3 Important Things to Consider When Choosing a Location for Your Vegetable Garden

1. Sunlight- How much sunlight will your plants need. Most likely if you are growing vegetables they will need AT LEAST 8 hours of sunlight a day during the growing season. If you have a shady yard, this can be addressed by building a grow box with a bottom and on wheels that you can move throughout the year to get enough sun light. Or you could consider growing your vegetables interspersed in the landscaping of your yard.


2. Proximity- Having a location that is close to the kitchen door is ideal, and you will more likely check on it more often if you can see it from a kitchen window. But this is not always possible when you live in an apartment or somewhere where you need to have a plot at the community garden. Just think about what would be most convenient for you and your life style. Your harvest will reward you for your efforts!


3. Watering- If you live in an area where you get enough rain to keep your garden growing strong all year, consider yourself a very lucky gardener. But for the rest of us, this is a big deal. In the heat of the summer, your garden might need to be watered every single day, and if you have a large garden then it will be a huge undertaking. Ideally  you can install an automatic watering system that will only take some time to arrange and set up in the spring. However, that is not always possible. In the Square Foot Gardening system, they teach to have some buckets of water filled up and set next to the garden at all times. Filling the water buckets up the day before, will allow the water to get warmed by the sun and be more readily accepted by the plants. Having a hose or tap nearby makes life much easier. I do want to say one thing about watering: be careful when choosing to "sprinkle" your garden. This is not the most efficient way to water your garden  and not only wastes a lot of water, but gets the plants wet regularly and opens them up for disease. I would encourage drip irrigation, or putting in milk jugs when planting so that you can get the water right to the roots.

Happy Gardening!

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Choosing a Vegetable Garden Location          Choosing a site for the vegetable garden

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