Easy Tips For Starting A Vegetable Garden in Your Backyard

Starting a vegetable garden might seem like hard work. But there’s nothing more rewarding than eating food that you have put in all the hard work to grow yourself. In this post we go over some tips for starting a vegetable garden in your backyard.

Should You Start A Vegetable Garden?

Gardening provides many benefits including things like great stress relief and some added physical activity (which lets be honest, most of us can use a bit more of that these days right?).

Another wonderful benefit of starting a backyard vegetable garden is better health from eating healthy foods and having less commercial chemicals on that food you are eating.  When you grow your own food you are in control of what is used on that food to get it to your kitchen table.

When you grow your own food you also don’t have to pick the vegetables or fruit before they’re really ready since you only have a transport time of your backyard to your kitchen. By doing this you get the food when it’s really ripe, the taste is so much better than what you get in the store, because you are getting it when it is intended to be eaten by nature.

With all of these benefits, what are you waiting for? Get your own backyard garden started today!

Tips for Starting a Vegetable Garden

Find The Right Spot For Your Garden

The first thing you need to do when you want to start a vegetable garden is to find an area in your backyard and get it ready to start planting stuff in.

You will want a spot that gets lots of sun, at least 6 hours of sun a day. I usually prefer a spot that has around 8 hours of sun per day.

Determine Which Way You Want to Grow

You also want to figure out if you want to have a traditional dig garden or a no-dig garden. My preferred and easiest way is I use 2 x 6 pieces of wood and create a border for a slightly raised garden area. This way I can add quality soil and soil amendments like worm castings along with compost to make sure my garden has the best nutrients available to the plants I’m going to grow in it. 

If you choose to go with the traditional dig method, you will want to till the soil so your vegetable plant’s roots are able to grow well in the soil and it won’t be too compacted to impair their growth. Once you have tilled the soil you will still want to amend the tilled soil with things like worm castings and compost or manure. 

How To Start Composting In A Tumbler

What To Grow In Your Vegetable Garden

After you have picked out the best spot for your garden and have gotten all ready for planting, you need to figure out what you want to grow in your new backyard vegetable garden you have started.

While it’s tempting to just go out and try to grow your family’s favorite vegetables, as a new gardener sometimes this can be detrimental.

Not all vegetables are the easiest to grow, and as you are just learning how to garden you want to start out with vegetables that are easy to grow.

Some great options of easy to grow vegetables for new gardeners are:

• Tomatoes
• Zucchini
• Cucumbers
• Lettuce
• Green Beans
• Garlic
• Pumpkins
• Carrots

After you get more of a green thumb you can start adding to your garden. 

How To Start Your Vegetables

You will also want to decide if you are wanting to purchase seedlings that have already been started or if you want to start your vegetable garden plants from seed. 

If you are starting a bit later in the growing season the seedlings will be your best bet on getting a good harvest.

But if you want to start from scratch, and especially if you want to try to get a head start on the growing season you can start from seed, and start them inside if it’s before the last frost for your area.

The Garden Layout

Once you have your garden spot prepared and you know what you want to grow, you need to plan the layout that you want for your garden.

The best way to do this is to get out some graph paper and a pencil and draw your garden layout.  

Some vegetable plants can grow closer together. Others however will need a bit more space and will have to be spread out. 

Have The Right Garden Tools

Any new gardener is going to need some essential garden tools when starting a new garden.

You’ll want to cover some of the essentials:

• Garden Hose
• Pruning Sheers
• Garden Trowel
• Garden Gloves
• Digging Shovel

Checkout which basic garden tools you’ll want for starting out with your new garden here:

Basic Gardening Tools For Your Garden

Start Growing

Seed packets or the care instructions for seedlings will tell you what each vegetable plant needs. You can also look it up online easily if you haven’t purchased seedlings or seeds yet. 

My top three favorite places for ordering seeds are True Leaf Market, Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, and Burpee.

Tips for Starting A Vegetable Garden Conclusion

• Find an area that gets at least 6 hours of sunlight per day.
• Determine how you want to start your garden, dig, no-dig, raised beds, containers, etc.
• Get the soil ready for growing vegetables.
• Pick out the vegetables that you want to grow.
• Draw your layout.
• Make sure you have your essential garden tools.
• Get your seeds or seedlings.
• Start your new garden.

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