What you need to grow a perfect vegetable garden

August 24, 2009 by The Gardener
Filed under Gardening

While deciding to create your home vegetable garden, it is necessary to rubbish the idea that such concepts are meant for the ugly ’patch’ in the backyard. In fact, with proper care and meticulous planning in the planting of the plants, your home vegetable garden can outsmart any other creative garden. In fact, with a harmonious scheme, the home garden can be extremely welcoming which can look more beautiful that any shrub, borders or flower bed.

Growing a vegetable garden need not be restricted to the backyard or a site which is out of site, behind the barn etc. Of course, if space is a limiting factor, then you have to make do with whatever space you can. Before you start, remember that there are essentially two factors to be kept in mind when it comes to the site. Exposure and convenience are the two important considerations – the details of which will follow shortly. By convenience it would mean that convenience of accessing the garden, the convenience of keeping an eye over it, etc.

One of the most important considerations for a home vegetable garden is the aspect of ‘exposure to sun’. Look out for sites which slope slightly towards the south or the east. If you want vegetables all summer and for many years, go for this site as it gets sun light early on the day and hold on to it till late. When the site is out of the way of northern and northeast winds, the better it is for your garden. Consider yourself lucky if there is a building or even a fence along wide which protects your garden from these cold blizzards. You can then expect an early start for your garden and successful years ahead. In case you are not already bless with such structures, you could construct a board fence, a hedge of some low height shrubs or young evergreens for offering protection. This important aspect of offering winter protection is often overlooked by the amateur gardener.

It is highly likely that you will not find a suitable area with the right soil for your garden., but even the worst quality of soil can be brought up to the desired standards especially when it is as small as a home vegetable garden. Remember that large tracts of sandy soil or even those filled with muck which has not been cleared for centuries have all been brought to standard levels after reasonable amount of soil treatment. So there is no point in worrying about your soil quality – as any quality of soil can be ‘brought up’ to desired standards. In fact, some of the ‘treated’ soil yields better quality of vegetables and flowers than even the highest grade of soils with average method of cultivation.

The perfect soil for vegetable gardening is a type called ‘rich sandy loam’. For your information, these types of soil do not happen naturally, but have to be made. Let us now discuss the four important ingredients required for vegetable cultivation – one of which is soil; the others are cultivation, moisture and temperature. When a gardener refers to a soil type as “rich”, it means that the soil is rich in food. But what kind of food does the soil have? Rich soil will contain foods which are readily available in the soil from where plants draw vital nutrients immediately after plantation. This means ready, available, and good quality food. That in short is a ‘rich’ soil.

Interestingly no soil in an area which has been inhabited for long by humans remains ‘naturally’ rich for too long. It should be made or kept rich. This can be attained in two ways: by cultivation where the soil ingredients are brought into available form and the other is by adding manure and other nutrients to the soil to make it rich.

When you talk about a ‘sandy’ soil, it means, as the name suggests, that the soil contains particles small enough for water to seep through without making the soil muddy or sticky, after rain. Sandy soil, if you hold it in your hands, should be able to fall through just as sand passes through. It is not apparent through appearance, but sandy soil should be friable.

Loam, according to Webster is a ‘rich friable soil”. In fact to understand it better, a loamy soil is where the proportion of sand and clay are in the right amount so that neither of the two components dominates the overall quality. Such a soil, even to the untrained eye, looks welcoming as if things can grow in it. A well cultivated land will show up immediately through a change in its appearance. A recent experience comes to mind when I saw an onion field which was created only on a fine strip of land. The rest of it was not even given any extra manure or any other fertilizer. But the entire field started to look gorgeous once the ground was plowed in the fall season.

Darren Williger is a tea drinking, guitar playing, meditating, wine making sales maker who writes for MiniGarden.com, RoseMaven.com, and HomemadeWine.com.