The Easy Vegetable Garden Method

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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.

Sit down and write a list of the vegetables you would like to grow. A couple of tips here... 1. Check your local area and only list the vegetables that are easy to obtain. 2. Resist any temptation to list any rare, exotic vegetables. They will be hard to get, expensive and even harder 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.

While you're still in the planning stage, study your vegetable choices to find out what each plant needs. Some prefer full sunlight, others will want part shade and then there are the ones that require full shade. Doing this will help you to decide on the positioning of your plants to give you the best possible harvest.

What if you have limited space? The French have an ingenious way of making full use of a small vegetable garden. You plant fast and slow growing vegetables together. This simply means that you mix something like packets of spinach and carrot seeds with each other.

Then you'd make a 1/2 inch deep furrow in a row and sow the mixture of the two seeds into that furrow and cover. The spinach will grow quickly and open up the soil so the carrot seeds can germinate better.

In about four weeks, you can start to harvest some spinach to thin it, making room for the slower growing carrots. By the time the carrots start to reach maturity, the spinach will be completely used up, and the carrots will have plenty of room to grow.

This method can successfully be used for many different types of vegetables. Radishes can be planted well with lettuce or parsley, for example. The French will often sow early radish varieties with lettuce and turnips all at the same time.

The quickest growers are the radishes, which will be exhausted before the lettuce are mature enough to be harvested. Likewise the turnips will be ready to pull up by the time the lettuce are just about finished. Also, if your rows of plants are in an east-west pattern, you need to sow your tallest plants to the north side of these rows. This is to make sure that your shorter plants don't get shaded by 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.

Of course the reverse of this can be useful if you're wanting to grow vegetables that prefer dappled sunlight or shade. You can be imaginative and make use of larger plants to shade these smaller ones. A case in point would be to grow a tall row of peas or beans to provide shade for a cool climate vegetable like spinach.

This could help you grow shade-loving vegetables in your garden, even if you don't have any shady spots available. By being creative with placement, you might be able to grow vegetables you never thought you'd be able to grow in your location!
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