Vegetable Garden Site Preparation: How To Find And Prepare The Best Spot For Your Veggie Garden
Unsure where you are going to grow your vegetables? Learn the main steps of vegetable garden site preparation so you can have the best spot!
So you’re raring to go and just want to get growing.
But STOP!!
Not so fast.
There are a few steps you need to take to ensure success in setting up your first garden and have less frustration!
Note: I’m an advocate for raised beds instead of traditional in ground vegetable beds or row gardening as it is sometimes called. So you’ll notice below references mainly to raised bed gardening but most of this information can also be applied to traditional in-ground beds.
Find The Best Location For Your Vegetable Garden
There is nothing more important than finding the best vegetable garden location. You can have the best soil and the best plants, but if your beds are in the wrong place, you won’t have much success.
The key properties for the best location for your vegetable garden are
- sunlight
- drainage
- access.
Let’s look at each one in detail.
Sunlight
The key to growing most vegetables is sunlight. Plants use sunlight to convert water and oxygen via photosynthesis literally into food (mainly glucose) to sustain them. Without adequate sunlight your plants will still grow but not well.
As the infographic “Sunlight Requirements for Vegetables” shows, fruiting plants like tomatoes need lots of sunlight and heat to mature the fruits. Whereas leafy greens like lettuce can handle part shade and only a few hours of sunlight a day.
I would not try and grow anything in full shade, except in the heat of the summer and only those veggies that can manage just a few hours of sun.
In an urban backyard your vegetable garden is going to be competing with your house, your neighbours’ houses, established trees on your property and neighbouring properties, and those tall hedges that are great for screening off your neighbours but also good at blocking sunlight.
Not only do I grow vegetables in my backyard for my family to eat, but also I have 9 fruit trees! This is a similar setup to what my parents had when I was growing up.
It was always a bit of a compromise having these productive fruit trees when we need enough sunlight on our vegetable garden. And now I have the same problem.
So trees are great if they are in the right spot, not so great if they end up shading your garden. Ideally you want your trees to be north of the raised bed garden, so that any shade they cast misses the garden.
You’re likely never going to find the perfect sunny spot in a small urban backyard, so you’ll have to compromise and find the best spot you can.
The best way to find that choice spot where you’ll get the most sunlight is by monitoring the sun throughout the day. Pick a day in early to mid spring and literally set a timer to go out and check every hour or two hours.
Best is if you make a sequence of photos like I did here from my second floor deck that has a great view of my raised bed garden: