Vegetable Gardens: Planning Ahead for a springtime Cornucopia
You`ve finally decided to just say no to wax -and pestide- embalmed grocery store produce and grow your own vegetables. Now is the time to gather information, assemble and clean your gardening tools, and decide what you want to plant. With forethhought, even the smallest spot of land can produce an abundant harvest.
Gardening methods
The first step is to assess your available space. Whatever spot you choose should receive at least 6 to 8 hours of sunlight per day. If you don`t have a backyard but do have a small terrace or patio, consider container gardening, a popular choice for small-space gardeners. Almost any containers will do, from large pots and barrels to coffeecans or milk cartons. Snow peas grow well in hanging baskets and strawberry pots are perfect for raising herbs.
Vertical vegetable gardening, a relatively recent phenomenon, allows space-hungry gardeners to take advantages of walls and other vertical space. A “vegetable tree” can be built by attaching a half-circle of chicken wire or concrete reinforcing wire, lined with black plastic, all along a 3-foot-long 2”x12” board (the pieces of chicken wire and plastic should be about 20 inches wide and the length of the board). Fill the resulting half-cylinder with planting mix, then slit the plastic at intervals and insert vegetable seedlings. As they grow, the seedlings will turn the “tree” into a coloumn of greenery.
Raised beds, which should be at least 12 inches deep, work well on patios or over especially poor soil. Railroad ties are ideal for enclosing the gardening area, but you can also use stones or bricks. Maintenance is especially easy with this method, because if the beds are placed away from walls, all plantings are within reach of one of the sides.
Space planning and vegetable selection
Once you`ve selected a gardening method, it`s time to plan what you`re going to plant where. Use graph paper to draw out what you want the garden to look like, keeping it simple if you`re a beginner. A rule of thumb is one square for every foot of gardening space.
Some vegetable grow especially well next to each other, offering shade or discouraging insects. Beans do well with corn, parsley with onions, and radhises with anything. Place quickly maturing vegetables together to better facilitate crop rotation. You should also be aware of the nutrient demands vegetables make on the soil. Some plants -artichokes and celery, for example- are heavy feeders and will deplete the soil, while others, namely beans and peas, enhance it. Placing plants with similar nutrient needs together makes fertilizing easier.
Soil
Container gardeners can buy soilless potting mix or mix their own growing elements. If you are working in your backyard, however, you`ll probably have to do some soil amendment; few soils are naturally ready to grow vegetables.
There are three basic kinds of soil; clay, sand and loam. Silt is an intermediate category between clay and sand. Clay is made up of small, flat particles packed very tightly together. It is slow to drain, and tends to prevent air penetration. Sand has much larger particles that allow water and ait to pass through easily -often too easily, leaching nutrients away.
Silt particles are larger than clay and smaller than sand. They tend to pack closely together like clay and usually lack nutrients. Loam, a mixture of clay, silt, sand and humus, allows air to circulate and drains well, yet not so quickly that it depletes nutrients supplies. Your soil is probably a mixture of these elements, leaning either toward clay or sand.
To make your soil nourishing, it is important to add organic matter -compost, peat moss, manure, sawdust or bark. Test the soil`s pH while you are still planning your garden; its acidity or alkalinity will make a different in how your plants grow. Home test kits are relatively accurate. Professional labs can be located through nurseries, but their tests can be costly. Some college agriculture programs offer testing for a small fee.
