Three Good Reasons To Plan Your Garden

Thursday, June 17th, 2010 at 7:45 am

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Gardens can be built in many different shapes and sizes. Rose gardens or backyard gardens can be built in many different ways. Gardens provide a productive way to reduce your daily stress and are both pleasant to work in and relaxing. Herbal gardens provide fresh spices for cooking and salads.

Many options are available for building your garden. Building your garden in containers is an increasingly popular route to take. Container gardens make it easier to give your plants the correct amount of sunshine or shade. Raised bed gardens make it easy to create gardens in set, confined areas. Weeding is a part of gardening. It’s often easier to weed container gardens and raised bed gardens than in ground gardens.

Often people skip the planning stage all together and just dive right into building out their garden. Getting started is as easy as defining a boundary, turning the soil, breaking up the clumps of dirt and planting your seeds or plants.

A garden plan will most often yield better results. Creating a plan for your garden helps you lay out the actual dimensions and access points for your garden. Weeding and tending your plants is much easier if you have planned space for access to the plants on all sides.

Knowing sun and shade requirements critical for your plan. Planting corn or other tall plants between the sun and melons, radishes, squash, broccoli, cabbage or any other short plants will almost guarantee that you will have less than desirable results.

Different plants either help or hurt each other when grown nearby. Ones that help each other are companion plants. Some plants like onions and strawberries are complementary, or companion plants. Plants like spinach and potatoes should not be planted near one another. Determining the best placement for good and bad companion plants is much easier when using a garden plan.

Germination schedules are different for each type of plant too. Radishes for example germinate in as little as 4 days and can be harvested in 25 – 35 days. Deciding what to plant when you havest the early plants is part of a good plan.

Making a garden plan helps you answer this and many other things that will come up in the course of each garden. Using a plan will let you get a jumpstart on your garden next year. You will be ready to plant as soon as the threat of frost is gone.