Garden Planning

Garden planning for the vegetable garden - you can see all my vegetable gardening tips here at http://www.beginner-gardening.com/vegetablegardening.html - is not as complicated as some gardeners would have you believe.

This isn't rocket science, it's home gardening and here's a simple way to rotate your garden to improve garden soil, increase the overall health of your garden and improve harvests. These gardening tips aren't meant to replace common sense; but instead give you a guideline for a very simple method of crop rotation to avoid vegetable plant disease.

Understanding that each kind of plant requires a certain amount of food is the first step. Then putting them in the correct crop rotation from year to year in the home garden will create a pattern that will make the plants perform better and give you guidelines about which section of the garden to add extra food to and which to reduce feeding.

Garden planning does a take a bit of time. But the main tools - paper and pen - are easily found and don't require any serious amount of computing power. :-)

The trick is in identifying which of your vegetable plants you want to eat (no sense growing what you won't eat) and which zone they fit into. Then you need to allocate that amount of space to that section. Do this for the main groups listed in the video, leave one section for soil building and you're ready to plant your vegetable garden.

List the plants you want to grow. Put them in the right quadrant. Change the quadrants around every year as per the video. That's as simple as it gets.

A problem sometimes happens when a gardener only wants to grow plants that fall into one quadrant. The same system holds true, you're going to have to separate your plants into early, mid and late season plants and do the crop rotation on that basis.

Sometimes the quadrants are uneven in size because you want to grow a ton of one thing and not much in an offsetting quadrant. This is a problem for sure but the secret is to always have those soil building quadrants in the proper proportion. The others can be modified a bit from year to year. Simply build the soil in one quarter of the garden every year.

That's a simple way of garden planning; you can find other vegetable gardening tips in my newsletter at http://www.simplegiftsfarm.com/gardeningnewsletter.html

Category:

Howto & Style

Tags:

• crop
• garden
• gardening
• planning
• rotation
• vegetable
• tips
• secrets
• organic

[Handysome567]

Thanks for the advice, but I have one question for you -

How do I rotate my Capsicums and chillies as they grow into a second year in the same spot?

[gardenvespers777]

THanks! This helps alot! I also have the challenge of very late afternoon shade (which I actually try to use to my advantage in hot Dallas weather!), but this information will help me get better organized. Excellent video!