Growing & Designing Your First Vegetable Garden: Beginning Gardening

Growing fruit or vegetables in your backyard (or front yard) can supplement your food budget for you and your family, as well as provide the self-confidence and outdoor therapy that comes from growing your own food.

Giving some thought to this list of planning questions will set you up for success, even if you are starting a vegetable garden from scratch.

Jump to: Planning your Garden Space | Prepping the Garden Area | How Much to Plant | Growing Vegetables in Pots

Step #1: Take Stock of Your Personal Needs

You can’t control the climate, and while you can amend the soil or shade your plants with shade-cloth, the selection of what to grow is the main thing you have control over.

Here are some key questions to ask when starting from scratch:

• What do you like to eat?
• Are you growing for interest or subsistence?
• Do you want to extend the season and grow in the shoulder seasons (early Spring and late Fall/Winter). This will require getting some knowledge on a variety of short season and long season plants
• What are the main limitations of your growing area (space, sun or soil are usually the big 3)

Step #2: Decide on Location

Once you have decided what you would like to grow, the first consideration you must address is the location of your garden. Trying to grow certain plants in the wrong location will be an exercise in frustration, so you may have to hone your list of “wants”.

B) Water:

Letting the rain naturally water your gardens is wonderful, but rain clouds don’t adhere to our schedule. Make sure your location has access to water.

Growing fruit and vegetables in small spaces often means you will be growing in containers. For container growing, you need to be prepared to water often, sometimes more than once a day.

Some gardeners have rigged up self-watering systems, and some will use sprinklers. If you are watering containers by hand, be sure you have thought out how you will get water to your plants. Carrying large buckets of water from the house to the containers is not fun.

Exposure to strong winds is another consideration around watering. Wind causes the plants to dry out more quickly, especially if your home is in a wind tunnel. Use protection over vulnerable young plants if you are in a windy area.

C) Soil Considerations:

Healthy soil will not only allow you to achieve more fruit and vegetables from your garden, but it will make your plants more resistant to pests and diseases. The ideal soil is one that retains moisture and nutrients well, but drains freely (i.e., loam)

Many urban soils are either heavy clay or sand, which means you will need to amend the soil before planting. All soil types can be improved by adding organic matter (i.e., compost) to the soil. This will increase drainage in the clay soils and improve moisture and nutrient retention in the sandy soils.

Well-rotted organic matter (manure or compost from the recycling center) can be dug in to your garden soil and then also laid on the surface as a mulch. The mulch will allow nutrients to slowly drip into the soil and it will keep weeds down.

You can get your soil sampled with a kit that is usually available from your city municipality or a garden center. It will give you a lot of information on your soil type, including whether your soil is acidic or alkaline. Most vegetables prefer slightly acidic soil.

If your soil isn’t good for what you want to grow, you may want to consider growing in pots or in a raised bed instead.

D) A Few other limitations:

Trees and Shrubs: Avoid planting too close to any tree or shrub roots. The roots will take up a lot of water and nutrients from the soil leaving little for the vegetable plants. Tree roots also leave pockets of air in the soil which is not good for small plants looking to make contact with the nutrients in the soil.

Hard Surfaces: Sidewalks and rooftops are nonabsorbent surfaces that allow water to run off of them, this can cause flooding or pooling of water in the nearby soil. If plants are left in standing water too long they can develop root rot, which will stunt their growth and production

Nonporous surfaces can also trap in heat. (Examples are asphalt, concrete, stone, brick.) This can be beneficial if the weather has been cooler, these surfaces will absorb the heat and release it back out warming the area around the vegetables. On the other hand, the extra warm could also dry out the garden and provide too much heat for good growth.

Preparing Your Garden Space

Preparing a space for your urban vegetable garden may require some extra work, but preparation is key for a successful garden.

Before laying out your garden space and planning where your seedlings will go, consider the following:

Timing: The best time of year to prepare a garden bed is in the fall of the season before. This gives the soil time to recover if it is an older garden, and/or to absorb the nutrients from organic matter that you have added.

However, this can be done in the spring time as well, but know that there might be more weeding involved through the growing season if the soil was not prepared the previous fall.

Grass and weeds: There are a few different ways to remove grass and weeds, but the quickest is to simply use a spade to cut down vertically into the root system a few inches, and then positioning the spade parallel to the ground, slice below the surface taking up the grass and most of the roots.

Large Rocks or Roots: As you dig into the yard you may come across large rocks or roots that need to be removed. These large objects can impede the roots of your vegetable plants from establishing. Take care and remove what can be taken out. If there are too many large rocks or roots then a different location might be necessary.

Fencing: If deer and rabbits or other animals enjoy spending time in your yard then a fence might be necessary. Plant loving animals can plow through a garden in no time, eating all the leaves off your plants hindering any growth or production.

Deer can jump most fences, so in our small farm we have fenced in 5 acres and have a farm dog that loves to chase deer. The fence keeps the dog in and the dog keeps the deer out. Rabbits can be deterred with chicken wire fencing.

Raised Bed: If the soil you have is no good for raising vegetables because either the PH balance is all wrong or there are too many obstacles in creating a clean bed, then a raised bed might be the option. In a raised bed you can control the contents of the soil more easily. Weeds also do not appear as much in a raised bed, making weeding the garden less of an ordeal.

Encroaching Invasive Plants: Many yards can have invasive plants that creep into the garden bed, such as Creeping Charlie. Creating a barrier at the edge of your garden bed can help to divert the plants from spreading and choking out your plants. You can find various barriers at you local garden center. Look for something that works with your budget and skill levels. This does not have to a fancy barrier, something simple can get the job done.

Ready to Plant:

Limited Garden Space: Growing Plants in Pots

If your yard space is limited, you may have more success by growing vegetables in pots. Pots can be placed in various locations, such as: decks, patios, driveways, steps, or any flat surface that gets adequate sunlight.

Not every vegetable plant does well in a pot, so you will have to be selective. When selecting a pot, choose one that has the right depth and width for the plant. Read the seed labels. Soil tends to dry out more quickly in pots because of wind than in the ground, so watch closely because hand watering more often might be necessary.