Becoming more self sufficient and eating healthier or organic foods as you know is very important. The price of gasoline has skyrocketed and so has the price of organic foods which really pushes you to grow your own. The problem is your stuck with a very small area to garden.
Don’t give up. A small garden design layout is needed. Just because you’re stuck with a small garden space, doesn’t mean you can’t grow your own. There are many different vegetables that can be grown in a small space as long as they get the proper amount of nutrients, water and sunlight. You can go to a home warehouse store or garden center and look at what each vegetable needs. With good planning and small garden design, you will be able to grow a lot of different vegetables in a very small area.
One way to begin the small garden design planning is to pay attention to the time each plant takes before harvest. If the plant takes seventy five days to produce, a person doesn’t want to plant the entire space with that single plant. The trick is to plan alternate days for the entire crop by planting the garden at different times. Small garden designing must have perfect planning to succeed. Even though the package says how long a plant needs to grow doesn’t mean that it will work out exactly the way it was planned. Make sure that you have allowed into your small garden design some flexibility for different number of days to harvest. Without this flexibility, the garden won’t deliver what you have projected.
Planning Your Small Garden Design Using The Square Foot Method
There is a way to plant all of the plants you want by using the square foot gardening method. The premise behind the square garden is that each vegetable is planted in a personal square foot. Lay out the small space available, take the small garden design and begin the makeover. Laying down small boards that you can walk on and use these as alleyway through the garden. They should be laid down like a tic-tac-toe design leaving about one square foot of space for each area. In this way, different plants can be tended and harvested without bothering the rest of the garden.
The best way to make the small garden design useful within the square foot garden is to plant different vegetables into their own area and as they mature you pick the harvest and then plant a new crop unless it will grow a new crop without replanting like squash or beans. It doesn’t have to be the same thing as what you originally planted. With this type of gardening, many different vegetables can be grown giving the small garden design the maximum usage with a very small space. When planting the second crop into one of the square feet spaces, make sure that the time it will take to mature will pass before the first frost of the coming season. This is important in the cooler climates.
