Planning and Planting Your Vegetable Garden – What Is Important Before You Begin
December 24, 2011 Categories: Gardening
Spring is just around the corner, if you’re planting vegetable gardens, it’s important you plan it with a good layout. In other words, the planting space that you are going to use needs to be capitalized on so that you can grow as many vegetables as doable in the space that you have.
So before beginning to till your garden space, you might want to try to decide what type of vegetables you are going to grow. That way, you can plan on growing fast growing vegetables to shade those that don’t need as much sun, and even possibly plant double rows for those that mature a bit later. Making these decisions now before you start to plant can grant you to maximize your garden space.
Take a bit of time and research the type of vegetables you’re going to be growing. In other words, you’ll want to know what type of soil they like, whether they need shade or full sun, how often to water, and the ideal growing time. You’ll also want to check in your area to make sure that you’re planting at the right time, certain vegetables needs a certain temperature in order to grow effectively, so you’ll need to make sure that you’re planting at the right time in the season.
There are several different layouts you can use in order to plan your garden. Some of them are rather fun, so perhaps this year instead of planting in rows you can try the potager style.
Of course, most people are simply row garden planters; they will plant all of their vegetables in a row. This is an effective way to weed, water, and grow your vegetables.
Another type of planting is using beds. Actually, this can be an extremely effective way of planting a garden as it can grant you to reach through to the plants without stepping on your bedding. You make trails through your bedding areas, and this can grant you to take care of your garden very effectively and you can select raised beds, or in the ground style beds as well.
If you’re interested in having a bit of fun with your garden layout, you might select what the French describe as a kitchen garden, known as potager. Basically, you’ll be healthy to use geometric shapes to lay out your garden. It might mean laying your garden in circles, hexagons, and you can even hold your plants by food type, or color. Such as planting all of your salad food in one area, or perhaps planting all of your berries and fruits in another.

My suggestion for laying out the garden is to leave wide enough rows access the plants and do your weeding in the way YOU want. If you have a hard time bending over and will be using one of the garden scooter seats, leave row space for it. We use this wheel cultivator that does a 10″ pass really easily – so we make 18″ paths for it so we can push it up the left side then down the right side to finish the whole path (with a little overlap).