First time gardeners face a list of choices that can be somewhat daunting at first. Where to begin? What do I plant? What tools do I need? (and on and on…) But if taken a step at a time and prioritized correctly, the process can be streamlined quite a bit.

I’d like to give a few pointers here on some general priorities for people who are looking for direction.

Do’s and Don’ts

Location is one of the first concerns. Make sure it is a sunny space that receives at least six hours of sunlight per day, or more, without any major obstructions. The placement should be as close as possible to your house or kitchen to make it more likely to use the space for growing and make it easier to move produce from the garden to the house. But don’t locate it close to the house at the cost of sun exposure. Think about how close it is to your water source as well. The closer to a main water spigot, the less walking and hose lengths for you over the season.

Drainage is something to look at as you decide the site location. Gardening is harder on a hillside or on undulating ground, although it can work. You should preferably choose a flat site with good drainage around it, where it won’t get too waterlogged or too dry.

Plan for later expansion. 

You don’t want to paint yourself into a corner by limiting where your garden could expand later on if things went well. Try to visualize from the starting shape of your garden location, which direction it might expand in coming years if the gardening thing works out. It will make everything far easier to adjust later on if you simply add on to your existing garden in its original location. The exception here, of course, is if you only have limited space and don’t have the luxury of expansion. Then the garden will simply reside where it can.  If you’re planting in a container garden or planting boxes, that will make the garden space far more modular and portable, but will be a different animal than a traditionally planted garden space described here.

Size of the garden is dependent on a few things. Your time commitment is the first priority. Most gardeners are directed to start small, and I would tend to agree, but there are certain situations where starting a little bigger is also recommended. Lets say you have a situation where you are going to surround the garden plot with a fence and some permanent landscaping. If you start small you may fence in a shape that ends up being too small for your needs in a couple years. In a case like this, you might think about where the permanent border would go, start with that, but only cultivate the number of beds in that area that you have time for, while leaving the other untended beds sheet mulched and improve the soil until you can add them to your schedule. You will also want to keep in mind that it’s nice to have some spare space around the garden to use for compost piles, worm bins, storage, or maybe a chicken coop down the road. Design in a bit of extra space around the plot for the inevitable need for a spare place to put things.

Bed Shape is up to the gardener. Whimsical shapes designs can be interesting, but if you ask most long-time gardeners, the standard rectangular beds work best for the actual practice of gardening over time. A standard rectangle four to five feet wide by ten or twenty feet long is a good bed shape to create. The 4 foot width allows cultivation and weeding from both sides, and the length can vary, but 10 or 20-foot length on each bed is a common scale. It makes for easier irrigation, and can be transformed with a hoop house for season extension down the road at that size.

Raised Bed Garden? I recommend raised beds for a number of reasons.

• They warm up (and dry out) earlier in the season so you can work the soil and get seedlings in.
• They aid in accelerating plant growth since they have deeper soil with less compaction
• Creating good soil in a raised bed can be more easily done than trying to improve bad soil under your lawn.
• They improve drainage overall on the garden beds.
• Reduces the problem of invasive roots from neighboring trees and shrubs
• Adapts easily to cold frames and hoop houses
• Keeps dogs and other pets out of the beds since they take extra jump to get up into.

 

Now, that being said, this doesn’t mean you have to go out and buy a whole bunch of lumber to build wooden boxes for your raised beds. That route is fine and works quite well, but you can also create the borders on a raised bed with bricks, logs, and other found items you might have around. And you can create raised beds without any boarders by simply double digging your beds and adding composted organic matter to the soil during the process that raises the bed a good five to eight inches. If you do choose to build your own wooden boxes for raised beds, be sure to check out our unit on raised bed construction to avoid some of the common mistakes.

Fencing is a common step that is missed by beginning gardeners until they come out to their plots on a July morning and discover that the deer have feasted on all their precious crops. Depending on your situation, you might be installing waist-high garden wire fence to keep a few dogs out, or if you’re in deer country like I am, you may have to install a larger barrier.

One quick note on deer fencing. It doesn’t have to be too formidable. I have used what I call a “psychological deer fence” with great success in my garden. The main fence is a four-foot mesh fence strung between 8 foot posts, and I simply add a line of heavy gauge fishing wire at eye level and again at the top line of all the posts. The fishing line has a few strips of flagging at the mid point between each post so the string can be detected at night. This in itself won’t keep out a curious deer, but the next step will. Inside the perimeter of the fenced in garden you place four drive-in metal six-foot fence posts available at most lumber yards. You simply place one of them in each corner about two feet inside the perimeter of the original fence. You then string a piece of white clothesline at the four-foot level of the posts and it creates a floating rope square that the deer see inside the jump zone. This landing area is critical for the deer, and since that rope hangs in the way, they simply won’t jump the fence.

Diagram your ideas on paper and get a feel for what it might look like. Once you have decided on location and general size of the garden plot and the number and size of the beds inside that plot, a fun way to make it more real at first is by using Google Maps. Just go to Google, choose maps, and enter your address. Make sure the satellite view is checked in the upper right. Now zoom into your house and yard until you get too close and the resolution drops. Back up one step and save your screen. (Screen shot)

How to take a screen shot:

For Mac:

Then find that screenshot on your desktop and open it in an image-editing program. You can add the garden bed shapes to your photograph there, or print out the photo on paper and draw them in by hand. Keep it on file to visualize how you started.

For Windows:

Then open any image-editing software and open new image and paste your screenshot from the clipboard. You can add the garden bed shapes to the image in that software, or print out the image on paper and draw them in by hand.

So it might look something like this:

So now you see a person who is planning on four beds, with the long edge  running roughly north to south, with a fence line around it. Notice there is also ample space on the right for later compost piles, worm bins or maybe a chicken coop. Either way, it leaves options for the gardener to utilize the space available, while leaving some extra space around the garden for other components. Make sure you don’t put compost at least 20 feet from the beds. You want enough separation so that critters that hide there won’t sneak into the beds.

OK, so now you should have step one accomplished. If you haven’t yet, then turn off the computer, go outside and sit in your yard for a while so you can visualize your new garden and lets get started.

Tom.