Hi, I’m Ed Bruske and we’re talking about how you can grow your own vegetable garden. And one of the first things you want to think about is, where are you going to put this garden and how big. Before you start tearing up your front yard, think about where those vegetable beds are going to grow and you might want to ask yourself how much can you eat. Because even in a small space, you can produce a lot of vegetables.
Well you wanted first of all to be as close as you can get to a water source. You don’t want to have to be going miles for water and in some community gardens that actually can be an issue because they don’t have running water nearby. So get it close to water and also try to get as close to your kitchen as you can so you don’t have to cart those vegetables a long way before you can start cooking them.
Vegetables are plants they need three things to survive. They need food, water, and sunlight. And in an urban areas especially, sunlight can be a real issue. Trees, buildings, they can all block your sunlight and leafy vegetables like lettuce need probably at least four hours in order to get the sunlight that they need. Fruiting vegetables such as tomatoes and squash, eggplant, they need probably six hours minimum in order to produce that kind of vegetables you really want to see.
So think about how the sun travels through the sky where your vegetable garden is going to be. Of course, in the winter, in our part of the world, it's going to be much lower in the sky and the raise are going to be less than tenths. But as you move toward June and the summer equinox, the sun is going to travel much higher in the sky. So with that shifting of the sun, sunlight may or may not be blocked by large canopy trees or your house or a neighbor’s house or a tall building.
Now, as a graphic example, I’m standing here near the peas that I planted back in early March and if you look closely, you can see that at one end of the line here, which runs east and west, the peas are actually taller and have progressed farther than the peas at the other end of the line. And the simple explanation for that is the sun behind me is traveling from east to west and right about noon time the peas down here at this end of the line lose their sunlight while the peas down at this end of the light as the sun continues to travel, get at least another hour of sun everyday.
So the peas here are already in bloom. Assuming they’re fertilized are going to start producing peas fairly shortly while the peas down here are just starting to form their flower buds. And at down at the end, we don’t even see any flower buds. So there is still several days behind these peas here. That’s how sunlight can affect your vegetables. Those are some considerations for where to put your garden.
Next, we’re going to talk about another very important step you need to take before you actually start gardening and that’s how to test your soil.
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