Planning a Home Vegetable Garden

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When you become a vegetable gardener, you'll be educating yourself as to what you've been eating all this time.

Even the best supermarkets buy their produce from large farms that use chemical fertilizers, nasty pesticides and toxic herbicides in and around their plants—your food.

When you grow the vegetables that you feed to your family, you're in control of what you put in and on those veggies.

It's our hope that you'll grow them as purely as possible, with organic fertilizers and no pesticides.

Planning Your Garden

When planning a vegetable garden, determining what you want to grow is the first factor. What will your family eat and what do they like?

Start with a miniature garden and work your way up to a larger one after you gain knowledge, especially if you're a first-time gardener. Putting in a lot of work only to fail can easily discourage you from planting future gardens.

Build that knowledge and confidence. Consider planting just 3-5 different vegetables, your favorites, the first time. And be sure to involve the kids and spouse. Everyone will gain the feeling of contributing, and they'll be proud, knowing that they were able to grow some of their own food.

The next step is to determine where you want to place your garden on your property. Pick a space that will receive enough sunshine and enough room to spread the veggies so that they're not on top of each other. Almost all vegetables need 5-6 hours of sunshine each and every day.

If you're starting your first garden, you can get by with a space as small as 6' x 8' (1.80 meters x 2.4 meters).

Creating Your Vegetable Garden

Now that you've found the perfect location for your garden, decide whether you want to create a raised garden (which will sit on top of your yard) or till up the yard to create your garden.

You'll need some construction skills to build the raised garden. Or you'll need a rototiller to start your garden (you need to cut through and chop up sod and remove weeds).

Once you've created the garden, bring in a couple loads of compost. Mix it with the soil so that your vegetables will have a good start.

After creating the garden bed, section it off into rows or squares for planting. Since the sun crosses the sky from east to west, rows should also be east-west, so that all the plants will receive as much sunshine as possible.

Grow the tallest plants on the north side of the bed, and the shortest on the south side. This ensures that no plants are shading other plants of needed sunlight. (If you live south of the equator, put tall plants on the south side. If you live near the equator, it won't matter as much, since the sun is always high in the sky.)

Keep in mind that you don't have to grow only in two dimensions. As the photo at the top of the page shows, you can add trellises and supports and grow plants towards the sky as well. Tomatoes grow upwards quite well, when supported, and so will beans.

Follow the steps above and your first vegetable garden will be a roaring success. You may even have to give some zucchini to your neighbors!

From Home Vegetable Garden Plan to Gardens