Making a Kitchen Garden, Live Plant Vegetable and Herb

Your kitchen garden can be as simple as a few herbs in pots outside your back door, or a proper vegetable and herb garden.

The type of garden you choose will depend upon the space you have available, the amount of sun it gets, the time you have to spend in the garden, and to a certain extent, your own taste in food. A small-scale kitchen garden could perhaps consist of a few herbs and some tomatoes, lettuce and carrots.

Sitting the garden

You’ll need a spot close to the kitchen which gets plenty of sun (at least two-thirds of the day) and is protected from strong winds. Border your site with bricks, stones or logs and dig in a good quality organic material such as compost or well-rotted manure. Special attention to soil condition at this stage will repay you handsomely later on.

The compost heap

Starting a compost heap is easy. Heap your lawn clippings, stray leaves and vegetable waste from the kitchen into a pile, keep it moist and regularly turned and when it has broken down scatter it over your garden to provide organic material which will replenish the soil.

Succession planting

The key to providing enough vegetables for your family over the whole growing season is succession planting. If you sow too many seeds at the one time you’ll have a glut of vegetables and then nothing. Plant only six vegetables every fortnight, selecting varieties with different maturing dates. Seedpackets and labels will often indicate ‘early’, ‘mid-season’ or `late’. This way you will have new plants coming on as the older ones mature.

lntercropping

This is particularly useful when space is a problem. The idea is to plant two vegetables close together — tall slender growers such as onions or leeks can be interspersed with compact growers such as lettuce and radish. Or lettuce and spinach can be grown with tomatoes — the leaf vegetables will mature before the tomatoes overshadow them. If you plant radishes close to carrots, the radishes will mature first and help to loosen the soil.

Crop rotation

The principle is that a crop of light feeding plants should follow a crop of heavy feeders.

A kitchen garden can be as simple as a few herbs in pots

This maintains soil texture and fertility and controls pests and diseases at the same time. Leaf crops such as lettuce and spinach, which use plenty of nitrogen, should be followed by root crops such as carrots and radishes, which do not. Peas and beans return nitrogen to the soil and raise trace elements from lower layers which can be used by surface rooting vegetables. Do not plant members of the same family in the same spot in successive years.

Companion planting

This is planting one particular vegetable or herb with another for their mutual benefit. For example, basil planted close to tomatoes deters the white fly which transmits fungal diseases. Garlic keeps aphids and red spider mites away from tomatoes but should not be planted close to peas, beans, cabbages and strawberries. Marigolds prevent root-rotting bacteria and nasturtiums are a useful general insect repellent.

This kind of organic gardening gives many benefits:

• It prevents the soil degradation that comes from too- frequent use of chemical fertilisers.
• Beneficial soil organisms, such as worms and bacteria will thrive, aerating the soil and preventing diseases.
• Natural predators such as birds will rid the garden of pests. At the same time as helping the environment, you get fresh, healthy vegetables and herbs.

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)
Making a Kitchen Garden, Live Plant Vegetable and Herb

• Help with Wildlife
• My Favorite Beauty Flowers: Tansy
• Garden Plants Companion Planting (Herbs and Vegetables)
• Gardeners Many Uses of Herbs to Serve with Food
• Plants and Environment part 3
• Planting Green Vegetables, A Flash of Green Garden
• The Herb Garden
• Planning a Herb Garden, Growing Herbs Yourself
• Plant a Tree or Climber for Wildlife
• Alkanet