When planning your garden it is very important to consider where the sun will be shining and where there will be shadows. Remember to consider the movement of the sun. Vegetables that like cooler temperatures will do better in places where there may be more shadows, but remember that too much shade may prevent your plants from growing properly, or even at all. Areas that are subjected to sun throughout the day are the places to plant vegetables like tomatoes, peppers and other heat loving plants.

It is also very important to consider what types of vegetables will be planted next to each other, as some types of vegetables don't get along with other types. For example, potatoes should not be planted next to tomatoes because they both extract large amounts of nitrogen from the soil, and there may not be enough nitrogen for both types of vegetables in one area. Or for example, that peas and beans actually inject nitrogen into the soil and may be beneficial to other vegetables that need high amounts of nitrogen. People call these types of vegetable relationships "companion planting". For help with companion planting in your garden, click HERE.

Another thing you'll need to consider when planting your garden is how it will be watered. If you are away frequently or have a very inconsistent schedule, you may find that after you've planted your garden you just can't seem to get it the water that it needs. It is very important especially in the early stages of growing your garden that it receives enough water. Seeds must stay at least slightly moist in order to sprout, and freshly transplanted seedlings often cannot tolerate the stress of insufficient water. But as always, try not to overwater, as overwatering can prevent your garden from growing properly, and may lead to molds, fungi and pests that can harm the health of your garden.

It is also good to think about what vegetables you may want to plant "successively". Sucsessive planting is when you plant a smaller amount initialy, and then about a month later you'll plant another small amount, and so on, so you'll have a continuous supply, rather than having a huge amount all at once. Vegetables such as lettuce, spinache, peas, snap beans, broccoli, and cabbage are often planted succesively. Depending upon your part of the world, there may be a point in the season at which you will stop succesive planting, as the seeds or seedlings will need sufficient time to mature before the growing season ends.

It may sound like a lot to consider, but most of all remember that you don't need to worry too much about doing everything just right. Most of these plants have been taking care of themselves for the last several thousand years and have done just fine without our help. But there are a few things to be aware of, and if you put a little thought into it before you plant your garden, it can be the difference between a modest harvest, or more fresh food than you could have imagined.

One thing we learned in our first experience planting a garden was the value of speaking to others who had done it before. If you have the ability to do this, then definitely don't miss out on the opportunity to get first hand information. It is often far more helpfull than the instructions that are printed on the back of your seed packages.
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So... one of the first things you'll need to start a vegetable garden is to find a place to put it. Fortunately for us, there was a big backyard with a big lawn that was only producing big water bills, and not much else. So after not much deliberation, we decided to cut our losses and we tilled up the entire backyard. It was quite a bit of work, but everybody helped, and the experience was actually a lot of fun to go through. It was great to work together with everybody on a project that would benefit us all so much.

After tilling the yard once, we went through and pulled out the large chunks of grass that were left from the lawn. We would pick up the peices by hand and shake them off, removing a large portion of the dirt from the roots. After this we threw the peices into a corner of the yard we had designated for a composting pile, to use the material to help fertilize next year's food.

We tilled over the yard in a couple different directions to try to break up the grass and make the soil soft and ready for planting. It took us about two days, with a couple of people taking turns on the tiller. Toward the end, the tiller wasn't working so good. So we borrowed another one which broke down before we could finish, so we finished the job by hand with old fashioned spades. It actually wasn't a bad way to get the job done...with a couple of people working together we covered a lot of area really fast, and actually did a better job than either of the tillers had done. Tilling with the spades was very helpful around the edges, where the garden met things such as the concrete driveway and the fences around the yard.

At the end of the job, we had prepared over 2500 square feet in which to plant. We had begun some of our seedlings indoors about two months before we prepared the garden. With many varieties of vegetables, it is recommended that you plant them indoors to get them established before you transplant them to your garden. We started these seeds in small inexpensive plastic trays, using potting soil mixed with soil from the backyard. We placed them on a table by a window, but we found it neccesary to place some grow lights over them because the light from the window was not enough. It is easy to tell when a seedling of any type is not recieving enough light, because they will develop long, thin stalks that grow longer and longer as they try to reach up toward the light.

It's pretty easy to get lights that are suitable for growing plants indoors. You can buy "grow" lights at just about any wal-mart type place, but you can get better ones from garden shops. They don't cost hardly anything to run either...we had our lights on 24 hours a day for the first month (you can do this when they are seedlings), and I didn't see any increase in our power bills at all.

