How To Plan A Flower or Vegetable Garden

If you’re new to organic gardening, you should make a plan for your vegetable garden or flower garden before you buy any plants. Planting haphazardly, whether vegetables, fruit, perennial flowers, or annuals, is strictly a hit-or-miss proposition. You might get lucky, but more likely than not, you’ll lose a lot of plants and give up in frustration.

How to make a garden plan

You should think about:

• Where does most of the day’s sun hit my property?
• Which parts of the property get the least light?
• What do I want to see when I look out my windows?
• What kind of soil do I have, and what kind of condition is it in?

While these questions might seem complicated at first, they’re really not. First, note where the sun hits your property at sunrise, midday, and evening – these are your starting points. Then, decide if you’re planting a vegetable garden or flower garden (or maybe a little of both).

Find a sunny location

Regardless of the type of garden you’re planning, when beginning, your best bet is to start on the south side of your property. Assuming you don’t have lots of trees or high walls, a southern exposure generally receives the majority of sunlight during the spring and summer, making your probability of successful blooms much higher. Creating a garden bed next to the south-facing wall of your home is usually the most logical place to start, but creating an “island” on a sunny slope or other favorite sunny spot is cool, too.

What plants do you like?

Decide what kind of bushes and shrubs you’d like to plant and what kind of flowers will compliment them. This is strictly a personal and aesthetic choice and also depends on your climate. Gardening and landscaping books are an excellent resource here. I’d recommend The Encyclopedia of Perennials (American Horticultural Society) or The A to Z Encyclopedia of Garden Plants to start with. Look at pictures, decide on a few varieties, and then make sure that those plants are appropriate for your area by consulting the USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map. Most likely, you’ll find a Hardiness Zone map in one of the aforementioned books as well.

Pay attention to the quality of your soil

One big thing that many novice gardeners don’t pay attention to is the quality of their soil. Learn if you have clay, sandy, or loamy soil before you plant anything, especially before adding any amendments or mulches to your soil. And by all means, start to learn organic methods of gardening – chemicals are simply not necessary and are in fact destructive, depleting the health of your plants and soil. Chemicals upset the ecological balance – killing one pest while letting others multiply, and may add unhealthy and unnecessary amounts of nitrogen, creating unstable growth and polluting local waterways.

So there you have it – start making your garden plan and look forward to the beautiful flowers and food you’ll grow next spring and summer!