planting season and the best growing conditions for each plant is crucial to your vegetable garden design.
2. Group your crops according to the height they grow into. The lowest growing crops should be placed at the south end of the garden, which has the best exposure to sunlight. Lowest growing vegetables include onions, lettuce, beets, carrots and radishes.
3. The medium-growing vegetables such as cabbage, cauliflower, tomatoes, green peppers, squash and broccoli should be planted in the middle of the garden.
4. Pole beans, corn and peas, all of which grow very tall, should be planted in the north end of the garden. That way, they will not shade the other vegetable plants.
Aside from planning your vegetable garden design to ensure the correct distribution of sunlight, you should also make the best use of your space, especially if you only have a small area to work with. Upright trellises should be installed for plants that could climb, like gourds. This would free up a lot of space on the ground for the other vegetables.
If you would be planting crops in beds, do not make the beds so large that you would have t o stretch a lot just to be able to reach the plants in the middle. Planting beds that are just three to four feet across would be best, so that you can reach across the middle quite easily from both sides.
Also, be aware of how much time it would take before your vegetables would be ready for harvest. That way, you can plant them at the correct intervals. For example, if your goal is to have all the makings of a green salad, you can plant the vegetables which take the longest to grow first, such as carrots. By giving them a lead, they would be ready to harvest at the same time as your lettuce. On the other hand, planting crops with vegetable garden design which would bear fruit at different times all at once would make sure that you always have something available to harvest.
