Designing a vegetable garden is both a practical and a creative process. Practically speaking, you must arrange plants so that they have room to grow and so that taller vegetables don’t shade lower-growing types. Different planting techniques fit the growth habits of different kinds of vegetables. And you need to plan for easy access to the garden. On the other hand, creativity is important to the design process. After all, vegetables can be good-looking as well as practical. Consider mixing them with flowers or growing them in containers.

Before you sketch a garden plan, you need to decide how to arrange the plants. You can choose from three basic planting arrangements:

• Rows: You can plant any vegetable in rows, but this arrangement works best with types that need quite a bit of room, such as tomatoes, beans, cabbages, corn, potatoes, peppers, and summer squash.
• Hills: Hills are best for vining crops such as cucumbers, melons, and winter squash.
• Raised beds: Raised beds are best for smaller vegetables that can be planted close together, such as lettuce, carrots, onions, spinach, radishes, and turnips. You can plant vegetables in random patterns or in closely spaced rows. Raised beds have several advantages: They rise above soil problems and consolidate your work. They’re also easy on your back, handicapped accessible, and attractive. Plus, raised beds warm early because more of the soil is exposed to the sun, which allows for early planting and extended harvest seasons. (Click here for how to build a raised bed.)
  
  In dry areas, such as the desert Southwest, the traditional bed is sunken, not raised. Dig into the soil about 6 inches (15 cm) and make a small wall of soil around the outside of the bed. This design allows the bed to catch any summer rains, protects young plants from drying winds, and concentrates water where the vegetables grow.

As you plan your garden, you need to pay attention to the following information in seed catalogs and on seed packets:

• Seeds/Plants per 100 ft. of row: How many plants and seed you need to purchase.
• Spacing between rows: The ideal distance you should leave between rows of different vegetables, usually a little more than the distance you should leave between plants.
• Spacing between plants: The ideal distance you should allow between individual vegetable plants within a row or planting bed.
• Average yield per 10 ft. of row: How much you can expect to harvest.

Vegetable spacings are just guidelines, most likely derived from agricultural recommendations for maximum yield per acre. With close attention to soil preparation, watering, and fertilizing, you can plant closer and still get a good harvest. However, if you plant so close that plants have to compete with each other for food, water, and light, you’ll eventually get smaller harvests or lower quality vegetables.

Drawing a garden plan doesn’t require any landscaping expertise. After you determine the location and dimensions of your garden, you just need a piece of graph paper and a pencil, a list of vegetables you want to grow, and maybe a seed catalog or two.  ....read more