Beginner’s Tips to Starting a Vegetable Garden

Whether you’re new to backyard gardening or just bought your first home and have always longed for the day when you can plant an organic vegetable garden, these tips for starting a backyard garden offer newcomers to the world of gardening useful information to help you be successful. Vegetable gardening doesn’t need to be expensive, and it doesn’t have to be time-consuming. Most homeowners can grow a few vegetables if they have the right conditions.

Location for a Vegetable Garden

Choosing the right location for your vegetable garden can make a big difference between success or failure growing vegetables. But what is the ‘right location’ for a vegetable garden?

Light Requirements for Vegetables

Vegetables need full sunlight, which gardeners define as six or more hours of direct, bright sunshine per day. They actually do best with 8 or more hours of sunlight per day. While some vegetables, such as green beans and a few herbs, can be grown in a location that receives fewer than six hours of direct sunlight each day, most vegetables will fare poorly with low light conditions. Your first step in choosing a spot for your vegetable garden in your backyard is to find the brightest, sunniest area you have.

What if you don’t have enough sunlight in your garden? Look for other locations near your home that get more light. How about your patio or deck? Many vegetables can be grown successfully in containers. You can grow tomatoes, peppers, strawberries, herbs, cucumbers, eggplant, and even a few ‘midget’ type melons in containers on the patio or deck.

Can You Grow Vegetables Instead of a Lawn?

What about your front yard? Unless you have strict homeowner association or similar covenants or laws prohibiting all but a stately lawn and sedate shrubs, why not grow vegetables in your front yard if that’s where you receive the most sunlight? A pleasing kitchen garden mingling herbs, flowers and vegetables may be just the thing to greet visitors to your home – and provide vegetables for your table!

Look for Level Ground for the Garden

Another aspect of site selection, or choosing a good location for your vegetable garden, is having level ground. Sloping or hilly ground can be difficult to work with and may require some terracing or other boundaries to prevent soil from eroding. It also allows water to drain off too quickly, which can make watering your vegetables more difficult. You should also avoid planting your vegetable garden at the base of a hill for a similar reason; water can run off the hillside and pool in the garden, creating soggy, muddy conditions that rot your vegetables instead of watering them.

Place Garden Near Water Source

Lastly, make sure you place your vegetable garden near a water source and near your home. Whether you’re irrigating your vegetable garden using a standard garden hose, sprinkler or soaker hose, or you want to use a watering can and hand-water your garden, placing the garden near the source of water makes it easier for you to give your plants life-sustaining water during the heat of summer.

Make It Easy to Tend the Garden

Why locate your vegetable garden near your home? If the garden is too far away from your home, the tendency to neglect it may be too strong to overcome. It may be too much of a hassle to lug down the hoe, the shovel, the wheelbarrow of compost if it’s far away. The same goes for harvesting your vegetables. It’s tempting to reach into the pantry for a can of green beans instead of take your bowl, basket or bucket out into the garden and pick fresh ones if it’s a hike down to the vegetable garden. Planting your garden near your home makes it convenient to both work in and enjoy your beautiful vegetable garden.

Step-by-Step Guide to Starting a Vegetable Garden

Now that you’ve selected your location for the garden, it’s time to begin your vegetable gardening. This step by step guide should help beginners grow a vegetable garden or new homeowners plant their first garden.

Planning

1. Choose your location using the tips above – bright, sunny, level, near water and near your home.
2. Contact your local County Cooperative Extension office and ask how much a soil test costs. It’s money well spent and usually between $5-$10. They will instruct you on how to take a soil sample and where to mail it. Once you get the results back, ask for someone to go over them with you. This will help you understand the soil type, pH and nutrients your soil needs.
3. Add soil amendments according to what your soil test dictates. You can always add compost. Be sure to rototill or turn over the garden soil and work in the amendments in according to the amounts listed on your soil test. Randomly adding lime, fertilizer and other amendments isn’t just wasteful – it can be harmful to the environment if the excess runs off and into the water supply. Using the right amount saves you time and money!
4. Mark out the location for your garden beds. It’s easier to grow vegetables in smaller plots with about a three to four foot space between each plot or row. That gives you enough room to walk among the plots and tend to them, or to push a wheelbarrow around to help you move things through the garden.
5. Get your water supply ready. Purchase a hose and sprinkler that reaches your vegetable garden area.

Choosing Vegetables

1. Choose vegetables for your location (find your gardening or growing zone). You can plant them around the date of the last expected frost, or the ‘frost-free’ date for your region. Remember that this date is an estimate; nature changes yearly, and some years you may get a frost earlier or later than others.
2. Plant only vegetables that you know you and your family are likely to eat. If you all love tomatoes, tomatoes are a great vegetable to plant.
3. Find out the general planting timeline from your local County Cooperative Extension office. This varies by location, and your local extension office can guide you.
4. Know which plants like to be started directly from seed, and purchase good-quality seeds from the garden center. Lettuce, radishes, carrots, beets, turnips, and many root crops are like that, too. Corn should also be directly sown into the garden at the right time.
5. When the time is right – plant your vegetables! Don’t forget to use plant markers or make them yourself. Mark each row of vegetables so you know what you have planted.