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Planning before planting vegetables:

When choosing the site for planting vegetables we should take a compass with us.  We should also take into account any shade cast by trees, shrubs, walls or the house, as this would result in slower growth rates.  Our chosen site should be protected from strong winds and be level – a sloping site would need to be terraced to avoid the erosion of loosened soil or may require leveling.  String attached to short pegs was used to mark the outlines of the paths and beds.  We made our paths 60cm (2’) wide to allow plenty of room to move and our vegetable bed 1.5m (5’) wide for planting vegetables in several rows across the bed, but still enabling the center of the bed to be reached comfortably from the paths.  This resulted in a bed area of 23m² (247½ sq ft) and a total of 33m² (355 sq ft), including paths.

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Preparation is the next step before planting vegetables:

Before planting vegetable in a garden, lawn grasses must be removed or else terrible weeds can appear.  For this reason, the lawn where the garden was to be situated was removed with a spade, so that work could commence immediately on digging the garden beds.  If time permits, the grass can be sprayed with weed poison, such as ‘Zero’ or ‘Roundup’ and the beds dug after the grass has died.

 

Once the lawn has been removed from the garden area, the soil is turned over to spade depth in preparation for planting vegetables.  Organic matter was incorporated to improve the soil – we used mushroom compost.  This is ideal and is readily available from local gardening and landscaping suppliers and quite reasonably priced.  The soil we had was fairly heavy clay and the structure of this was improved by adding gypsum at the rate of one large handful per square metre (10 sq ft).

 

To prepare the soil for leaf crops, such as lettuce, add animal manure, for example, pelleted poultry manure.  Fertiliser is also needed to enrich the soil.  We used ‘Dynamic Lifter’ but a good complete plant food, such as ‘Hortico Gro-Plus’, may also be used.  Prior to planting vegetables, the addition of materials to the soil also adds bulk, which raises the height of the beds, thereby improving drainage.  After the organic matter and fertiliser was thoroughly dug into our garden beds, the whole area was watered (including paths) to allow the area to settle.

 

The prepared beds should be left to settle for two to three weeks before planting vegetables commences.  We surfaced our paths with a layer of blue metal dust – the fine material left after blue metal gravel is made.  This surface drains quickly and unlike concrete or pavers, can simply be dug into the soil if the vegetable garden plan is altered at a later date.  Lawn paths can be high maintenance as, even when beds are edged (for example, with logs or bricks), there will be an increased risk of grass entering the vegetable beds and becoming weeds.

 

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The final step is planting vegetables:

The weeks during which the soil of the freshly prepared garden is settling in, can be put to good use by sowing seeds into seed trays, if you can’t get seed trays, ordinary pots will do.

Fill seed trays with seed raising mixture and level the surface.  Make some holes onto the surface of the seed tray in neat rows.  Two or three seeds should be placed in each hole and covered with a few millimeters of seed raising mix.  The rows should be labeled, the surface smoothed, and the tray watered gently.  A piece of fly-wire mesh can be placed across the surface of the tray to protect it from disturbance for the first five days or so, until the seedlings begin to emerge.

 

Make sure that you are planting vegetables in the garden in straight rows so that it is easy to walk between them; you could perhaps put down stepping rounds so that your shoes don’t get dirty.

 

The rows should be mounded up for good drainage – this stops rotting and makes them easier to tend, hoe and weed.

Buying punnets of 30-50 seedlings is not necessarily a good idea; by the time they are separated there are hardly any roots left.  When planted they will wilt fast on a hot day.  It is better to buy the newer style punnet that looks like an ice cube tray.  Each seedling, with its own root system intact, can be easily lifted out.  This makes planting vegetables easier.  Even though there are fewer seedlings, there are probably more than enough for a family’s use.

When planting vegetables, during the summer it is important to water them immediately and thoroughly with a trickling hose to give the seedlings a really good soak.

 

If planting vegetables for an organic garden, crops should be rotated. For example, growing spinach one year and tomatoes the next.  In fact, one of the biggest tomatoes you can grow which has a mild and sweet taste, is the Big Rainbow tomato.  If you grow organically without using chemicals, the produce is healthier for the family and if you have too much produce that you eat; don't throw it away store it in bottles or jars.  Try growing Amish Paste tomatoes, as you can make sauces with it because it has fewer seeds.

 

There are many new varieties of plants, such as miniature varieties of corn and tomatoes that are very tasty.  It is important to get the timing right for planting vegetables – they cannot be planted at just any time of year.

The lettuce varieties we planted were ‘Narromar’ and ‘Brown Mignonette’.  The tomatoes were one ‘Multi-Tom’ grafted tomato, six ‘Grosse Lisse’, and two cocktail tomato plants, which are probably the hardiest of all tomatoes and require virtually no chemical pest and disease control.