Create your own Vegetable Garden

Welcome to VegetableSeeds.info, the site where you can find useful information about various popular vegetables and growing them from seed aswell as tips for finding cheap seeds to sow and grow yourself. If you want to grow your own veg, create a kitchen garden or find veggie recipes then you've come to the right place!

The phrase 'vegetable garden' can be applied to large scale commercial operations, walled kitchen gardens attached to large stately homes or just a modest corner of any modern suburban garden. It is this last category that our site deals with, making the most of the available space to create a productive vegetable garden in any residential environment.

A couple of raised beds are a popular and effective way of separating vegetable plots from other areas of the garden, such as lawn, patio, decking, rockery or pond. They make for easier attention to the plants and are great for those gardeners with back, kneeling or mobility problems, raising plants a couple of feet off the ground. They also make for a large volume of soil but easy to control environment; old soil can be dug out and replaced with relative ease. They may also offer a small amount of protection from opportunist garden pests and wandering family pets. Raised beds can be constructed from stone, brick or heavy timbers and may be filled with a soil mixture tailored to the veg that will be grown in it.

Turning over a larger area to a veg garden may require a fair amount of work and ground preparation. Many people will choose to sacrifice a significant part of a lawn to create a vegetable plot in a small suburban garden but the rewards on the table will make it all worth the effort. Creating many raised beds or using large planters would prove to be prohibitively expensive for what is largely non-essential work.

Adequate depth of soil is essential for growing vegetables and digging deep down in advance is always to be recommended. Carrots will take on interesting shapes if they find a stone paving slab two inches below the surface but, having been denied the freedom they require, they won't grow very large or become particularly good specimens!

Large areas of ground should be dug out to good quality earth, turned over with appropriate soil, compost, manure and other natural materials and then the space marked out with drills or rows, canes and string. The distance between rows and cane structures will be dictated by the requirements of the soon to be grown vegetables and the specific dimensions of the plot.

Keeping the costs to a minimum

The major outlay with any basic veg garden will be time and labour. If it is not to include raised beds and costly hard landscaping materials then digging and preparation are the only things that stand between you and turning that corner of spare ground into a potentially productive veg garden.

Natural soil enhancers, according to the intended crop, may include ash from the fire, compost, manure and plant matter based fertilisers.

Twigs and branches, sourced from the garden, can be used instead of commercial canes. They can be made into strong pyramid frame structures and with plenty of string will be great for peas, allowing plants to grow tall, carrying many pods.

Small and simple cloche frames can be constructed in around fifteen minutes from a dozen thin twigs. Three hoops and a ridge are made from a dozen flexible twigs (privets or willow are effective) and all tied together with string. Clear plastic and some stones to weight it down complete the structure without the need to spend money on high tech cloches from the garden centre.

If necessary, makeshift coldframes and temporary hotbeds can be constructed using spare glass, wood, metal, sheeting or any other old DIY and building materials to hand. They don't need to look pretty just as long as they are stable and do the job.

Using natural pesticides and pest traps can save the cost and possible environmental issues associated with some commercial solutions. Non-harmful natural pesticides may be used (garlic works well) and can be produced from the veg garden itself. Beer traps are a perennially popular solution for retaliating against the slugs and are made from just a jam jar, buried to its neck in the ground and containing an inch of beer in the bottom. Not very nice to empty but a cheap and reasonably useful weapon in the fight against these destructive pests.

Find veg information, cheap vegetable seeds and barrows of garden, greenhouse and window-box fun. Grow your own carrots, potatoes, courgettes, radishes, onions and other essential vegetables. For bargain seeds and gardening tips come to VegetableSeeds.info

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