Growing your own vegetables
right in your backyard can be very rewarding. Here's how to
get started.
Before you plant a single seed, you have to choose the ideal
site for the vegetable garden. Luckily, vegetable gardens
don't require a lot of space - you can even grow veggies out
of containers.
These three elements are important for every vegetable
garden:
Sunshine
Water
Good soil
Avoid areas that are covered in shade most of the day. Your
vegetables will need at least 6 hours of sunshine every day
to grow strong and healthy. A garden near a convenient water
source will make your life easy because watering will be at
your fingertips. Good soil has a consistency between
rock-hard clay and loose sand. But if your soil is less than
ideal, don't worry - bad soil can be fixed rather easily.
If you've never set up a vegetable garden before, create a
small garden to begin with. A garden you can control, no
matter how small, will yield more produce than a large one
that has gone wild.
What should you grow?
Beginners often get overly excited and attempt to grow a
wide variety of vegetables in one garden, but this can get
you into trouble. The best way to get started is to grow the
food you enjoy eating that is easy to grow and the most
productive. Tomatoes, lettuce, radishes, peppers, snap peas,
green onions, summer squash, and green beans are some of the
best vegetables to grow at home. Stay away from vegetables
such as corn, which requires too much space to grow and
offers a low yield, asparagus, which takes two years to
start growing, and green peas, which don't grow abundantly.
Read through garden catalogs to get ideas for what
vegetables to grow and create a list of potential candidates
for your garden. Grow a few varieties of the same vegetable
so that if one doesn't do too well, you'll have a few plants
to fall back on. In the following seasons you can learn from
your mistakes and grow only the plants that did well in the
previous year.
When choosing plants to grow, read the descriptions because
some varieties produce small plants and others produce large
ones. There are even some varieties bred to be disease
resistant. In the end, your selections should be based on
the type of garden you plan on growing. |
