Vegetable Garden Design

Design your vegetable garden for you

Vegetable garden design begins with a list.

List the vegetables you and your family will eat, and only design for those. Why plant anything else?

Decide the size of your vegetable garden

Beside each vegetable on the list, write an estimate of the quantity your family will eat. Probably the easiest way to estimate quantity is to consider replacing some of your weekly grocery items with the garden harvest.

How many tomatoes will you consume in a week?

How many heads of cabbage?

How many onions? Beets? Green Peppers?

Practical self sufficiency through food skills

Vegetable Gardening, Home Canning and Freezing, Orchards and Fruit, Food Crafts, Wine Making and more...

Each year we make adjustments to our vegetable garden design and the space we allocate to individual vegetables. That way we have more of what we use and less of what we don't. It's as much art as it is science!

Adopt design concepts from others

You can incorporate some or all of the following principles in your design.

Keep a pathway throughout the garden of about 2 feet between planting areas, so that you can tend to each area conveniently. Laying straw down is inexpensive and contributes to next year’s top soil as it composts down, but plastic sheeting, strips of cardboard or barrier cloth can also be used. Some folks leave grass growing as a ground cover, but I find that to be a nuisance. Straw is my current favorite.

Plant vegetables in such a way that adequate sunshine reaches everything. One way of doing this is to plant “short to tall from south to north”. The southern summer sun reaches all the way back to the taller plants on the north. The exception to this rule is that some plants prefer a bit of shade – lettuce, for instance.

Take advantage of a fence for climbing vines like beans and peas, unless your fence is there to discourage wildlife. If I plant vines along the fence, the wildlife in my area (deer, especially) like to graze along the fence for a midnight snack. On the other hand, moving climbing plants to the garden’s interior necessitates buying or building trellises. Choose your battle.

Vegetable Garden Layout #1

Here is a vegetable garden design for an area of approximately 22' X 40' that uses companion planting techniques.

Notice that there are no plants along the fence. Plants along the fence, especially vegetable plants, are perceived as an engraved invitation to dinner for your four-footed friends.

The 'background' of the garden is covered entirely with straw from bales bought at a local feed store. Straw keeps the weeds down and gives me a roomy walkway; it softens over the season and is comfortable for walking, sitting and kneeling on; it reduces squishy mud puddles; and at the end of the season, straw can be incorporated right back into the soil. No muss. No fuss.

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