Learn About Spring Backyard Vegetable Gardening

Introduction
Growing your own vegetable garden is extremely rewarding and fun. When you grow your veggies, harvest them and cook them in your kitchen, you literally bring food from the garden to the plate. If you need soil for building new garden beds, you can search for “topsoil near me” and buy some from the nearest store. Let’s learn about spring backyard vegetable gardens.
The Details
- Make the most out of available space – Location is key while building your backyard garden. It can make or break your backyard garden. Location decides everything from the amount of sunlight your plants receive and frost protection to available water resources. When location is so important, you can’t waste the real estate on that location. You need to make the most out of your available space.
Backyard gardeners often get greedy and want a sprawling garden that can grow everything they could ever eat. If you have a large property that can even accommodate space-hungry crops like pumpkins, corn, melons, and cucumbers then all the power to you. However, if you have limited space, that isn’t an option. Instead, you need to maximize the use of space so that it’s sustainable and easy to care for the garden. You can use anything from a few containers to entire raised garden beds. It will depend on the layout of your backyard and the existing landscape.
- Ditch row planting – To maximize the space in your garden, you need to get rid of traditional row planting. While single-row crops on 3 to 4 feet wide beds are highly efficient on large farms, they aren’t suitable for small gardens. Large farms have industrial farming machines for planting and harvesting those crops and symmetrical geometry helps. On the other hand, in a home garden, fewer rows are favorable since you don’t waste space for paths in between those rows.
If you already grow everything you need with traditional row farming, adopting open beds or raised beds will allow you to grow the same number of crops in a smaller space and use the rest for planting green-manure crops. This makes crop rotation and other types of farming easier. You can also add variety to your garden by planting cherry tomatoes or herbs in that newly freed-up space.
That’s not the end of it. When you get rid of row farming, intensely planted crops on raised and open garden beds keep the soil from compacting and prevent moisture loss by shading the soil. That means fewer resources are wasted and you can expend less effort. Moreover, when you get rid of row planting and widen the beds there are fewer paths to walk on, and that drastically unintentional soil compaction.
- Grow up – Apart from intensive plating, you can also adopt trellising for increasing efficiency. When people have small gardens, they usually lean to vertical farming with vertical supports for growing as many veggies as possible. Even if you have a large garden, you’ll need vertical support for growing climbers like pole beans and peas. This is called trellising and is often used for vining crops like tomatoes and cucumbers.
If your garden is located beside your fence, you can make it serve a dual purpose. You can replace the old fence with a trellised version that uses crisscrossing wooden slats or some other material that provides plenty of leverage to climbers. This way the fence acts as a support for the garden veggies while shielding your property at the same time. For heavier veggies like melons and tomatoes, you may need to manually tie the developing products to the fence.
- Plant crops for continuous harvest – You need to plant crops in such a way that you get to harvest them and eat them fresh throughout the upcoming season. Plant a few transplants or seeds at a time throughout the spring season. It takes less effort and doesn’t require a lot of commitment on your part. Get the calendar and mark something new you can plant each week of the growing season.
For instance, if you want to eat fresh peas and other tiny greens, you can plant them during the winter for an early spring harvest. On the other hand, you can plant peppers, eggplants, and tomatoes when the frost goes away, and the soil is warmer. When you adopt the practice of succession planting you can extend your harvest season as long as you want. You don’t need to be buried by a mountain or beans or squash. Since you’re not a farmer that can sell those crops, you’ll be bored very quickly and end up wasting that food. Instead, when the harvest season can be stretched you get to try something different every week and keep the palette stimulated.
- Plants for your spring backyard garden – Before you start planting crops in your garden, you need to choose the crops carefully. Instead of growing random exotic crops, it’s better to figure out which crops your family likes to eat. You don’t want to grow those veggies for your kids to reject. Once that’s done, you can choose from a vast variety of plants that are suitable for growing in your region.
Some common spring veggies grown in backyard gardens include cucumber, honeydew, carrots, beets, tomatoes, beans, and broccoli. You can also grow aromatics like garlic. If you plant cucumbers during the spring, you can enjoy fresh cucumber water throughout summer. On the other hand, honeydew can be planted in late spring when the soil is warmer. If you have space for a small herb garden bed, you can also grow sage, mint, and chives during the spring season.
Conclusion
As you can see, spring backyard vegetable gardening isn’t too difficult. All it needs is a rudimentary understanding of the soil and plants and plenty of elbow grease. To make sure that your veggie garden grows perfectly you need to create a decent garden bed and it starts with sourcing the right topsoil. You can do that by searching for “topsoil near me” and buying some from a local store.