One of the most important decisions you will make when vegetable gardening is selecting your garden site. Pick the wrong site, and your garden is doomed. Pick the right site, and you can grow vegetables for many years. Here are some things to consider when picking a vegetable garden site.
Light
All vegetables need at least six hours of direct sunlight. While some herbs will grow in partial shade, the energy-intensive nature of producing vegetables requires lots of sun.
Water
In addition to sunlight, vegetables require lots of water. Think about how much water is in a tomato or watermelon. Your garden site needs to be close to a pure water site. Dragging buckets of water to a garden is miserable and rarely works. If necessary, you can run an irrigation pipe from a distant water spigot, but planning on carrying the water is a mistake.
Drainage
While vegetables require lots of water, they do not do well in poorly drained areas. Don’t pick a spot that is always full of water after a rain. If that is the only sunny spot in your yard, use a raised bed so the plants don’t have wet feet. The vegetable’s roots will rot if they are always wet.
Near You
You need to put your garden someplace you will see it every day. Kitchen gardens are traditionally put right outside the back door. That way if you need to dash outside and get a vegetable or herb, the garden is handy. If you put your garden out of sight, you will probably forget about it at some point. In that case, the weeds will take over and by the time you remember the garden is there, it is gone. Not that I would know anything about that.
Not Too Visible
There is such a thing as too visible. If anyone walking by your house can see your garden, and especially if they can get to your garden from the sidewalk, expect people to pilfer. Someone will walk right up and help themselves to your prize watermelons, squash, tomatoes, and cucumbers. In this case, good fences make, as Robert Frost said, good neighbors.
When choosing a site for your garden, remember that you will be using that site for a while. Problems with access to sunlight, water, and poorly draining spots will make gardening drudgery instead of the fun it is meant to be. A good site makes growing vegetables that are healthy and nutritious easy.
Want to learn to garden? My first attempt at gardening ended up in failure. The weeds took over and squeezed the vegetables out. I was very frustrated by this waste of good seed, time, and money. So I became a master gardener and spent a lot of time helping other people avoid or overcome problems in their garden.
In order to help others garden successfully, I have written a book, Vegetable Gardening from the Ground Up, available in an ebook or a paperback from Amazon. It is also in Kindle Unlimited.
