How to Come Up With a Simple Vegetable Garden

How to Come Up With a Simple Vegetable Garden
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Have you ever considered having a kitchen garden? Most likely you’ve thought about it or you wouldn’t be here! If you’ve ever tasted a vine-ripened tomato, fresh from the vine and still warmed by the sun, then you may kitchen garden for the rest of your life. Believe it or not, growing your own vegetable garden with high yields of this is possible.

Whether your space is ample or at a premium, you can grow your kitchen garden. Taking control of your own food supply by growing it is a smart move, however, if you’ve never grown food before it can be daunting. There’s so much to learn and as many things could potentially go wrong if ill-informed! Good planning is the key to good harvests. So let’s not waste time.  Here are practical and easy-to-follow tips to have you eating ripe, delicious, and beautiful veggies.

Step 1: Find Your Garden’s Vegetable-Growing Sweet Spot

Take time to walk around your garden just observing. Identify which areas get the most sun and which do not. Most crops, and particularly tender crops like tomatoes, prefer plenty of sun and warmth, so usually best to grow such vegetables in your sunniest spot. That’s not to say that shadier areas are completely out of bounds, no there are crops that will grow in partial shade too, for instance, lettuce and other leafy greens. Put in mind that the amount of sun and shade your garden receives will change as the year progresses.

The perfect spot for your vegetable garden should have some through-flow of air, which helps keep plants healthy, but is not a wide-open plain or in the path of a wind tunnel. Add windbreaks if you need to. Hedges are excellent windbreaks as they allow air to pass through while reducing the strength of the wind.

2. Map it out

To help you see how many seedlings you need, map your vegetable garden before planting. Remember to keep each bed productive all through the growing season. It’s a lot easier to get the right arrangement when you make clear plans ahead of time. And what’s interesting is that you don’t have to be an artist to do this. Just grab a square and a sheet of paper and start.

Map out different quadrants for different vegetables. Am assuming that you’re gardening by hand and not with a tractor, it’s usually easier to grow in beds narrow enough that you can reach into the center from different sides without having to step on the soil. This is not the time to be overly ambitious.

One of the most important yet commonly forgotten elements of a vegetable garden is good walkways. Hard materials such as slabs or gravel, surfaced with woodchip, sawdust or other bulky organic material can be used to make Paths. Widen the paths enough to enable you to reach all beds with a wheelbarrow on at least one side.

3. Preparing soil for a kitchen garden

Make sure your soil is up to scratch to get the best homegrown crops from your kitchen garden you need. It's important to test the pH levels of the soil in your vegetable garden. This will help you select crops to suit it. You can hire a professional or locally gets the soil testing kits. Soils are generally on a spectrum from clay to sand and may vary from place to place within your garden. Any soil can benefit from the addition of organic matter to retain moisture and nutrients.

Clay soil takes longer to warm up so suits later crops. Light soils are good for early vegetables but need compost manure in large quantities to avoid water draining away rapidly. The ideal soil for gardening is loose, crumbly loam, which absorbs and holds water and nutrients, very well aerated, and drains freely.

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