Plan Your Kitchen Garden
There are several ways to approach the growing of a vegetable garden. The first being rather obvious by utilizing a portion of your property and prepare this area for the establishment of a garden. The second method is the construction of a raised bed which maybe done for many reasons one being the lack of space to provide for a large garden directly in the earth.
This method also has other notable advantages. In my years of doing raised beds, I have noticed less attacks by devouring insects and less diseases in general. This is probably due to the fact that your planting soil is above the ground which gives you the means to control the soil that just exists in your raised garden.
Before I can discuss the size of your kitchen garden, it still requires some of the same thought given to an in ground vegetable garden. The location of your raised bed garden is very important in regard to sunlight, wind and water. The kitchen garden is going to require a minimum of five hours of sunlight per day up to a maximum of ten hours. The closer you can reach the maximum sunlight the better it will be for your vegetables. A spot should be picked where the wind is not going to be a major factor in beating up some vegetables or drying out your raised bed soil too rapidly.
It is important to locate your kitchen garden at least reasonably within hose reach of a water supply. A raised bed kitchen garden will require a little more attention to moisture than a garden planted in the soil of the earth. If you have the means, you may want to consider an overhead spinning sprinkler with a timer to provide daily moisture to your kitchen garden. Just remember when nature provides you with rainy days to turn off the timer or you may have more moisture than is necessary causing other growing problems.
The size of your raised bed can be almost any size as long as you have the ability to reach all areas of the kitchen garden. I would recommend a size ranging from 3×6 feet to 4×8 feet.You are not going to believe what can be grown in a kitchen garden of this size. The best structure for the bed is cedar boards at least 7 inches high. If you purchase 8 foot boards and have the yard where you bought it cut one board in half then you could have sides as high 10 inches. You can either nail the boards together or purchase corner supports, available on line from several garden spots or you can purchase the entire unit depending your budget limitations.
Other items required will be a roll of weed mat installed inside of your raised bed to prevent weeds from entering your raised bed. A layer of small stones about two to three inches deep for good drainage and last but not least bagged top soil to fill your raised bed. All of these items can be purchased at your local garden shop. You can also buy loose top spoil from some area shops and delivered to your site. This will result in a lot of extra work shoveling the soil into the kitchen garden rather than dumping bags.
Now what exactly can you plant lets say in a 3×6 raised bed that will provide you with an interesting vegetable garden and enough product to consume? You will need to pick the vegetables you like or want to grow and maybe it will be a few or many vegetables. Here is an example of a variety of vegetables placed in a 3×6 raised bed.
First measure it off into squares with each square equaling a square foot and this is what you could plant in a 3×6 raised bed utilizing a square foot for each vegetable. sixteen carrots, one broccoli, one eggplant, 6 leeks, 9 onions, two potato plants, sixteen radish plants, one winter squash, two plants of parsley, two plants of cumcumbers, nine plants of spinach and, because I like the following, these were planted in two of the squares, one tomato plant in each square, two basil plants each square, two peppers in each square and one square with two kale plants. As you can envision the combinations are endless and frankly provides for a tremendous variety but this mix can easily be changed to match your taste. You can also use other vegetables that are not listed here here by determining the space requirements for the each plant.
If you want to know how to plant each of the vegetables or other gardening information concerning your kitchen garden then go to gardenersgardening for more detail and a picture of the diagram discussed above.
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