Get the dirt on how easy a bountiful garden can be
Raised beds can extend your veggies’ growing season by keeping soil temps warmer for weeks longer than in-ground plantings.
A perfect soil is rich in compost and a good blend of materials for moisture retention and drainage.
The real secret to an abundant garden is attracting pollinators to turn your flowers into fruits.
From the crunch of fresh, crisp lettuce to a cherry tomato picked in the sun, growing your own garden vegetables is one of those hobbies that quite literally allows you to see (and taste) the fruits of your labor. Whether this is your first year planting or you’ve tried it before, there’s always something new to learn. Before you start throwing your seeds down, try some of these time-tested tips to make sure your veggie garden has an abundant year.
You’re getting ready to plant your veggie garden but before you cast a single seed make sure your soil is worthy. While it’s true that different plants have different soil preferences, when it comes to vegetable gardening, there’s a recipe for success.
Your soil’s PH should be around 6 or 7 on the PH scale.
Supplement with a rich planting mix if you’re planting in the ground.
Look for a planting mix that has a balance of compost, manure, perlite (for proper drainage), and some kind of material that allows for moisture retention (such as peat or vermiculite).
If you’re planting mostly in raised beds look for a mix specified for raised beds, or use a rich planting mix plus a potting mix for added drainage.
Make sure there are no large stones or clumps, especially if you are planting from seed.
When you trim your plants and harvest throughout the year, with the exception of the weeds you pull, put all your scraps back into your compost pile. Keep that pile going all year long if you can. Even in the winter, many people keep composting and add to their bin once things thaw. It’s fine to supplement with outside compost, but nothing works better than your own little mulch pile, especially one that has known ingredients and no outside chemicals.
The importance of companion planting cannot be undersold for a successful garden, and it has the added benefit of looking great! Companion planting is the art of planting certain things near each other to enhance their natural defenses, attract pollinators, and enhance natural flavors. Examples include:
Garlic, basil, and tomatoes.
Onions and lettuce.
Corn, squash, and beans.
Chives, garlic, oregano, thyme, rosemary, onions + almost anything to ward off insects and attract pollinators.
Marigolds, mint, and pennyroyal all contain natural insect repellants and can deter aphids and other frequent garden pests.
Note that companion planting can be regional, so it’s not always one-size-fits-all.
For example, an area with a short growing season may not get the greater benefit of a companion plant that requires a longer bloom period. A gardener in an area with an infestation of a specific beetle that decimates broad-leafed beans may ruin their corn crop when trying to do the corn/squash/bean planting. Gardening is an experiment and can vary not only from season to season, but from zone to zone, and even microclimate to microclimate.
Possibly the best way to ensure a bountiful harvest for your garden is to have an abundance of pollinators to guarantee that your flowers turn to fruit! In addition to your zucchini and carrot seeds, be sure to throw down some seeds for big bloomers like zinnias, marigolds, sunflowers, petunias, lavender, and more to create a pollinator-friendly garden. There are also flowering cherry trees, serviceberry trees, redbuds, and pollinator-attracting trees that make attractive focal points in a backyard garden.
You can add mason bee houses, night-blooming flowers to attract bats and moths, and a host of other garden pollinators.
Vertical gardening is a great way to save on space when you want to get as much yield from your garden beds as possible. It can help you cover more ground and create an efficient watering system too.
While most people think of an attractive moss or succulent wall when they think of vertical gardening, you can apply the same principles to your vegetable garden, and in fact, you may be doing it already.
Creating an edible vertical gardening setup is actually pretty simple. Many people create bean tents for vining plants like peas and beans or use tomato cages for tomatoes, which actually will vine rather than grow like a shrub.
You can train other plants like watermelon, cucumber, pumpkins, squash, and eggplant to grow over PVC archways and up vertical structures to save space—and look pretty darn cool too.
Other forms of vertical gardening include making wall gardens where greens and smaller rooted plants like radishes and button carrots (ones that don’t have deep tap roots) can grow.
Water your plants when the top two to three inches of soil has dried out completely for really healthy, happy veggie plants. Vegetables, in general, have shallow root systems, especially when first getting established, so slow, deep watering is the best way to keep them watered and promote deeper root growth.
The ultimate way to do this is a drip irrigation system. If adding a drip irrigation system for a seasonal garden isn’t in the budget, consider the less expensive option of soaker hoses. These can be run throughout the garden beds and simply hooked up to a spigot and used in the same method as drip irrigation. You can even add a timer to the spigot to allow for timed waterings.
There are so many benefits to raised bed gardening. For veggies and herbs, one of the many perks is weed control. You can contain your veg garden and keep the weeds from growing too close—this is really handy when everything is just sprouting, and you honestly aren’t sure what is a weed and what isn’t!
Raised beds also help extend your growing season by keeping soil temperatures warmer longer, a big perk when you are sprouting from seed, and when just a week or two counts. Plus, veggie gardening can require quite a bit of weeding and fine-tuning, so a raised bed helps save on some of that back-stooping that can get old after a while.
Every garden has areas that have more sun in the morning and corners that cast shade in the afternoon. Even if you think your garden is full sun, structures like decks, shadows from fence lines, trees, and garages will all change the amount of light in a given garden patch. And guess what? That will change from early summer to the end of summer!
The good news is, most veggies need around the same amount of sunlight, 6 to 8 hours per day. However, there are some that like it hot and some that can take the shadier ways.
The hotter afternoon sun is great for peppers, watermelon, and tomatoes.
Plants like lettuce and peas can take the shade during this time.
Controlling insects and plant diseases in an area of your garden where you are growing foods is a tricky task. Applying toxic chemicals to something you soon plan to serve up for dinner isn’t exactly appetizing. Luckily, there are plenty of non-toxic remedies and natural insecticides, many of which you can make yourself.
Be proactive if you notice something amiss. Don’t let it linger too long; homemade remedies are milder and take longer to control the problem.
Another important thing to consider is that if you have a particular vegetable or plant that doesn’t grow well for you, try growing it in a different place in your yard. If it doesn’t do well there, try a different variety. And if it still doesn't do well, then, well, it may be time to let that one go! Not every plant is meant to grow in every environment. In addition, some heirloom varieties can be finicky, so they may require a little more TLC than hybridized versions. Be patient, ask your garden-knowledgeable neighbors, and keep trying.
You don’t need the fanciest potting table or even the cutest garden clogs to be a successful gardener. But there are a few things you shouldn’t skimp on.
Garden gloves. Buy two pairs. The good ones will cost you $7, and they are washable. You might think you don’t need them but by month two of scrubbing out dirt from the part under your nails you didn’t know dirt could get in, you will wish you bought three pairs.
Decent hand-held tools: pruners, weeder, a hori-hori (Japanese digging tool aka the gardener’s BFF), a spade. The total should be less than $100. A butter knife and kitchen scissors are not the same. They just aren’t.
A good hose with a winding reel. Make sure the hose is long enough! And the reel actually winds it up. $100 to $200 if you’re starting from scratch. It’s an investment, and yes, it may get a hole in it, and you may need to replace the hose every couple of years, but there is nothing worse than a hose that doesn’t quite reach. You end up either filling a water bucket ten times and cursing yourself for not buying the longer hose or awkwardly spraying a plant in a way that it doesn’t deserve, and not even watering it to boot. Just get a good hose.
