Advice If You're Planning a Vegetable Garden

There's nothing more enjoyable than eating your own vegetables, freshly picked from your garden, bursting with flavour and goodness.

With a bit of planning, you can really increase your chances of success and look forward to bumper crops.

Here's some ideas you might find helpful.

Track Sunlight Levels

See which parts of the garden get the most sun. A successful vegetable garden needs around 6 hours of sunlight a day. Put the plants that need the most light in the sunniest spots.

Plan Before You Dig!

It's much easier to get things right first time if you plan on paper. Make a sketch of the area you want to use the check out factors like water, sunlight, soil conditions, then plan which plants you want to put next to each other. This way you can ensure you get better resuults.

Don't Fight The Seaons

Having to protect plants planted out too early is a lot of work, and requires some investment in protective cloches and so on. You can grow vegetables all year round, just pick the plant to suit the prevailing conditions so you work with nature, not against it.

TIP: Don't plant out your seedlings when there is still a danger of frosts.

Don't Buy Unnecessary Equipment

Vegetable gardening can be very cheap. The essential equipment is a shovel or spade, fork, hoe, rake, trowel and some effort on your part. It's easy to get sucked into buying specialized equipment, special fertilizers and more. Try not to spend much on these things, otherwise the cost-savings you get from growing lots of food from a small investment in seeds is undermined.

Improve Your Soil

It is worth investing some money on a good seedling compost, since putting in strong, heathly seedlings helps you to grow a better crop.

You may choose to improve the soil by adding some commercial fertilizer, organic matter and lime.

Keep Watering Regularly

If you don't water your plants sufficiently, they dehydrate, wilt and become damaged. Whilst you can water them again and they look healthy again, a small amount of damage still remains.

You might want to consider and automated watering system, based on a timer and a mechanism to deliver the water such as a soaker hose or micro-sprinklers, if you are worried you might overwater or underwater your plants, or perhaps not water at all when you go on vacation.

Harvesting

Pick the right time to harvest, not too soon or your crop will be too small, or might need time to ripen. Also, don't let things remain on the plan too long, or they will deteriorate in quality as the plants go to seed.

Unwelcome Guests

There are many biological, chemical and physical protection products that can help you keep your plants safe. It's important to keep an eye on any pests that might pray on your plants.

If you've found this useful, why not check out some more of my gardening articles.