Some people seem to grow their vegetables all mixed up together, while others keep them separate — sometimes even in special, built-up beds. What is the best method?
There are different ways of planting vegetables. You can dig over the entire site and then sow all the various vegetables in blocks of different sizes (depending on how many you need of each kind) with no clearly marked space between them. This works quite well if the vegetable garden is on a perfectly level site, but it does make proper crop rotation difficult.
Most gardeners find that it is better to have carefully marked-out beds in which the various vegetables are planted. These can be level with the ground or slightly raised — and they can be marked off into permanent beds with brick or concrete edges. It is always possible to change the size of the non-permanent beds if you want to grow a large number of one vegetable, while the permanent beds must always stay the same size. Clearly marked-out beds make crop rotation easier, as well as the application of compost and fertilizer — and not all vegetables need the same kind of soil preparation.
Soil for vegetables
My soil is poor and sandy. Will be able to grow vegetables successfully?
Your success will depend almost entirely on how much compost, manure and fertilizer you are prepared to add to your soil. Most vegetables can easily be grown in sandy soil — indeed, many root crops do better in slightly sandy soils than they do in very heavy ones. The best thing to do is to lay out permanent beds in your vegetable garden with the edges quite high above the ground — about 10-15 cm. You can then dig out some of the poor, sandy soil and fill the beds up with good soil and plenty of compost and manure, depending on the type of vegetables which you plan to grow. Perhaps you should start with the less fussy vegetables, such as root crops and spinach, and then go on to grow more demanding crops like brassicas as the fertility of the soil in the beds is built up.
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Greetings,
Thank you for creating such a wonderful Garden blog!
I wanted to let you know about a national campaign we are spearheading to help stimulate a national move towards growing more of our food closer to home. As you know, as the economic challenges continue to grow, more and more Americans are considering getting involved in local food production.
As a way to help to accelerate this trend, we have started a very simple campaign called “One Million Gardens” who’s goal is:
To identify, encourage, and document the creation of at least 1,000,000 food gardens throughout the U.S. in 2009.
I was curious if you would take a look at the site, add your garden to the list, and let others know about this campaign. It is also my hope that we can show the Obama administration the growing numbers of people involved in this work and help shift national policies to help encourage these activities.
Thank you for your work and I hope you will encourage others to add their gardens to this growing list.
Zev Paiss
Boulder, Colorado
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