Learning How to Grow Vegetables and Herbs in a Home Garden

We have a nice little quarantined section of our backyard that looks like it will be perfect for beginning a vegetable and herb garden. Neither my wife nor I knew anything about starting a vegetable garden—until now.

Research Vegetable Gardening Before You Start

It is extremely important to do your homework before starting any work on the vegetable garden if you want to be successful. My wife found an excellent site, Weekend Gardner, that provides a wealth of knowledge on gardening. There are so many factors to consider that a novice such as myself would never have conceived of without reading up on the subject. Here are some key take-aways that I think you need to research and consider for beginning a vegetable garden in your yard.

• Learn your hardiness grow zone so that when you are looking at seeds you can tell which will be successful in your area
• Keep a journal
• Decide how much space you want/need
• Pick where in the life cycle you want to start (seeds or young plants)
• Choose what plants you want to grow
• Measure and draw up a plan for your garden
• Soil preparation techniques for the plants you want to grow (level plots, raised beds)
• Planting styles (wide plots, single row)
• Staking out and fertilizing your plot
• Composting

You Need to Get a Little Dirty Preparing Your Vegetable Garden

Part of gardening is getting dirty. We had to start with a huge mess of an area in our yard. It has a great location and is already fenced off from the rest of the yard, but it was badly overgrown with grass, bushes, rogue blackberry bushes, killer vines, and hidden rocks and bricks. Before we get into what types of plants that we chose to grow in our vegetable garden, you will notice that our particular plot needed to be addressed immediately because the last frost in our area was only three weeks away. Regardless of raised beds, wide plots or single rows, we needed to get the area to at least be a patch of dirt instead of a jumble of weeds.

Grow Vegetables and Herbs that will Be Successful in Your Hardiness Grow Zone

Our hardiness grow zone turned out to be a nine, so we are fortunate enough to be able to grow just about anything in our area, as long as the plot gets enough sunlight. We noticed that our particular plot may have a little issue with sunlight being blocked in the afternoon by a tree. Given this slight sunshine blocker, we decided to shy away from things that require full sun to be successful. We also tried throwing in a few that may not work out, but it’s an experiment so you don’t really learn anything unless you have some failures. Our portfolio of seeds includes basil, parsley, squash, peppermint, broccoli, carrots, peas, arugula, and mixed lettuces. These plants will force us to learn several types of growing methods, which is ultimately one of the goals of this vegetable and herb garden project.

Designing Your Vegetable and Herb Garden Layout

It is important to draw up a plan for your garden before you start planting anything to ensure you have enough space to accommodate your chosen crops. Certain plants require raised beds, such as carrots and potatoes, so you will want to make sure that you have adequate space to build the raised beds and ensure that they are far enough apart from each other to accommodate the plants. Some plants, such as squash and other vine-type crops, require an area that is wide as opposed to long, narrow single-row crops such as peas or broccoli. Be sure to take into account what the needs of each plant are that you intend to grow and draw up a plan that utilizes your plot most effectively. Also, do not forget to include a walkway of some sort so that you can get into areas to weed and maintain the garden.

This is just the beginning of our journey to create a functioning vegetable and herb garden. I will be writing updates to this, further expanding on some of the concepts summarized in this article. Hopefully I will have good news to report on things that work well, and also some lessons learned the hard way and what you can do to avoid or minimize the damage from our mistakes.