GROW YOUR OWN FOOD - 3

Garden Location

Hello Everyone,

Last week we talked about the three different styles of gardening and the space requirements for each one. Now that you’ve made a decision on what type of garden fits your setting, and started looking for the perfect spot in your yard, we can begin the next step in preparing your garden.

You need to decide on the perfect spot in your yard. If you are limited in space, this will probably be easy since you don’t have many choices. But if you have a large piece of property, you will have to decide where your garden will go. There are several things to think about when picking your location.

They are as follows :

Sun - You want a place that gets full sun at least 75% of the day. Stay away from trees and anything else that might obstruct the sun from reaching your plants. If there is an obstruction you can’t avoid, you will want your garden on the south side of it. Make sure you pay attention to the shady spots throughout the day, you might have a perfect spot in the morning hours, but in the afternoon, it could turn into a shady spot. You want the most sun as possible.

Water - you need water for your garden so unless you plan on watering by bucket or an auxiliary pump, you will need your garden reachable by a garden hose. You can install an underground water supply out to your garden, but it takes time and money. I’ve installed water lines all over my property so if you need help getting started running a water line, shoot me an email or dm and I’m happy to help. Just make sure your future garden location can be reached with a garden hose.

Pests and Critters- You want to keep your garden fairly close to your house. There are a few reasons for this. One, is because you will need to be in your garden at least once a day, the farther it is from your house, the less likely it is that you will enter it and work in it. Second, there are many rodents and pests that will want to eat your plants, keeping it close to your house and human activity will help to reduce furry friends from getting your goods. Another good idea is to put your garden close to natural bushes and woods if possible. The natural wildlife will comingle with your garden. Birds can easily fly into your garden from the woods or trees and eat bugs. Wasps, lizards, frogs, bees, birds, are all your friend, you want these animals in your garden as much as possible to kill/eat the bad bugs.

Space - I recommend leaving yourself as much space as possible. For my set up, I use a small tractor to till up the ground. So I left myself plenty of space around my garden area. I also install temporary fencing around my garden to keep dogs, chickens, and kids out! You may need to bring a trailer load of mulch or top soil, so think about leaving yourself access to your garden.

If you are doing raised beds you want to leave yourself plenty of walk space in between them for a wheel barrow or other equipment, like a lawn mower to mow the rows.

I recommend taking a piece of paper and sketching out your proposed garden location and put in the real dimensions to make sure every thing works. You will leave this set up for as long as you’re living at this house so take the time and set it up right the first time.

This is a rough sketch I did of my property.(not to scale)

As you can see from my set up, the garden is right in the center of my property. So there’s no way I can forget about it, or go a day without seeing it. It’s close to my house so it’s easy to run a water hose. The arrows show how I left room to be able to drive a truck and trailer through my back yard if needed. These are all things to consider when picking a spot for your garden.

See you next week, if you’re doing an in-ground garden we’re going to test our soil!

WAGMI,

Farmer