Start Planning a Vegetable Garden

Light Requirements

Vegetables, like many flowers, need lots of sunlight to thrive and produce tasty vegetables. Most vegetables need full sunlight, which gardeners define as six or more hours of sunlight per day. This direct sunlight stimulates the plant’s cells to produce the food it needs through photosynthesis to build a strong root system and produce fruit.

Many people are confused about what type of light they have in the garden. Try this simple test. Pick a day when you’re home and can observe the garden. Take a look at the garden area you want to grow vegetables in first thing in the morning, and write down whether or not the sun is actually touching the ground. Look for full, bright sun, not dappled sunlight filtering through tree leaves. Now set a kitchen timer or alarm clock and return to your observation once an hour or once every two hours until dinnertime, marking down how much light the spot in the garden receives. Then, add up all the times you saw direct light. This will give you an idea of whether you’re working with full sun, partial sun or shade.

While you can grow some vegetables in partial sun, most will struggle. If the entire yard gets only partial sun or shade due to immovable objects like garages, homes, or trees in neighbors’ yards, look for a place that gets bright direct sunlight and grow vegetables in pots instead.

Persimmon

Persimmons, if unripe, are notorious pucker-producers. When ripe, however, they’re delicious. “There are so many varieties of persimmons, including Japanese and American varieties, light-colored flesh, dark-colored flesh, firm and soft,” says fruit expert Ed Laivo.  shows a coffee cake (‘Nishimura Wase’) persimmon.Persimmons don’t ship well commercially, so the selection at your local supermarket is likely to be limited. So what’s a persimmon pursuer to do? Plant your own tree! Odds are there’s a variety that will grow well in your neck of the woods. For example, the American persimmon always has to be used soft and is usually grown in the Midwest or the colder regions of the east coast. The Japanese varieties are all adapted to the milder coastal climates of the United States.

However, there are a few reasons these beautiful trees aren’t growing in everyone’s yard. According to Laivo, persimmon trees are a little more expensive than your average fruit tree because the propagation is expensive. Not only is the tree hard to bud, but the buds don’t always take, and sometimes less than 60 percent of the trees survive the digging. So growers like Laivo take on the challenge of propagating persimmon trees, and the rest of us can buy young, healthy, grafted trees at the nursery. Sure you’ll pay a little more, but the investment offers returns in other ways.

“Persimmon trees are really easy to take care of,” says Laivo. “They’re actually very adaptable to a wide range of soils, they’re disease- and pest-free, and basically drought tolerant after established.” Depending on your climate, persimmon trees can be planted in early spring or winter.