Planning a large vegetable garden will involve creating permanent structures such as storage sheds and compost heaps.  In addition, dividing your area is important to have space to rotate your vegetable groups. Here are a few ideas that will facilitate a large vegetable garden design.

Planning a Large Vegetable Garden

Large vegetable gardens need to be planned like any garden: they need good light, soil, and space. Larger gardens have abundant space and don’t face the problems created by shadows from nearby buildings. You’ll need to make sure the soil is in good shape for growing your favorite veggies and herbs.

As you plan your garden, consider adding structures, such as greenhouses and polytunnels, that will help you extend your growing season. Year-round gardening is one of my dreams.

With a large space for gardening, you can split your plot into definite areas, which will help with proper crop rotation.

As you journey into large vegetable gardening, plan to set everything up over two seasons.

Start small if necessary

It’s important to remember not to try to complete everything in the first season. A large gardening area can be quite daunting, and there’s nothing wrong with starting your garden on a small scale. Each consecutive season, you can introduce new structures, vegetables, and herbs so you can actually enjoy your time in the garden.

In the first year, build (or purchase) a storage shed to keep yourself organized. Also, a water collection system and a couple of compost heaps should be set up.

In the second year, introduce a poly-tunnel, some fruit cages, and permanent crop areas.

Using garden beds

Using beds in your garden makes it easier to care for it. You don’t need to walk on the soil, and you can grow your vegetables a little closer together. This improves yields.

It may seem a little wasteful to have grass paths between each vegetable patch, but as you never need to dig or feed the paths, it will save you time. And when you think that you need walking space between crops anyway, using beds improves the yield.

If you don’t like mowing between your garden beds, you can create a stone path or add a ground cover that grows close to the ground.

Vegetable sowing the right way

You will also need to decide what you will sow in one go and what you will sow in succession. In our plan, almost all the vegetable plants would be sown when suggested. For example, we need 120 leeks, 40 calabrese (broccoli), and about 12 courgettes (zucchini), so at the earliest opportunity the plan gives us, we would sow enough seeds to provide us with these plants.

We don’t count each seed: instead, we scatter sow small seeds and double sow larger ones, thinning out the seedlings so that we have the right number of plants.

Vegetables Planting Calendar

By using succession sowing and closer spacing, you can grow almost every vegetable you eat during the year.

If you have a large garden, you could create a growing list based on the vegetables you buy more often and grow the vegetables you are more likely to eat.

Here is a helpful guide:  Vegetable Gardening: A Beginner’s Guide – TUTORING YOU

But whatever you decide to grow, understanding vegetable groups and crop rotation is very important in a large vegetable garden.

Our plan also directs us to sow over 60 lettuces from the beginning of March, which would not be a good idea. Lettuces tend to take a few months to mature but will only be edible for a few weeks, so unless you can eat 20 lettuces a week, you are better off staggering your sowing. This is known as succession sowing.

We tend to sow lettuce every three weeks, sowing enough for a three-week period. If you eat three lettuces per week, you will need nine plants plus some for losses. You’ll need some seed-sowing trays.

Of course, sowing 12 seeds in individual cells will be a real fiddle, so instead, scatter sow on each cell and pinch out all but the strongest seedlings as they germinate.

Plan to spend some time in your garden

Although it is very difficult to quantify how much time you will need to grow your own vegetables on a larger scale, you must expect that during the growing season, an allotment-sized garden will take up a couple of evenings and at least half the weekend.

And as the harvest starts coming in, processing the bumper crops will keep you in the kitchen far longer than you might have imagined. I’m not trying to discourage you, but planning with your eyes open is much better.

Source:  backyardgardenlover.com

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