Vegetable Gardening Nursery Landscaping Guide
Vegetable Gardening Tips For Your Backyard
By Pixie Matthews
Local experts can be a great place to start your vegetable gardening
odyssey. You may not get the one-on-one garden advice you need
from a place like Home Depot, but local nursery store owners and
master gardeners are great sources of gardening information.
Be sure to visit the Farmer’s Almanac page to learn about your
local growing season and when the last frost is expected to arrive.
This can help you plan when you’ll begin your gardening season.
If you’re beginning in late spring or summer, there are still
a few quick-growing crops like lettuce and transplanted tomatoes
that you may be able to salvage.
Choose A Sunny Location
The first step in starting a vegetable garden is choosing the
right size and location. First, be sure your location is very,
very sunny. Most vegetables need a good six to eight hours of
direct sunlight each day for the best results. If you have a shadier
area, you can stick your spinach and lettuce there.
As you assess your yard, be sure to take into account the shade
cast by the deciduous trees and the house during certain times
of the day. Ideally, the garden will be conveniently situated
near the kitchen, so you can tend to it more easily and harvest
without hiking long distances.
A Well Draining Soil
The best soil will be full of nutrients and drain well, so you
may need to add organic compost and use garden tools to aerate
the soil before you begin.
A gardening expert will usually tell you that raised beds are
the best method for effective vegetable gardening. Garden guides
love raised beds because they increase the growing area by reducing
the amount of garden used for paths, they save fertilizer and
compost materials, they are easy and convenient to work with,
they work well with trellises, they are 12-15 degrees warmer than
the ground so you can plant earlier, and they are beautiful to
look at.
Creating Your Raised Garden Beds
To begin creating your raised beds, measure and stake down each
garden bed and outline the beds with string. To raise the bed,
loosen the soil with a shovel or fork and nestle your bed into
the plot. Smooth the soil on the surface of the bed with the tines
and back edge of a rake.
Take your time when shaping the beds, for this step is very important.
Each bed should rise eight inches above ground when all is said
and done and the most productive raised beds are about three feet
wide. You can line the beds with bricks, stones or wood, whichever
you prefer.
Over the years, you’ll begin to fine-tune your vegetable gardening.
You may find some crops do extraordinarily well, while others
are a flop. You may decide to add new veggies to the mix or plant
more of a certain crop that worked very well.
Try Interplanting With Quick Maturing Crops
Once your cool season crop finishes its season (like peas),
you can try planting a warm season crop (like zucchini). You may
also try a technique known as "interplanting," which
involves planting a quick-maturing crop like lettuce next to slow-growing
broccoli.
The idea is that you’ll harvest all your lettuce by the time
the broccoli is looking to stretch out. Try growing plants from
several different varieties to increase your chance of success
and to find the best performing types.
About the Author:
Pixie Matthews has written a number of articles on gardening and
landscaping including Organic
Vegetable Gardening, Organic
Vegetable Gardening Products, Organic
Vegetable Gardening Products, Composting,
Compost
Heap.
Keep a lookout for more of her articles on this website.
Little Known Gardening Facts....
When should I start my garden?
Most people erroneously think that gardening
has to start in late spring or summer. The fact is that most gardeners
actually start planning their garden out in the fall. You can
wait until planting season but you want to do some preliminary
work first.
If you want to start a flower garden then
you need to get some gardening tips immediately. Most bulbs such
as tulips and irises have to be started in the fall if you want
them to bloom by spring. So you first need to think about what
kind of garden you want to grow. There are endless possibilities
and much of it depends on your location.
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