Growing your own vegetables may be quite rewarding, regardless of whether you want to employ raised beds, vertical gardening methods, or any other method. If you have never tried growing your own veggies before, why don’t you begin with one that you really like eating? It’s possible that knowing you cultivated it yourself will make you appreciate it even more.
Planning a Garden
Planning is the first stage in the creation of any garden. This is particularly important to keep in mind while tending a vegetable garden, where plants such as squash, melons, and others may quickly reach enormous sizes. You’ll have to make sure there’s enough room for them to expand as they become older. Additionally, in order to keep the fruit from decaying, plants such as peppers, tomatoes, melons, and a few other types of plants need additional room for air circulation.
Take a close look at the area that you have available for gardening. Is there any shade, or is there just sunlight here? When grown in the shadow, beets, carrots, and lettuce fare far better than peppers or tomatoes. Consider how long it takes each plant to reach its full maturity as well. A technique known as succession planting, in which one plants a crop of spinach in the spring and then another crop of peppers in the summer, is one way to get more veggies out of the same amount of area.
It may seem silly, but you should cultivate foods that your family likes eating together. Why bother planting rows of something that won’t be consumed by your family if everyone in it detests kale to the core? Since I am not a fan of spaghetti squash but my kid is, I do not bother cultivating it but instead purchase a few of it at the local farmer’s market when it is in season. If you have children, you should let them have some input on the design of the garden. Growing peas from seed might be a gratifying experience for a youngster who enjoys eating them, especially if they start from scratch. One of the children could not be a fan of veggies, but after growing their own carrots, they might change their mind and give them a try. If it weren’t for the fact that he saw brussels sprouts develop throughout the course of the summer before we ate them, my kid would have never eaten them.
When creating a vegetable garden, one of the rules to follow is to avoid growing too many plants. If you have a household of four, it is unlikely that you will need twenty zucchini plants unless you want to make money off of the surplus or trade with a neighbor. Plant an amount equal to what you anticipate consuming. Grow a greater quantity of cucumbers than you anticipate using for fresh consumption if you want to ferment them into pickles. However, if you do not have a method for preserving a vegetable or if you do not have room to preserve it, you should only sow the seeds for the vegetables that you will be able to consume while they are still fresh.
Raised Vegetable Gardens
There are several advantages to growing plants on raised beds. In general, the soil is looser, which results in improved drainage. Within elevated gardens, gardeners are less prone to stroll, which reduces the likelihood of soil compaction. It may be possible for the soil in elevated gardens to warm up more quickly in the spring, resulting in an earlier window of opportunity for planting.
There are many different materials that may be used to construct the walls of raised gardens. To create a boundary around the space, you may use basic logs, wooden planks, pebbles or huge stones, a dry-stacked wall of flagstone, or even larger stones. Any raised garden you build need to be of a size that allows you to weed, grow, and harvest your crops without ever having to set foot on the ground underneath the garden.
Even if you do not have the resources necessary to construct walls, you may still make a raised garden by using the lasagna gardening method. Put down several layers of newspaper on the ground, and then make sure it gets enough water. This is the first layer that you will place down in your garden to assist prevent the growth of weeds. The next step is to construct a mulch pile on the newspapers. Utilize recently cut grass, manure that has had enough time to decompose, finely chopped fallen leaves, leftovers of vegetables from your kitchen, and a little amount of wood ash. You have the option of either letting this elevated area rest through the winter and planting in the spring of the following year, or you may put nice loamy topsoil on top and start planting right away. In any case, you won’t have to be concerned about the edges (but, tight fencing is probably a good idea when rabbits abound).
