4 Tips When Planning and Designing Your Organic Vegetable Garden

We all want to grow a best garden first time round, but sometimes we rush in without thinking about what we actually preparation and some prior planning might be what the doctor ordered. Designing your garden is really worthwhile.

You will be surprised when you see how much an organic garden can produce if you develop the proper plan, and follow through.  Not only will you be able to have bragging rights to growing your own vegetables, but you might have enough to share with your friends as well.

Also once you put in the effort to develop a plan you can simply tweak it the following year based on your experience.

Wisely green has these tips to help your garden along…..

Designing Your Garden

1. Location Location Location: 

When you start to plan for your vegetable garden, the first important task is to decide where to lay out your garden. The site location that you choose should receive at least six hours of direct sunlight daily and the soil should drain well, with no standing puddles.

The garden area should receive adequate air circulation, yet be protected from strong winds. Your house or a thicket of trees can act as a shield from the wind.

2. Dimensions and Size of Your Garden:

After choosing your site, decide how large you want to make your garden. Beware of beginning too ambitiously; tending a plot that’s too large can quickly become a chore. A plot 10 feet long by 10 feet wide is large enough for some tomato plants, lettuce, a bush variety of cucumber plant, radishes, an endlessly productive zucchini plant, herbs and some flowers.

3. Your Garden Lay Out:

Once you’ve chosen your site, sketch a garden plan. This plan will ensure maximum productivity by giving each plant room to grow. Measure the dimensions of the plot and draw a scale model on graph paper, using for example, a one-inch square to represent one foot.

As you draw your plan, keep in mind each plant’s space requirements at maturity. Young tomato plants you put out in the spring will take up three feet of space by the end of summer. Consider laying out your garden design in blocks instead of the more familiar rows. Since you don’t have to allow as much space for paths, this will enable you to plant more.

Blocks containing a variety of plants encourage mini-gardens of vegetables, herbs and flowers, and are more diverse than single rows that alternate just two plants. Single crops crowded together are more susceptible to disease, so the diversity of blocks can mean healthier plants. Make each block just wide enough so you can comfortably reach the middle from each side.

The layout of your garden depends in part on what you want to plant. Some crops, such as lettuce, radishes and spinach, mature quickly and will be short-term residents, unless you plant and harvest them several times during the summer. Other plants, such as tomatoes, eggplant and peppers, will grow over the course of the entire season. Perennial herbs and flowers will remain in the same spot year after year, requiring an increasing amount of space each year.

An important key to growing organically is to choose plants suited to the site. Plants adapted to your climate and conditions are better able to grow without a lot of additional care and will produce much healthier vegetables.

4. Plan for Next Year:

Once you plan out, and design your garden for this year, you should make a general plan for next year as well. Crop rotation is so important to maintaining healthy soil, so when you’re making this season’s plan, lay out where you will plant certain vegetables in the next season. This will help you remember what was planted where and save troubles next year.

Rotate Crops

Besides depleting the soil, leaving plants in the same spot each year encourages disease and soil-borne insect predators. No annual plant should be planted in the same spot two years in a row. Waiting three years before putting a plant in the same spot works even better.

Add Green Manure (otherwise known as a Cover Crop)

When Designing your garden it is a good idea to consider planting “green manure” plants to enrich the soil. You can add this to your plan from year to year. Clover, Alfalfa, and other such plants add nutrients, which will support other plants, as well as adding bulk and organic matter, when they are dug or tilled directly into the soil before the next planting.

I personally struggle with planning, but it can really make the whole experience more enjoyable by taking much of the stress out of gardening.  Knowing what you are going to plant and when can really help make a big difference.  It also helps your garden because you will not drain the soil of nutrients, by planting the same crops over and over in the same place.

In Summary

So in Summary Remember the four points

1) Location

2) Garden Dimensions

3) Lay Out

4) Next Year Planning (Crop Rotation etc.!)

All the best and hope your plants are luscious and your yields are high!

Go Organic

PS Check out how to create gardens with Pallets..–>   Click here 

Source: https://wiselygreen.com/organic-vegetable-garden-how-to-plan-and-design-your-organic-garden-for-best-results/