We bought most of our seeds from a couple different shops around town, but we did order a few types on the web. The types we started indoors were broccoli, red onions, roma tomatoes, beefsteak tomatoes, red cabbage, three types of cauliflower, brussel sprouts, serveral types of bell peppers, japanese egg plant, kale, and four types of basil.

We had a lot of space to fill in the garden, so we had to plant a lot of seeds. Each seed tray cost us only a dollor, and contained 48 separate cells in which to plant seeds. We had 10 or 11 of these on a large table next to a window, over which we placed a couple of large flouescent grow lights. Flourescent lights have to be placed quite close to the tops of the seedlings. Something like 3-7 inches.

I think I over watered the seeds at first. Everybody who had prior experience told me that you should let the top of the soil get dry before you water them again. It caused the area to stay damp and it attracted a lot of small gnats. I'm told that these gnats can lay eggs in the soil, and their larvae eat the roots of your seedlings. We didn't end up having a big problem with the, allthough they were very persistent, and didn't go away untill the seedlings went away.

In our area, the spring of 2008 was very cold and wet late into the year, which delayed the planting of vegatables for weeks, but it was ok with us as we were a little bit behind in our efforts to prepare the soil in the garden, and also to prepare the seedlings we had started indoors to be transplanted outside.

When plants are started indoors, it is often neccesary to "harden them" as they say. Since the young plants are not used to the sun, they need to be gradually introduced to the outdoors by moving them outside for what is at first a short period of time such as a couple of hours, eventually ending up about a week or two later with the seedlings remaining outside permanantly and being transplanted to your vegetable garden.

I don't know for sure, but I think some of our seedling may have died as the result of not being "hardened" well enough, as we were in a hurry to get them in the ground once the weather cleared up and the threat of frost was over.

The growing season had started late this year and we were anxious to get seeds into the ground. We had seeds for Fava Beans, Spinache, five types of lettuce, Snow Peas, Sugar snap peas, Tiger eye beans, Scarlet emperor runner beans, Cherokee wax beans, Lima Beans, Gold Mine beans, soybeans, Black Kabouli Garbonzo Beans, four types of beets, 3 types of carrots, two types of potatoes, several types of squash, and red winter rye that were all overdue to be started directly in the soil.

All the plants that we started indoors were transplanted at about the right stage in the weather, but we were late in planting our cool weather vegetables like peas, carrots, beets, beans, lettuce, and spinache. Some of these cool weather vegetables suffered as a result.

Though not all of the things in our garden did well, most of them did great. Among the best producers were the Cherokee wax beans. Cherrokee Wax Beans are a small reddish colored bean that is usually eaten as a dry bean. We planted them directly into the garden, as is recommended with most beans. We planted only one package containing about 70 beans, and ended up with about one mason jar full of dried beans. To begin with, there are two main types of beans, those that are to be eaten when they are green and tender, called snap beans or snap peas, and those that are to be eaten after being dried and removed from the pods, called dry beans. I did a bit of research about beans before planting the garden, and heard many things about the proper way to dry out the bean pods, but I found that the best way was to just leave them alone and let them dry out on the plant. You'll just have to keep an eye on them so as they don't get so dried out that the pods drop off into the soil and you lose your beans. If you don't think you can prevent this from happening, the other way is to pull out the plants toward the end of the season and let them dry out in a garage or somewhre similar. I think if you can let them dry on the plant, you'll likely get a larger yield, since the pods often devolop at different rates, and some pods may be already dry while others are still undeveloped and not ready for picking.

The red cabbage did very good, and is a very cool looking plant as well. The thick and fleshy leaves have a dusty, almost irredescent sheen to them, with an incredible range of colors from turquoise and blue greens, to reds and dark purples. Some cabbage heads reached 7 inches in diameter. It was a joy to watch them grow. You can harvest the heads at just about any point after they have formed and hardened. Cut the head at the base. Cabbage heads can be stored for up to 3 or 4 months in a cold refrigerator or cellar where the temperature is between 45 degrees F. and freezing.

