Vegetable garden design. . . What the heck is that? You just dig up the ground, throw down some seeds, and add water. Right?

“Back in the day” when my wife and I first decided to grow our own food, we knew absolutely nothing, nada, zero, zip, zilch, about designing a vegetable garden. But that was okay since our first experience in the field (small pun intended) took the form of a community garden sponsored by our church.

A select group of knowledgeable members handled all the details of planning a vegetable garden. They selected the site, prepped the soil, and let the rest of us know what needed to be done and when to do it. It would have been difficult to get it wrong under those circumstances.

The Six Steps of Successful Vegetable Garden Design

So, what do we know now that we didn’t know then? Glad you asked. What I’m going to tell you is based on the assumption that you’re starting a vegetable garden on your own property and that you will be the one responsible for the vegetable garden design.

Step One: Consider Your Reasons for Starting a Vegetable Garden

Your reasons may consist of one or more of the following:

• Love of growing things
• Desire for self-sufficiency
• The need for physical activity
• Therapy and/or stress relief
• Eat inexpensive healthy foods
• Sense of accomplishment/success

A word of caution, however… If your sole motivation for starting a vegetable garden is to eat inexpensive food, you might want to consider your plan more carefully. While a good vegetable garden CAN be a source of inexpensive food, there are costs in both money and time for you to consider. Careful reading, studying, and planning will help you avoid the trap into which so many novices stumble – spending more money to grow their own food than they would have spent simply to buy it.

Step Two: Consider Your Needs and Abilities

At this point, we’re still a ways off from planting anything. First, you have some important choices to make. Choose correctly, and you’ll assure yourself maximum gardening enjoyment and productivity not only now, but for years to come. Ready? Let’s get started.

Take a moment to assess your level of gardening knowledge. Are you an experienced or inexperienced vegetable gardener, or do you fall somewhere in between? Your level of experience should be a determining factor in the size of your garden as well as the quantity and type of plants. If you’re just getting started, try to keep it small and relatively simple your first year. Your goals should be to gain some practical, hands-on experience and to enjoy a sampling of homegrown produce. Learn as much as you can by visiting web sites like this one or by reading books on the subject.

Are you healthy and able to meet the physical demands of gardening? Do you have problems kneeling? Is the problem serious, or is it something you could remedy with a good pair of kneepads? If kneeling is a hardship, you may want to consider purchasing or having someone build a raised garden with wide edges on which you can sit while tending your garden.

Are you, or is the person for whom you are designing a vegetable garden, handicapped? There’s no need for anyone with even a modicum of physical ability to be left out of the wonderfully therapeutic and stress-reducing activity that is gardening. A square foot garden mounted on a table offers easy access for anyone who is confined to a wheelchair or who needs to use a walker.

Are you able to tolerate heat and direct sun? I’m on a medication which forces me to limit my exposure to direct sunlight. What do I do? I wear a comfortable, wide-brimmed gardener’s hat, a lightweight, long-sleeved shirt (unbuttoned, over a t-shirt), gardening gloves, and jeans. In addition, I take frequent breaks and drink lots of water.

Before you turn over even one shovelful of soil, please give careful consideration to all of the above, especially those factors which may impact your physical well-being.

Now that you’ve taken your abilities, your own needs, and the needs of your family into account for your vegetable garden design, you’re ready to start constructing your vegetable garden.

Step Three: Location, Location, Location!

Guess what! One of the most significant elements of your vegetable garden design is its location.

The closer to your residence, the better. Why? Because if the expression, “out of sight, out of mind,” ever were true, it’s especially true when it comes to gardens. A garden you can’t easily see probably won’t get the regular attention it needs and deserves. And regular attention is what keeps your garden productive and attractive.

In an ideal world, your vegetable garden design would include a site on the southern face of a slight hill, a location that tends to be a bit warmer than the surrounding land and thus better able to help prevent damage inflicted by frost. If you don’t happen to have a gentle slope available, don’t worry about it. There’s no such thing as the perfect garden. All we’re trying to do here is maximize your success factors.

Consider your location in terms of how much sunlight the selected site will get. With 8 or more hours of sunlight, you can grow anything you want. If the site gets less than 8 hours sunlight, you can still grow sun-demanding vegetables like tomatoes, but your yield will be lower, your crop less productive.

While you’re at it, see if there are any young trees nearby. While they may not block your garden this year, in years to come, as the trees continue to grow, they just might.

Water has to be available for those days when Mother Nature simply refuses to cooperate. For the smaller raised-bed garden or square-foot garden, an ideal solution is a barrel of sun-warmed rainwater from which you can refill your watering can. For larger plots or row gardens, you’ll need to be able to run a sufficient length of hose.

Speaking of water, another important consideration as to location is drainage. A low-lying area where water tends to pond will not make a good gardening site, unless you do your gardening in raised beds.

Step Four: Put Your Vegetable Garden Design on Paper

Map it out. Draw out the rows or squares and list what you’re going to plant in each one and when. In your vegetable garden design, try to list subsequent plantings for each space as well. This will be a big help to you in keeping track of where everything is, at least until each plant has grown enough that you’re able to recognize it. Those of you who fall into the category of geeky and/or detail-oriented (you know who you are) may want to consider purchasing some vegetable garden design software for your computer. It’s amazing what some of these programs can do.

