Vegetable Gardening

Growing your own vegetables right in your backyard can be very rewarding. Here's how to get started.

Before you plant a single seed, you have to choose the ideal site for the vegetable garden. Luckily, vegetable gardens don't require a lot of space - you can even grow veggies out of containers.

These three elements are important for every vegetable garden:

1. Sunshine
2. Water
3. Good soil

Avoid areas that are covered in shade most of the day. Your vegetables will need at least 6 hours of sunshine every day to grow strong and healthy. A garden near a convenient water source will make your life easy because watering will be at your fingertips. Good soil has a consistency between rock-hard clay and loose sand. But if your soil is less than ideal, don't worry - bad soil can be fixed rather easily.

Need a Landscaping Contractor? Find Landscaping Contractors in your area: Your zip code or city:

If you've never set up a vegetable garden before, create a small garden to begin with. A garden you can control, no matter how small, will yield more produce than a large one that has gone wild.

What should you grow?

Beginners often get overly excited and attempt to grow a wide variety of vegetables in one garden, but this can get you into trouble. The best way to get started is to grow the food you enjoy eating that is easy to grow and the most productive. Tomatoes, lettuce, radishes, peppers, snap peas, green onions, summer squash, and green beans are some of the best vegetables to grow at home. Stay away from vegetables such as corn, which requires too much space to grow and offers a low yield, asparagus, which takes two years to start growing, and green peas, which don't grow abundantly.

Read through garden catalogs to get ideas for what vegetables to grow and create a list of potential candidates for your garden. Grow a few varieties of the same vegetable so that if one doesn't do too well, you'll have a few plants to fall back on. In the following seasons you can learn from your mistakes and grow only the plants that did well in the previous year.

When choosing plants to grow, read the descriptions because some varieties produce small plants and others produce large ones. There are even some varieties bred to be disease resistant. In the end, your selections should be based on the type of garden you plan on growing.

Find a local Landscaping contractor.
View more Landscaping articles.