To begin with, you need to compile the list of vegetables that you plan to grow. You must also decide which, if any, vegetables you will start from seed inside, which you’ll sow as seed directly into your garden, and which you’ll purchase as seedlings from a nursery.

Additionally, you should list supplies you’ll need for growing seedlings indoors, and begin to gather these items. It is also helpfulto start composing a rough sketch of your garden layout. Finally, you should draw up a calendar of garden tasks to do, to help you stay on schedule as the season progresses.

Start by thinking about which vegetables you’d like to grow this year. If you’ve had a vegetable garden before, you should consider what grew well for you before and what failed. Certainly include any of your old favorites, those vegetables that are easy to grow and can be relied upon to produce abundantly.

There may be new vegetables you’d like to try, or new varieties of your old favorites that you would like to experiment with. You’ll want to think about vegetables that you’d like to provide fresh from your garden over the summer, as well as considering any vegetables that you’d like to can, freeze, or store for fall and winter eating.

If this is your first vegetable garden, it’swise to start small. A small kitchen garden often or twenty square feet, planted with a handful of vegetables and herbs, will keep you fairly busy with garden tasks, supplement your family’s food, and provide you with good gardening experience to go forward.

Don’t forget to take your growing zone into consideration when choosing vegetables to grow. If you are not sure which zone you live in, you can readily find out in almost any gardening book or online. Do some research on gardening in your region to find out how long your growing season is, when planting time starts, and what types of vegetables do best where you live. Don’t overlook neighbors and friends who garden as potential sources of useful tips.

As you find out more about your growing zone, you will very likely find yourself adding to or subtracting from your to-grow list. If you don’t receive catalogs at home, you can search for vegetable seeds online where you will find many choices of suppliers.Continue to refine your list by researching what each type of vegetable needs in terms of space and garden conditions.

Does it need to be trellised? Can it be crowded together, or does it need plenty of room? Does it prefer full sun, or like some shade? Additionally, you can delve a little deeper into your choices by comparing varieties of each type of vegetable. Most vegetables are available in dozens of varieties. Varieties differ in terms of taste, yield, length of growing time, and resistance to disease, so do your homework to determine which type is the best for you to grow. If you have room, why not try a couple of varieties of each vegetable on your list, and compare for yourself? While you are researching characteristics of vegetables, don’t forget to note when each plant needs to get started, either inside or out.

Certain vegetables, like carrots or green beans, don’t like to be transplanted, and must be directly sown as seed where they will grow. You can get around a short growing season by starting some seeds inside, weeks ahead of the planting date. Make sure you know exactly when to plant everything on your list.Thankfully everything does not need to go into the garden at the same time.

While you are at it, read about companion planting too. Many vegetables thrive when planted next to certain other vegetables, herbs, or flowers. They can share nutrients, provide shade for each other, or distract pests that are harmful from each other. You’ll want this information handy when you sketch out your garden map.

By now you probably have modified your vegetable list a bit, and that brings you to the next decision. You need to think about how you will approach the growing season. Do you intend to start many of your own seeds inside ahead of time? Or will you try to directly sow most seeds into the garden? Will you buy some seedlings already started at a local nursery, and if so, which ones? These are considerations of time, space, and money. There isa great deal of satisfaction in starting things from seed, and it can be significantly less expensive than buying plants from a nursery.

On the other hand, growing seeds inside requires materials and space where small plants can safely grow. If you are going to start vegetables from seed, you’ll need to finalize your choices, particularly for any of those vegetables that need to get started early. Once you’ve placed an order, you should draw up a list of materials needed to start your indoor nursery. You will need those seeds, along with potting soil, peat pots, and some method of covering and protecting baby seedlings.

Remember, while you can always make your garden bigger next year, it can be very discouraging to have a garden that is too big. An overly ambitious garden can lead to being overwhelmed with work or weeds, or having to watch vegetables going to waste because you can’t harvest them fast enough. Roughly sketch your garden with its approximate dimensions. Take into consideration requirements of sun and shade; trellising or staking, and space requirements for each type of vegetable.

If this is your first garden, deciding how to fit things in could be a bit of a reality check. The garden fills up quickly. Don’t forget to leave space in the garden for yourself! You’ll need room to get reasonably close to plants to care for them and to harvest them. Make sure that you aren’t creating beds that are so large that you cannot reach into the middle.

Start a little garden notebook and record all of the helpful information you find, and keep it where you can refer back to it readily. Again, catalogs, the libraryand online resources abound. Don’t forget to pick the brains of your local garden supply people, or anyone you know with a green thumb.

And most importantly, don’t forget to approach the whole thing with a positive mindset – think of it as Zen meditation – and by the end of the year, if you follow your plan, you can be eating your very own home grown organic food.

Gardening books always include long lists of pests and diseases and make it look as if these problems are lurking around every corner, just waiting to burst in on your garden and ruin your crops. In fact, it is unlikely that most gardeners will ever see a fraction of these during his or her lifetime, and, if they do, they are probably not really worth worrying about.

A mixed garden

One of the best ways of keeping the garden pest free is to grow a wide range of crops. If you only grow carrots and carrot root fly turns up and devastates your crop, you have nothing left. However, if you grow 20 different types of vegetables, you are only going to lose a twentieth of your total crop, which is relatively insignificant.

A mixed garden, which contains plenty of flowers – particularly the old-fashioned varieties – will attract a host of wildlife such as ladybirds, hoverflies and plenty of other predators, which will attack any pests that arrive in the garden. I have a large cottage garden with several large flower gar­dens within it and I am rarely troubled by even such common pests as aphids. Indeed, I cannot actually remember the last time any chemicals were used on my garden, not because I am against using chemical treat­ments, but because it has just not been necessary to do so.