Step Five: Don’t Just Stand There Mulling Over Your Vegetable Garden Design… Plant Something Already!

But whatever you do, don’t overplant. You’ll quickly tire of all the extra work. Your family, friends, and neighbors may soon tire of you dumping your excess produce on them. Okay?

Now as to what to plant, here are some great recommendations from the University of Illinois Extension – Urban Programs Resource Network.

Types of vegetables – Choose vegetables that you and your family enjoy. Make sure they can be grown successfully in your garden considering space and sunlight conditions.

For shady gardens use this rule of thumb. The sunniest spot goes to vegetables grown for their fruits or seeds such as corn, tomato, squash, cucumber, eggplant, peppers, beans, and peas.

Plants grown from their leaves or roots like beets, cabbage, lettuce, mustard, chard, spinach, and turnips can be grown in partial shade.

For small gardens plant vegetables with a high yield per plant space such as bush snap beans, bush lima beans, Southern peas, leaf greens, tomatoes, and bell pepper plants.

Vegetables that take a lot of garden space for a long time and produce less are vining melons, squash, pumpkins, and sweet corn.

Step Six: Prepare Your Vegetable Garden Design for Next Year

That’s right… It’s mid-summer, and you’ve found a moment of calm somewhere in between harvesting and succession planting. This is the ideal time to sit down and take some time to think about your vegetable garden design for next year.

Why now?

Well, next year you’re going to want to go bigger and better, maybe experiment a little. Planning your vegetable garden becomes even more important. You’re going to want to make sure your soil conditions are just right and that, for the most part your garden site is prepped and ready. This is best accomplished in the fall. You’ll have all winter to order seeds, peruse gardening catalogs for ideas, order whatever you need, and come out swinging (planting, actually) early in the spring.

You might even want to develop three vegetable garden designs… one for Spring, one for Summer, and one for Autumn.

There you have it… the six steps to successful vegetable garden design. So why are you still reading this page? Go plant something already!

Rock lovers that enjoy gardening find great satisfaction in combining beautiful stones and their favorite flowers into essential parts of their landscape. Rocks create wonderful gardens. Their size, weight, and stability make them highly suited for use as a border, and even as a containment barrier in a raised-bed garden, as we’re going to discuss in this guide.

Step one is to choose a location for your rock garden. Stroll around your yard imagining possibilities. Popular options include a hill slope that is difficult to mow, a ring or rectangle formed around a favorite shade tree, a focal point easily enjoyed from a large window or the deck, or a corner of the yard, perhaps where fencing comes together. Leaf through some of your favorite gardening books for location ideas, as well as inspiration for design.

How to Build a Rock Garden

Step two is to finalize that design through trial and error, by laying it out in the chosen spot, using newspaper. Explore different shapes, and expand or shrink the design until you are happy with it. Add several layers of paper, which will act to smother the vegetation beneath, while allowing for drainage in the garden.

The third step is to form the outside border with stones large enough to create a bed at least 6-8 inches deep. Bunch stones tightly next to adjoining ones, so they will better hold the soil. When the containment border is complete, fill your garden with quality top soil. Water the soil thoroughly to compact it, and then fill in settled spots. If you plan to add an elevated section within the garden, perhaps with a smaller course of rocks, now is the time to do that, filling it with soil, also. Circles within circles, rectangles within rectangles, or mixed shape combinations can be very attractive.

The fourth step is to begin planting your flowers. Here we have to take a step back and talk about plant selection. Let’s begin with color. Different types of rock feature different color characteristics. Field stone is varied, yet quite different than assorted shades of sandstone or ledge stone. It is important to choose flowers that will complement the colors found in the rocks. The best thing to do is to have a few rocks with you when you select your flowers. You’ll easily see that some colors are a good fit and others are not. The principle is the same as matching carpeting with furniture fabrics or curtains indoors. The other plant selection issue involves choosing the right height plants for where you plan to place them. Shorter plants will go in front, taller, bushier plants should go in middle or back. The point is that as you view the garden, all rows of plants should be visible. Sketch on paper your planting configuration before you start planting. Finally, plan for there to be color through each season. Know when each bulb or plant blooms, and locate them so that all sections of your rock garden will have several plants in full blossom at all times.

The last step is to plant the flowers in your rock garden. The essential thing is to begin in back and plant toward the front, so that you won’t damage what you have already planted by accidently stepping on it, for example. Keep a few of the nicer stones set aside to place here and there in the garden as attractive accents. These basic steps to building a rock garden will produce a unique, natural space employing some of the choicest bounty the earth has to offer.

Think before you squish is the advice here. Many garden bugs are beneficial and aid organic gardening practices.

For years, well-meaning gardeners routinely maimed, swatted, sprayed and squished every bug they could get their hands on. However careful observation of nature and the move to organic practices have shown that encouraging “good” bugs, or beneficial insects (the politically correct name) is one way to give Mother Nature a hand. She was doing a fine job, however the use of pesticides, combined with overzealous tidiness resulted in loss of normal bio-diversity in our gardens.

