Considering a garden? Here are some tips

Many people dream of having a vegetable garden long before they ever turn the first shovel of dirt.

If you’ve longed to grow edibles but haven’t taken the plunge, here is your motivation. This is the year that you, too, can have a vegetable garden at your home.

Getting started

I recently spoke to a reader , Zach Lyman , about his desire for a vegetable garden at his home. He, his wife and two children moved into a house in Radford last year, and had their first experience with gardening when some renegade pumpkin seeds sprouted a patch in their yard. That got the family thinking about the possibility of a planned garden for this year.

Lyman and I met at his home to talk about how to get started. They have recently removed a large tree in the yard, and now have lots of sunshine available for growing veggies.

How much sunshine do you need? For most vegetables, a minimum of six hours of sun will be needed, and more is better.

Sunlight is probably the most important consideration when choosing a site for your garden, but there are other factors to consider as well. Proximity to a water source, the terrain of your site, your soil quality and area wildlife all need to addressed.

In Lyman’s case, he has a nice southern exposure for his yard, and a fairly flat area that will make situating a garden very easy.

The yard has a chain-link fence around it already, which will provide some protection against area wildlife, but will prove no real barrier to raccoons, squirrels, rabbits, chipmunks or deer. The Lymans reported rabbits in their yard, but no other known wildlife visitors. A rabbit fence around susceptible plantings, coupled with some mindful plant choices, would be good precautions to take.

The Lymans also expressed some concern about the soil in their yard, as lead-based paint has been found in the house. We discussed raised beds as a solution for their garden, with new soil brought in for the beds and amended for planting edibles. While raised beds don’t necessarily need to have a barrier, an edging of some type will help keep the soil in place.

Lyman’s first step in having his new vegetable garden will be to prepare the space. He is planning a raised bed over an area that currently has grass growing. I advised him to lay layers of newspaper directly over the grass and fill his bed with garden soil, amended with compost. Because the newspaper and soil will keep light from reaching the grass, it will die and, along with the decomposing newspaper, further enrich the garden.

How big?

There is a tendency among first-time vegetable gardeners to go too big when planning a garden. For a first garden, smaller is better.

To determine your garden’s size, begin with thinking about what you would like to eat, and then plan realistically for how many plants are needed for your family. Often that means that you should grow only one plant of a particular variety.

If you like to cook, plant herbs. Herbs represent one of your best investments when it comes to growing edibles. They are easy to grow and expensive to purchase, and do double duty by providing pest protection for other plants while serving as an attractive edible in your garden.

If you have kids, think about what they would like to grow, too. The Lyman children would like to grow pumpkins again, and their parents are willing to do so. Although pumpkins take a lot of room to grow, you can often grow them out of the way of your main garden space.

Because the Lymans happen to have an empty lot on their property directly behind their planned garden, my suggestion was to plant the pumpkins inside the fence, then train them out behind the fence into the empty space. They will be filling a lot with pumpkin vines instead of weeds, and won’t need to tie up more than a small amount of garden space.

I also encouraged them to employ a wide row, or square foot, method of gardening, instead of planting vegetables in traditional rows. Wide rows produce a greater yield per square foot and require less weeding and maintenance.

Lyman plans to make use of the existing fence as trellis space for growing peas, and, as he likes to cook, will also grow basil, oregano and sage. He would also like to grow zucchini, sweet peppers, cucumbers, lettuce, green beans and tomatoes. I encouraged him to add flowers to his garden, too, with marigolds, sunflowers and zinnias serving as easy, child-friendly choices.

To grow this variety of plants, he will not need a great deal of space. A 4-by-8-foot plot will be sufficient . If he’d like to plant additional space, good plant choices would include flowers and strawberries, as neither requires much effort throughout the summer.

Maintenance concerns

A final consideration in planning your garden is how much time you have to maintain it. The wide row method of planting cuts down considerably on maintenance time, with 16 square feet of gardening space requiring only about one hour a week of maintenance. You can cut down on weeding and watering chores further by mulching your beds.

Having a vegetable garden does not mean that you have to spend a huge amount of time or effort to grow some food for your table. Perhaps this is the year to learn how much fun it can be to grow a plant that also feeds your family.

On the blog

Come follow the progress of Lyman’s garden, or discuss your own, on my blog at http://blogs.roanoke.com/downtoearth/.

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