The Green Goliath Broccoli did quite well. We planted about 16 seedlings that we had strated indoors from seed. They seemed very strong and grew well when they were transplanted into the garden. They yeilded much more than we could use at once, so we learned that it may be better to plant broccoli successively. Since we were unable to eat as much broccoli as was being produced, many of the broccoli heads remain on the plants much longer than they normally would have, and near the end of the growing season many of the heads began to "bolt", growing long and thin. Bolting is when the plant reaches the stage in it's life-cycle in which turns it's efforts to making flowers and seeds. We discovered that this ultra-ripe broccoli was actually much sweeter and more tender then the broccoli that we had harvested in the earlier stages as is generally recommended. The broccloi was delicious and I would recommend trying some "bolted" broccoli anyday, just don't let it go for too long, as the little green buds will eventually sprout into small yellow flowers.

We planted three types of carrots, among them were a type called "purple haze". While having the traditional orange colored centers, these carrots have dark purple coloration on the outside. The more mature the carrot, the further inside the purple coloration reached. They seemed to grow a little more slowly than the other carrots we planted. All of the carrots we planted were started from seed, directly into the garden, as is often recommended with many root vegetables. The purple haze carrots seemed to grow much fatter and shorter than the other carrots. Some were only 3-4 inches long, while being 1.5 inches in diameter. They seemed to have a nice flavor, not much different than most other types of carrots, but a little more rich.

We planted another type of carrot called "scarlett nantes". These carrots grew very fast and seemed to do very well. These carrots looked very cylindrical, being thick, and stubby on the ends. Some grew as long as 8 inches and 1.5 inches in diameter.
They had a slightly different flavor than one may be used to in a carrot. A little bit more earthy, with just a hint of a musty flavor.

The third type of carrot we planted was called "royal chantennay", but they were planted in a part of the garden that was not well watered by the automatic sprinkler system that we had had installed, so the sprouts did not survive long, and we never had the chance to sample any of these.

One thing we did learn was that it is probably better to pull out the carrots when the soil is dry, because when the soil is wet, they seem to be "vacuum sealed" into the earth, and are very difficult to get out. Often the carrots will break half-way down as you try to wrench them out of the slippery. muddy soil, so try to pull them when the soil is dry and you'll save yourself a lot of effort and digging for broken carrot-halves. Carrots are often planted succesively, and can be left in the soil into the winter, though getting them may be difficult at that time.

We started two types of tomatoes indoors from seed. One type being the very large Beefsteak Tomato, and the other the small, acorn shaped roma tomato. Both grew vigorously as seedlings, but at the time of transplanting many of them had succumbed to a fungus, and were not looking very healthy. This was probably due to being overwatered in the early stages of their growth, allowing the fungus an overly wet environment in which it could establish itself. We we concerned that tomatoes affected by fungus may not survive, so we purchased about 12 tomato plants of varying types from a garden shop. We planted a total of about 40 tomato plants. Though the tomatoes affected by the fungus were a little slow to start, all recovered and did very well. We were a little short on tomato cages, so some plants were left without them. These plants could not support their own weight and sprawled out over the ground, at which point they were attacked by tomato eating snails. The snails were quite a problem and probably destroyed 5% of the tomatos that formed on the plants.

We started about 40 red onions indoors from seed, and actually ended up purchasing another flat of red onions and a flat of candy onions from a garden store. Each flat probaly had about a hundred small onions all clustered together. You have to pull them apart and plant them separately into your garden, about 5-8 inches apart. Onions are very strong and it's ok to tear the roots when pulling the clusters apart, which is about the only way you'll be able to do so. The bulbs of the red onions didn't grow nearly as large as those of the candy onions. Allthough the long, green onion tops of the red onions grew over 2 feet tall, the largest bulbs were only about 2.5 inches in diameter. In comparison the tops of the candy onions reached only about 16-18 inches tall, but some bulbs grew in excess of 3 inches in diameter. You can eat both the bulbs as well as the entire top of the onion, which depending upon who you ask, is often the best part.

We planted one package of about 40 Tiger Eye Bush Beans, which are larger, yellow colored beans with orange swirls on them. A very interesting looking bean, usually eaten as a dry bean. Though called a bush bean, the plants did grow long and viny, and promtly climbed up the sticks and poles we planted around them. Though they seemed to grow well, they only produced a handfull of dried beans.