Caterpillars

There are three ways of dealing with cater­pillars. The first is preventative. Cover the plants with fleece or small-mesh netting so that butterflies and moths cannot lay their eggs. The second is to check susceptible plants regularly and remove any eggs or cater­pillars by hand. You may miss a few, but this usually keeps the problem within reasonable bounds. The third is to use chemicals. Again, be certain that they are suitable for vegetables and follow the instructions scrupulously.

Diseases

Good housekeeping can prevent many diseases. Remove diseased or rotting mater­ial as soon as you see it. Deter aphids, which are often the carriers of disease, and, as a matter of practice, do not use the same ground two years running for the same crop. Wet, ill-drained soil may be the cause of some diseases, so improving the condition of the soil can be an important factor in keeping disease at bay. Healthy, well-fed and watered plants are less likely to fall prey to disease. Never buy, or accept as gifts, diseased plants.

Many modern hybrids are less suscepti­ble to certain diseases than some of the older ones, so choose your varieties with care, if you are worried about possible diseases.

Some diseases can be treated with chemicals, but if there is any doubt, dig up the affected plants and burn them as soon as possible. If you do use chemicals, be careful and follow all instructions, especially the safety ones. Store chemicals well out of the reach of young children.

Burning is the only solution for plants suffering from viral diseases, such as mosaic virus on marrows (zucchini) and cucumbers or on spinach, because there is no known cure. Burning vegetables may seem a waste, but it is far better to safeguard the unaffected plants as well as in prevent spores from getting into die soil. If this does happen, next year’s plants might be affected as well. To avoid this, use a rotational system of growing crops.

Remember not to put diseased plants on the compost heap. In theory, the compost should get hot enough to kill off any spores, but you can never be quite certain that all parts of the heap are sufficiently, hot, and you might end up spreading the disease over the whole garden.

The amount of space you have needs to be considered first where you will be gardening. Many people have just a small plot of 3ft into 3ft where the herb choices need to be narrowed a little compared to someone who has a large plot to do the same thing in. If it is a small plot that you have to work on or would like to add some minor effects to the larger space; you can consider planting the herbs in pots and a few of them can be planted in the ground. When we talk about herbs; there are simply hundreds of varieties available in them today; the best to do is determining the usage of your herb garden. If you just want an herb garden for showing and that would be pleasing when it comes to the smell of it; herbs can be chosen depending on the scents they carry. A great combination would be planting thyme, basil, and rosemary together to just filling your garden up lavenders.

If you plant to have an outdoor herb garden for cooking purposes; you need to determine the plants that will be the most useful for this purpose. For example, I have seen several Italian herb gardens that will have parsley, oregano, and basil in them. Depending on the type of plant you go for; either you can plant a lot of similar herbs close to each other or you might have to leave around 10 inches of space between them. Your plot’s size would highly determine the number of herbs you can plant in it. There are certain herbs that would crazily spread all around such mint that would spread all over once it starts to grow. Such herbs should be planted in separate plots so they do not end up taking over your entire outdoor herb garden.

Outdoor herb gardens require a lot of sunlight so make sure this factor is not overlooked. Mostly herbs ask for around six hours of sunlight daily. Herbs grow well in soil that has a quicker drainage.

Tile drains laid in a herring-bone fashion are undoubtedly the most satisfactory and permanent of all methods, but it goes with­out saying that they are by far the most expensive, and can only be regarded as the sole suitable means of drainage on lighter soils. Tile drains are small lengths of clay pipes, commonly used by the agricultural community, which are laid in trenches on top of a generous layer of stones or pea-shingle. Laid properly they form a quick and efficient means of drainage, only causing trouble if laid unevenly when silting will occur, or when used near vigorous trees such as poplar or willow whose roots have an uncanny knack of locating the pipes and travelling inside them until eventually they occupy the entire bore. Other methods are suitable on medium to heavy land, for then the soil assists by being sufficiently stiff to support itself.

The layout of the drains, of no matter what kind, should follow a set pattern to ensure even withdrawal of excess water from the soil. One or two main trenches can run the length of the garden, or a single track diagonally across the garden from up­per to lower opposite corners. These tracks should fall towards the outlet point and be of larger bore than their subsidiaries. These branch pipes join the main track in a her­ring-bone fashion being at approximately forty-five degrees to the main track and joining slightly askance from one another. If they join directly opposite one another silt­ing occurs and the drains eventually become blocked.

Permanent features

The site having been cleared and subterra­nean activities ceased, careful consideration should be given to permanent features such as the shed, greenhouse and paths, for once a decision is made regarding their siting little can be done to alter the original inten­tion without a major upheaval. Although you may not consider erecting either a shed or greenhouse immediately, the space allo­cated to them should be marked out and kept free of weeds until such time as this is possible. Paths, however, are a different matter, for it is virtually impossible to run a well ordered garden without at least one clean level path.

The boundaries, which will have been considered when surveying the site, should be put in good order or repaired before any substantial works commence, and any trees that are required ordered from the nursery­man for delivery at the appropriate time. My point here regarding ordering and planting long term subjects early on in the development, is that they can be growing while other work is going on. It is advisable therefore to plan the siting of trees, es­pecially in a new garden very early in the proceedings so that they can be established as quickly as possible.

Further Readings:

• How to Create an Outdoor Living in your Garden
• How to Design a Large Garden on a Relatively Steady Slope