Miniature Vegetables

Miniature Vegetables

How to Choose What to Plant in Your Vegetable Garden

You may sense a small lost feeling when you first start to decide on what to plant in a vegetable garden. Don't worry - many people get this feeling in the beginning.  There are so many different vegetables and varieties of each vegetable to pick from, it can make you lightheaded. Here's what to consider.

A Million Vegetables

A good way to make things easier is to group your vegetable choices.  Some groupings are; leafy vegetables, which are fittingly named, these are your spinaches, lettuce, chard, and kale.  You have your fruiting vegetables, things like peas, peppers, the glorious tomato, and cucumbers.  And you have your root vegetables where you find carrot, radishes, onions, and potatoes.  Other root plants, usually thought of as herbs, are garlic, horseradish and ginger.

Evaluate the groups according to their needs.  The fruiting vegetables need full sunlight while the leafy vegetables and some herbs along with the root vegetables are fine with a little shade.

The common need for healthy plants in all the groups is well-drained soil.  Keeping that in mind, take a look at your yard.  Do you have an area that has good light for your vegetable garden?  Does that space have good drainage?  If water pools up in that space you can fix that several ways.  One good way is to use a raised bed garden.  Another may be container gardening.  It's time to get serious about selecting the vegetables for your garden.

Personal taste is usually the rule of thumb to make your selection process easy.  It only makes sense to grow what you will use.  Of course if you are planning to give away a lot of your vegetables your selection will be dictated by the people getting the produce.

Considerations for Container Gardens

In addition to what you like to eat, if you are container gardening you need to be sure your containers will accommodate the full-grown plants.  Your containers also need to allow good drainage.  You should not use black containers for your garden.  They absorb sunlight and increase soil heat which will damage your plants sensitive roots.  Containers come in a variety of shapes and sizes to add to the eye appeal of your garden.  Remember that once filled with soil the containers will be very heavy.  You should put them where they will stay, or put them on rollers to help when you move them.

There are many plants that wonderful for container gardens.  Some are; potatoes, tomatoes, beets, greens, squash.  You can also grow miniature cultivars that need less room.  The downside is they tend to have less of a yield.

Lifestyle

Lifestyle is an important factor when selecting the vegetables you will grow in your garden.   While growing a lot of vegetables gives you a bigger harvest, it will demand more time to tend to the garden.  If you cannot devote the time to weeding, pruning, fertilizing and pest control you probably won't have the time for preserving your harvest.  How sad it would be to waste the work you did put into your garden to watch it rot.  So, consider your lifestyle and scale your garden to it.

Without a doubt vegetable gardening is a wonderful hobby, one that you can share with your family and pass on to your children.  Enjoy the sun, get your hands in the soil and build your garden.  Revel in the fantastic flavors only found in a fresh fully ripe harvest.

 

About the Author

View Steve's other article on deciding what to plant in a vegetable garden on his website Vegetable Gardens Made Easy.

Setting up commission prices?

I've been working with polymer clay since 1997. Anyway I'm planning to sell my work on ebay as well as do commissions for people who want sculptures of their pets. Here's the price list:

Small figure- $ 5-10

Paperweight- $15-20

Pencil cup- $10-15

Custom chess set- $25-30 (comes in travel size only, for now)

These are just pirces for commissions anything else I sell such as Miniature fruits and vegetables for example are $ 1 each. Also I will charge for additions.

This is my first time doing something like this.

But what do you think of the prices?

Reasonable and profitable

My Clay Creations - Vegetables