We planted 2 packages of Windsor Fava Beans. We planted one patch in a shadier area, and another in the sun. The Fava bean planted in the shade grew 3 times as tall as the ones planted in the sun. The Fava Beans planted in the shade produced large 6-8 inch beans very quickly, while the ones in the sun did not. Both groups went dormant and looked as if they might die during the hottest part of the summer. Thier leaves curled tightly inwards indicating that they'd had enough sun, and were trying to limit their exposure. When temperatures relented in August, the very small Fava plants that had suffered so much in the direct sun suddenly bounced back and quickly began producing the same large beans, despite the much smaller size of the plants. The Fava Beans planted in the shade did not seem to bounce back in the same way, producing a few medium to large bean pods. Perhaps each plant can have only one good try at producing fruit. Fava Beans differ from most other beans in that it is possible for them to turn rancid if not stored properly. Generally Fava Beans are refridgerated after picking, and used within a week or two. You can eat the beans raw, but usually they are cooked. The pods are tough and not edible. It is possible to dry Fava Beans for later use or to plant next year, but I'm not too clear on how to do it right.

We planted one package containing about 40 Black Kabouli Garbanzo Beans. I had never seen a black Garbonzo Bean before, but they are truly black, and slightly smaller than it's more familiar counterparts. The plants looked very different than any of the other types of beans, so much so that they looked completely unrelated to each other. Most of the other types of beans have broad fleshy leaves, while the leaves of the garbanzo bean plants were very small and delicate, the plants looking almost fern-like. Before producing beans they developed very small lavender colored flowers, looking almost like miniature roses. All of the Garbanzo bean plants grew very slowly and never reached above 12-14 inches, each one producing only a dozen or so small pods containing one small black bean. The plants' small size may have been the result of planting them so late in the season. It is said that Garbonzo beans are particularly fond of cool weather, and the hot summertime temperatures that came so suddenly at the start of that year's growing season may have affected their productivity. As with most of the other beans, we let the pods dry on the plants. We ended up with only a small handfull of dried beans, but we may try again next year.

We planted 3 types of cauliflower that came in a mixed pack of seeds. One type produces bright purple cauliflower heads, another type produces pale green, and the other type the traditional white. They were started indoors and transplanted along with all the other seedlings. They grew well and became very large, but none of the 9 plants produced any cauliflower. We aren't sure why, but we may try again next year.

The Bloomsberg Spinache we planted didn't do well and we yeilded very little of it, probably because it was too hot. Many plants such as spinache and lettuce will "bolt" when it is too hot for them. Bolting is when the plant thinks that it's too hot to survive, or that it is late enough in the year that it should shift it's efforts to making flowers and seeds rather than producing the nice parts that you want to eat. Bolting often transforms the entire appearance of the plant. When bolting, lettuce and spinache grow very tall very fast, producing thick stems rather than tender leaves. Shortly after, they will develop seed clusters at their tips, which will later turn into flowers.

The snow peas grew very fast but produced only small number of pods, and died shortly after. We don't know why, but imagine that it may have been due to being planted so late in the season. We got about 3 dozen pods from about a half pack of seeds.

The soybeans didn't do too well, and again we suspect that it may have been due to the exceptionally late and then abruptly hot growing season we had. They were planted directly in to the garden as rhe package recommnded. The package said that if the weather was cold or wet, to wait untill it had dried before planting them, but being our first attempt at growing soybeans, we are not sure if the waether was a factor in their diminished success. We planted two packages each conatining about 60 seeds, but only about 10 plants emerged, and about 6 survived, giving us a couple of handfulls of bean pods. Soybeans differ from most other beans in that it is possible for them to turn rancid if not stored properly. Soybeans should be refridgerated after picking, and used within a week or two. You can eat the beans raw, or cooked. The pods are tough and not edible. It is possible to dry soybeans for later use or to plant next year, but I'm not too clear on how to do it right.

We planted about 40 Gold Mine beans, which are a long, slender and brightly yellow colored bean. They are usually easten as a snap bean. Only 2 or 3 of them emerged, and none survived longer than a couple of weeks due to snails. Snails were a persistent problem for us, and they really loves eating the young tender bean leaves. We estimate snails were responsible for the death of about 100- 200 bean plants, consuming every last leaf, ensuring the death of the seedling. Despite the snails, we are not sure why so few Gold Mine Beans emerged.

The rye didn't do well, again probably due to the heat. Rye is usually planted in the fall, and actually grows through the snow. We had heard that it was heat tolerant and thought we'd give it a try in the summer, but the grains it produced were too small and too scarce to be usable.