The Best Location For Your Future Garden
The key to a successful vegetable garden is to eat the fruits of your labor. Anybody can garden like pros and enjoy a big harvest of tasty, fresh, and nutritious vegetables throughout the season if they know the essentials of successful gardening. One of the most important factors is having a good location. A good location is one that gets direct sunlight all or most of the day.
Sun provides the energy the plants need to grow. Ideally, sunlight must not be obstructed at any time of the day. However, this is not always possible. Your property may be small or for some other reason your garden needs to be close to the house or a big tree that you don’t want to cut down.
If this is the case, choose a location south of the high objects if you live in the Northern Hemisphere. Conversely, choose a location north of the high objects if you live in the Southern Hemisphere, such as in Australia, South Africa, and South America. This way, high objects will not obstruct direct sunlight to any part of the garden at any time of the day.
If the site you choose for your garden is east or west of nearby high objects, you still can grow vegetables successfull! Observe which areas get more sun and which areas get less sun throughout the day. The shade of high objects shifts continuously during the day, because of the rotation of the earth.
Plant the fruit-bearing vegetables such as tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants in the areas that get at least 8 hours of direct sunlight daily. Plant leafy vegetables such as lettuce and spinach in the areas that get at least 6 hours of direct sunlight per day. Plant root crops such as potatoes, beets, and carrots in areas that get at least 7 hours of direct sunlight per day.
Place your garden at a respectable distance from big trees. In addition to obstructing direct sunlight, big trees deprive nearby vegetable plants of water and nutrients. This is because tree roots are very big compared to vegetable plant roots and, therefore, have more capacity to absorb the soil’s nutrients and water.
If you cannot locate your garden far from big trees, give the area that lies on top of tree roots extra fertilizers and water and raise the level of the ground over the tree roots by adding topsoil. This added soil will provide the vegetable plant roots with a growing depth free of tree roots. If the trees are of the kind that develop shallow roots, like the maple and cottonwood, you will have to add more topsoil every couple of years.
Most people position their garden in the backyard. In houses having a small backyard, the garden may be positioned in the front. The surface of the ground should be flat or have a gentle slope. A gentle slope facing south (if you live in the Northern Hemisphere) increases the intensity of sunlight. This is desirable for tender and very-tender vegetables because they thrive on hot weather.
A gentle slope facing north (if you live in the Northern Hemisphere) reduces the intensity of sunlight. This is desirable for very-hardy and hardy vegetables, because they thrive on cool weather.
If the surface is too steep, water from rain and irrigation will run off quickly instead of seeping through the soil. Moreover, heavy rain will wash away the topsoil and the valuable nutrients it contains. To absorb more rain and reduce soil wash, plant the rows across the slope. If your area is windy, you may have to plant some high shrubs around the garden. The shrubs should be at least 15 feet from the boundary of the garden in order to prevent their roots from absorbing the nutrients the vegetable plants need.
Cheers,
John Parker
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Why It Might Be Time To Start Using A Rotary Tiller
If your garden gets too large for practical hand cultivation, and is too small to justify a large garden tractor or small farm tractor, what you need is a rotary tiller. The tiller replaces both spade and hoe, and can replace rake and cultivator too, with a little ingenuity. A tiller, run shallowly between rows, makes a weed cultivator without equal.
Because of its versatility, the tiller is probably the most popular garden tool made today. But to determine whether you can economically justify purchasing one, you should compare costs and the amount of food your garden produces.
Tillers are either rear-mounted or front-mounted. With a front-mounted tiller, you push down on the handles to make it dig deeper, the same as the rear-mounted, though the principles involved are different. When you sock the “brake” of the front-mounted tiller into the ground, the tiller can’t go forward and the blade continues to turn in place, going deeper into the soil. If the soil is hard, the tiller blades will bounce off it, causing the vibrations that after an hour or two can tire you out. The rear-mounted tiller won’t vibrate when the going gets tough, but if you try to force it to bite into tough soil, it will lunge ahead, dragging you with it.
The moral of the story is that neither type works well in very hard soil or in heavy sod. Here, as elsewhere, patience is the answer. Go over the area several times, letting the blades chew into the ground only an inch or so at a time. In the case of sod, allow the soil surface to dry out some between passes with the tiller. After the first pass, you’ll have a mess. Cut through the mess the second time at right angles to the first working. Don’t try to till sod when the ground is hard and dry. Wait until spring.
The easiest way to till sod is not to try. Instead, cover the area with a foot of leaves in the fall and leave them there the whole next year. (You can set out plants, like tomatoes, down through the leaves if you want.) By the following fall, most of the leaves will have rotted away and the sod, too. Then you can rotary-till easily.
Tillers won’t always cut up plant residues on the garden either. Things like tomato vines and cornstalks will tangle in the blades, especially if the blades have dulled with use. It’s best to run a rotary mower over the patch to be tilled first if there’s lots of plant material on it.
Tillers will “disk” plowed soil very well. If the plowed area had been in sod, do not let the tiller dig too deep as it will bring sod back to the surface. Tillers will fall-plow or spring-plow garden soil that has been previously cultivated and do an excellent job of it. They will incorporate into the soil chopped straw, hay, grass clippings, or leaves exceedingly well, and as mentioned, they will cultivate between rows too.
Cheers…
John Parker
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