Just as when you take antibiotics, and your doctor advises yogurt to normalize the flora within your body, the attraction of beneficials back to your garden can restore balance and harmony in your back yard.

Gardening Tips: The Good Bugs – Hoover Flies, LadyBugs, and Beetles

How about “Think before you squish” as your mantra for the new season…? Remember that you may not always know why this creature is climbing the clematis, lurking on the lobelia, or sniffing your snapdragons.

It is generally agreed that aphids are “bad”. They spread disease, and cause problems throughout the garden. However, aphids need to be present on your rose bush for a week or two before the beneficial insects will show up. Recent studies show that injured plant tissue sends out distress signals (!) attracting appropriate predators. Be patient, and keep your spray trigger finger occupied with something else, like knitting.

Beneficial insects are attracted to plants from families including compositae (daisy family); the mint family (all kinds of mints, lemon balm, and more); umbelliferae (carrot family, which includes anything which makes an umbel, or umbrella-like shape in the flower head: parsley, fennel, for instance); and the brassica family, a huge family which includes cabbages, cauliflower (all the “stinky when overcooked” vegetables) oriental greens, arugula, radish and more.

All these produce flowers containing the type of nectar which beneficial insects use as fuel for flight and movement, just as humans use carbohydrates, and “bad” bugs are the protein course. Now a look at three common beneficials, and how to attract them to your garden:

Beetles.

You undoubtedly know these large, fast moving, shiny metallic-blue-black beetles! Their full title is predacious ground beetles. I am always dismayed to see one crushed on the sidewalk, the victim of a shoe whose owner may have had good, but misdirected, intentions. Beetles thrive in deep, loose humusy mulch, like the bouncy kind found in the woods, where leaves, coniferous needles, etc., have formed a soft carpet on the ground. They snooze underneath pieces of rotten logs and stones and are nocturnal, dining ravenously in the dark upon cutworms, root maggots, and slug eggs, miscellaneous larvae and pupae of undesirables, flea beetles, and leaf hoppers.
To attract more beetles, imitate nature. Along a shady edge, away from foot traffic, dig a ditch three to six inches deep, and a foot wide. Plant mint, or lemon balm, or even red or white clover, along the inside edges to prevent erosion and to provide low ground cover. Drop shovels of peat moss, leaf mulch, coniferous needles, whatever, here and there along the slopes, then place a couple of big, flat rocks in the ditch. The beetles will hide under the rocks in the daytime. Beetles are supposed to be attracted to the nectar of evening primrose.

Syrphid Flies

AKA “hover flies”, so named because they can hover in one place, resemble slender black and yellow bees. Syrphids are important pollinators, but there is another reason to attract them: their larvae prey on many undesirable insects, and most especially, aphids. Adult syrphids drink the nectar from the flowers, lay eggs, and the larvae gobble up aphids.
With the naked eye it is possible to see eggs on the undersides of leaves near aphid colonies, laid in two symmetrical rows by the female, a hundred at a time. Once hatched, the larvae decimate aphid families in a hurry. The 1/2″ creature is often mistaken for a nasty “worm” or slug, so if you come across a legless, see-through greenish-beige creature, slightly pointy at one end, do not kill him, but wish him ‘bon appetit’! To attract syrphids, choose plants of the umbelliferae family: fennel, dill, caraway, parsley, coriander, yarrow, or allow carrots to winter over. All produce symmetrical seed-heads called umbels, which are a favourite of many beneficials.

Buckwheat, usually planted as a cover crop, can be sporadically seeded anywhere in the garden, and not only does it enrich the soil when turned in, but according to a recent Oregon State University study, the flowers are maximally attractive to syrphids. (Some people even consume buckwheat “greens” as food – check it out.) Other favourite flowers: cornflowers (bachelor buttons), marigolds, chamomile, coreopsis, and feverfew.

Lady Beetles

AKA “ladybugs”, feed heavily on aphids. If you think about purchasing them, remember…in most cases, the ladybugs go into dormancy or diapause when packaged, and when they are set free their natural instinct is to fly away. Don’t waste your money, instead attract ladybugs by your choices of plant materials. Become familiar with the ladybug in the larval stage. It looks a bit evil, like an elongated grey-black dragon with many little legs, and orange to red markings. The larvae fix themselves onto leaves, trees, or wood surfaces then pupate for about a week, emerging as the familiar round ladybug of our childhood.
All stages of ladybugs from larva to adult feed on aphids. Ladybugs are attracted to cosmos, especially white, and to goldenrod, coreopsis, fennel, yarrow and other umbelliferae. All are easily grown from seed. Lady beetles and other beneficials including the spider (yes, he is beneficial) like to lay their eggs amongst the long grass, so try to leave a strip un-mowed if you can.

It is good manners to provide your insect guests with a drink, in this case water, to wash down the aphids. This can be achieved simply: placing a plastic tray or any kind of pan in your garden and fill it with water. Put rocks in the water for them to stand on while they drink.