Veggie Garden Day 3

Garden Tribe’s “Boot Camp”–mini course on veggie gardening  continues. So I’m continuing with my annotations. You can benefit from my signally pitiful failures. They say the key to success is learning from our failures, so I should be really successful. Oh, unless of course I didn’t actually learn…

Never mind, on with Day 3–Where to Plant.

My motivation as a designer is always to give people the tools to be proud of their labours. That inspires us to do more of the same. So what will it take to be proud of our vegetable garden? Making it as easy as possible, so you’re keen to get started, keep at it, see progress, get quick results, and finally, succeed!

1. How much space do you think you’ll need? If you haven’t done a lot of gardening before, don’t bite off more than you can chew (someone please give me a non-food metaphor!). Did you identify 25 vegetables you know you’ll eat? Short list 5 of them. The you can devote yourself to those five and really give them the best of your energies.

2. Now, what will the actual garden beds look like? If you want to plant up a bed that’s 10′ x 10′, you’ll have to build paths through it, thus losing planting space anyway. Better for the home garden to have beds that are no wider than you can reach. For me that’s 3′. I can reach 18″, and I have access on two sides, therefore a 3′ wide bed. If I plant veggies along the edge of a perennial or shrub border (I’m sure Garden Tribe will address that in future days), then I won’t go deeper into the bed than 18″–as far as I can comfortably reach.

3. Light. Usually you can expect to find vegetable gardens located in full sun. Here in coastal BC, even full sun isn’t strong sun, so you seldom have to worry about leaves burning by scorching rays. But the “at least 6 hours of direct sun” rule was meant to be broken. If you get direct sun for the middle 4 hours of the day (say 11 am to 3 pm, that will be as much real light (lumens?) as 6 hours 7 am to 1 pm. So for fruits and roots, definitely give them the most direct sunlight you can, but if there’s competition for the very few  square feet of the only really sunny spot you’ve got, try out less sunny spots for some of them and odds are you will still get some harvest. Potatoes for example are meant to like full sun, but I’ve recently read they’ll tolerate less than the best and still give you potatoes. Tomatoes on the other hand I wouldn’t mess with. They have a hard enough time ripening in our climate as it is without challenging them even further.

Don’t rule out your front yard for growing edibles. Many are really attractive at their best–like rhubarb, blueberries, many cabbages, swiss chard.

4. Access–to water and to the kitchen. I hate going out to pick kale leaves in the pouring rain, but if at least I don’t have to tramp through a lot of wet grass to get there, I’m more likely to actually do it. So anything that I expect to be harvesting during bad weather will be located closer to the back door. Or front door. You’ll also want to make sure water is close at hand (will Boot Camp be discussing drip irrigation I wonder?).

Stay tuned for Day 4…