Planning a Vegetable Garden

If you've ever wanted to grow your very own garden vegetables, you can. It's fairly simple to create your very own vegetable garden in almost any sized yard, or even in containers. The first step to successful vegetable gardening though is proper planning.

Planning a vegetable garden is an important step, because it will help ensure you get the most of your vegetable gardening efforts, and make the most of the gardening space you have available. Planning a vegetable garden is not difficult though, so we'll go through an overview of each step here for you.

1. Which variety of vegetables do you want to grow? Knowing which vegetables you want to grow in your garden is the first step in planning. There's really no use planting things you will not use yourself, unless you plan to give vegetables away or sell them.

Most people start vegetable gardens for their own personal use though. And starting simple and small is usually best, so try selecting five to ten of your family's favorite vegetables to get started with, and then you can grow from there each year.

2. In what location will your garden be placed? The location of your vegetable garden is an important decision that needs to be made in the planning stage. Not only do you need to plan for enough room to grow all the vegetables you want in your garden, but you also need to plan the space based on how much sunlight it gets throughout the day, and how easy it will be to get water to the garden.

Most vegetable gardens need at least five hours of sunlight each day in order to grow abundant amounts of healthy produce. If you don't plan the location well, you may end up with no vegetables to harvest from your garden because there's not enough sunlight or water for the plants to grow.

Since you planned your vegetables already in the first step of this process, you should have a good idea of how much sun and water each of them will need. And this in turn will help you with planning the location for your vegetable garden.

3. How large or small will your garden be? This ties in closely with planning the location of your vegetable garden, because you must make sure you have enough space for the amount of vegetables you intend to grow.

When creating an outdoor vegetable garden, you generally plant your vegetables in rows which are space eight to twelve inches apart. So if you've chosen to start with five different vegetables, that could mean you'll have five rows all with about one foot of space between them. In other words, you'd need to plan for your vegetable garden to taking up at least eight feet in one direction. If you plan to keep your rows short, you may only need two to four feet in the other direction. But planning this is essential to making sure you have enough room for your vegetable garden.

If you plan to create a container vegetable garden, space will be important here too. You may need to buy several pots of various sizes, in order to have room for all the vegetables you plan to grow.

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