Plan your vegetable garden and save effort later

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• Article 1 - planning for success
• Learning - a better companion crop than garlic to help protect carrots is ...
• Latest web pages - suggestions on the best/ earliest/ easiest vegetable crops to grow ...
• My vegetable garden - Asparagus is ready for cutting - Yummee!

It is all too easy to buy some seed, sow it and hope for the best, but in my experience some planning first provides a much better way forward ... a successful future ... with your efforts turned in favour of producing a plentiful supply of great tasting fresh vegetables.

Your planning should include the following aspects;

• identifying your own needs
• find out about your vegetable garden site (conditions, soil, weeds, aspect, what needs doing)
• what you want to grow and how it fits with other crops to form a good crop rotation
• how you will lay out your vegetable garden
• what preparation you need in the form of clearance, weed control and soil preparation
• preparing for the year with your vegetable garden layout and planting plan
• sowing/ planting times to get the best from those precious seeds
• allow time for weeding and watering and most importantly the fruits of your labours at the plot, but also eating!
• remember don't over do it, allow time to enjoy it - the vegetable garden can be a great place to escape from life's troubles, get a great sense of satisfaction and pleasure from growing your own food and even make new friends.

Choose your companion plants carefully to give maximum protection. Use of garlic with carrots gave good early protection from carrot root fly, but not later as the garlic had matured such that later planting suffered. Better protection is gained from sowing carrots between early established leeks.

• easy vegetables - ideal to maximise success of the new vegetable gardener
• best vegetables to grow - guidance to suit all tastes
• early vegetables - an introduction to what you can sow/ plant early and what you can be eating in spring
• my vegetable garden - gain an insight in to and keep up to date with progress on the web masters own vegetable garden

We are still harvesting purple sprouting broccoli, leeks, parsnips and to our delight ...are just about to pick our first Asparagus of the year. So can look forward to 6 weeks of decadent living.

The first beetroot, carrots and lettuce are sown, and the 3 beds of potatoes are planted with well chitted seed and ridged up. The shallots and garlic are growing well and red onions have emerged from seed - sadly I couldn't find any sets this year.

Weeding is up to date - yes!

The compost is being spread and this week I'm preparing beds for planting later with curcubits like melon, courgette, outdoor cucumber and butter nut squash, which are just being sown indoors.

It is great to see well prepared healthy soil being gradually covered by spring plantings and a gradual greening with fresh young vegetable crops.

Best wishes and happy vegetable gardening.

Colin (easy-vegetable-gardening.com)