Planning and Planting your Vegetable Garden
Here is where you’ll find tips for planning what goes where in your vegetable garden. At the end of the day, if it feels right to you do it! There are more than a million variables to ones garden including but not limited to: sunlight, soil, bugs, animals, children, slope, water, there’s just a lot. So with the question in mind, “what do I plant together? Will some plants harm other plants? What plants are friends and which ones aren’t?” here is my guide to planning and planting your Vegetable Garden.
Small or big, any garden is better than none.
Tomatoes and Basil… what’s the deal?
The deal is that fragrant, smelly herbs and flowers like Basil but also Chives, Garlic and Marigolds deter certain garden bugs that feast on tender, new growth like aphids. This isn’t to say that you must plant basil if you plant tomatoes or that if you plant marigolds anywhere it must be near tomatoes. It’s an opportunity for a symbiotic relationship that you can take or leave.
Rotation is important
If you’ve been planting your tomatoes in the same spot in the same soil for several years and your blight or hookworms are getting worse… that means it’s time to stop planting your tomatoes there. You’ve basically been training hungry bugs and fungus to come back again and again for the same meal. Rotating your placement of plants yearly is paramount to keeping certain problem bugs and diseases away. Outside of pest management, rotation is really important for the distribution of nutrients. Some vegetables add nitrogen to the soil (like beans) while others take it away (like corn or cabbage). Take notes of where you planted what each year and try different combinations!
Tall things, crawly things
Say you have a 3x6 raised bed (very common). If you want to grow tall upright things like corn and okra, consider planting them on your north end (northern hemisphere). Plant smaller bushier things like bush beans, lettuce, kale, etc. on the south end of your garden. This way the tall guys don’t block the sun from the shorter guys. If you want to grow pumpkins, melon or squash, plant them near the edge of your bed and allow them to crawl over the side to rest on the ground where you can put down some cardboard and/or hay or mulch. Provide a trellis for your pole beans or cucumbers to crawl up to save ground space and you can do the same thing for smaller squash, melons or pumpkins. Caging your tomatoes and trimming them continuously throughout the season will keep them from taking over.
Placement matters
Cucumbers like a little less sun than peppers, so plant cucumbers in the shadier areas and peppers in the sunnier areas. Tomatoes require a lot of water so if your garden is on a slope, plant them at the lower end so they can get a little more water. Pumpkins and melons like to crawl down slopes so same thing, if your garden has a slope, guide your crawling veggies down the hill. Even if you’re a novice gardener, take into account when the veggies are ready to harvest, what their heat/water/sun needs are, plant taller plants on the north end and shorter plants on the south end to keep the tall plants from blocking the sun. And also RELAX! Have fun! You’re going to have some amazing successes and some miserable failures. This is normal because nature does not provide guarantees.
