The Meadowwood Garden Design
Part 4 in a series of posts about one method of easily building a vegetable garden.
A Very Important Step
Designing a vegetable garden? What is there to design? Don’t you just dig up a spot and start planting your seeds in it? Why should I waste my time doing this?!?
All good questions. Designing your garden (and by designing I mean drawing it up on graph paper like in the photo of Meadowwood Garden’s 2008 design on the right) will help you determine 3 critical things you need to know before you can build your garden…
How much soil will I need? When I first set about designing Meadowwood Garden I failed to take this into account! Then I started calling around to get prices on topsoil and the first question they asked was, “How many cubic feet do you need?” Yeah, they sell topsoil by the cubic yard — who knew? Fortunately I had been smart enough to graph out my garden design so with a little thought it was pretty easy to figure out exactly how much topsoil the garden was going to require. I’ll share how to determine this in the next article!
How much fencing material will I need to purchase? If you live in an urban or suburban area you might not need to fence your garden in at all. Lucky you if that is the case! The rest of us need to have some sort of barrier to protect our garden from pests like deer, rabbits, hungry neighbors, etc. By designing your garden ahead of time you will easily be able to determine exactly how much fencing material you will need to purchase. And in the next article in the series I’ll show you my recommendation for an inexpensive yet extremely sturdy fence that should last for decades!
Will I have room for everything I want to plant? Once the gardening bug bites you will never, ever have a large enough garden! Having said that, in the beginning you will definitely want to think through what you want to plant just to make sure that your garden isn’t too cramped to even stand up in. My experience this year is that the plants grew WAY larger than I had thought they would, and I planted WAY too many of each type. For example, one zucchini plant will feed a small town, so I must have been high on compost when I planted 11 of them!!! My advice to you is to err on the side of giving the plants more room than you think they will need, but plant a few less than you think you want.
So now that you know why it is so important to design your vegetable garden on paper let’s explore how easy it is to do. First you will need some graph paper. Since I’m cheap and it only takes 1 piece of graph paper for the design I did a quick search and found a couple websites you can visit to print your own! The first will generate a .PDF file that you can save, edit and print. The second site is literally just a graph on the screen — use your browser print command and you are all set.
The Meadowwood Garden Design
Now grab a pen or pencil and get started! One square on the graph paper represents one square foot in your garden. So if you want to have a bed that is 3 feet wide by 10 feet long you would draw a rectangle that is 3 squares wide by 10 squares long. Use the sample Meadowwood Garden design posted above to give you some idea of what you are looking to create. See how easy it is?
A few hints that might help:
- Determine your reach. It doesn’t matter if your beds are square, rectangular, circular, triangular or whatever. What does matter is you need to be able to reach into all parts of the bed without stepping in it. An easy way to determine your comfortable reach is to put a yardstick on the floor, kneel down at one end and record how far you can comfortable reach out. For me it is about a foot and a half, but everyone has their own comfort zone. Multiply this number by 2 and this will give you the maximum width for your beds (in my case 3 feet).
- Give yourself room to move. You will want the beds to be about 2 or 3 feet apart to comfortably walk between them. Leave 3 feet between the beds and the fence. In the beginning when the vegetables are small this will seem like a huge distance, but after the vegetables mature you will thank me for this recommendation.
- Put your gate somewhere convenient. You will be entering your garden a lot over the years. if you put the gate close to the house and close to where your tools are stored it will help a lot. The gate for Meadowwood garden is as close to the outbuilding and water source as possible.
- If you need to fence it do it right. Unless you build fences for a living you probably know as much about them as I did when I started. For a sturdy fence you will want to place a fencepost every 8 feet around the perimeter of the garden. The fencing I will recommend using comes in 16 foot lengths. Regardless of whether you use what I will recommend or not you will reduce headaches if you make the outside dimensions of your garden in multiples of 8 feet — for example 16 feet by 8 foot, or 32 feet by 16 feet.
- Give the vegetables enough room to grow! In my opinion this is probably the hardest part of designing the garden. You won’t really know how large a particular vegetable will be when it is mature until it actually grows! The best thing you can do here is to estimate. Many seed catalogs give plant spacing recommendations. There is a decent chart here that details vegetable plant spacing. Personally I ignore the “Inches between rows” numbers in order to have a slightly denser planting — but I’m a daredevil that way!
That about wraps it up for this post. If you take a little time to sit down and draw your garden plan out on paper you will reap the rewards come harvest time!
