Planning Your Edible Garden Is Important – This Is Why

Published on 04/28/2020
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Gardeners of every caliber have been in pursuit of the best specimens with the strongest genetic qualities since the beginning of known history. Through intensive caring and a whole lot of know-how, horticulturalists have produced some of the most beautiful plant varieties that we have the pleasure of enjoying. Peaches were not always the big, juicy, fragrant fruit we know of today. Many grape varieties we can buy off the shelf, didn’t even exist fifty years ago. The choices are nearly endless and are bound to become even more and even better, given what we’ve learned thus far.

Planning Your Edible Garden Is Important This Is Why

Planning Your Edible Garden Is Important This Is Why

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Outlay Efforts Will Affect The Outcome

As much planning as you can muster will be required if you want to build your own perfect garden. Keeping in mind that while the plants are still small they might look a little far apart, but in nearly no time at all, they will be bigger and that spacing will be filled with big, beautiful, well-shaped plants bearing better yields than if they had been forced to be too close together. Diseases and pests are easier to avoid when plants are not growing all over each other and being able to reach everywhere are also very important, you don’t want to be stepping on cauliflower leaves growing over the path, nor do you want to knock all the heads off the carrots when you pull the hose around the garden.

We’ve been planting our crops in straight rows for centuries, but the landscape of our gardens don’t always lend themselves easily to this rigid structure. So we have learned to adapt our needs to the spaces available to us by incorporating edible plants among the pretty flowers and ornamental shrubs. Or as in some cases, completely do away with all the ornamentals and replace them with berry bushes and fruit trees, and the rest of the available space is filled with pathways around all the edible plants, instead of a costly and rather pointless lawn.

Evenly Spacing Crops Is Crucial

Two of the planning mistakes that easily happen, even to experienced gardeners, are overcrowding and planting everything at the same time. The tendency to forget that while today might be a lovely day, we may not yet be out of the freezer yet. The weather will have a major effect on your plants and careful planning can be the saving grace at the end of the day. Sowing seeds in batches about 2-3 weeks apart can ensure that any seedlings already planted out but damaged in the first few weeks, while winter and spring were finishing their battle, can be replaced by the new ones from the following batches. Snails and slugs also tend to take a toll, so it helps to have some seeds left over to replace the little claimed victims.

Evenly Spacing Crops Is Crucial

Evenly Spacing Crops Is Crucial

Know Your Produce And Its Purpose

The planting of beneficial plants is basically an ancient tradition, like medicinal plants to cure the ails of the human body and those we plant that has no other use than to keep pests at bay. Plants with qualities disliked by pests, like marigolds and onions when in flower. Other plants such as dandelions, can act as attractors for pests like aphids, making it easier to carefully remove and destroy that plant without having to resort to pesticides to control the aphids.

Deliberate planning is the point here, you’re not going to know it all first time around and that’s okay. The joy of nurturing a living thing to the point where it returns that love in the form of its fruit, is a joy some compare to watching their children grow up well.

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