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.

Green Lettuce and Red Tomatoes

With the redbuds, daffodils, dogwoods and hellebores starting to bloom, master gardener Paul James knows that spring has sprung. That means there are some chores to be done in his vegetable garden:

Thinning
In the bed of two-week-old lettuce, the crop needs to be thinned. This is an important task that many veggie gardeners, especially new and inexperienced ones, fail to do. By thinning, you remove excess seedlings in order to provide adequate spacing between the remaining plants. The process can be somewhat tedious, but it’s essential to the success of the crop. The failure to thin leads inevitably to crop failure.

If you’re feeding a family of five but only have enough food for three, then either two people are going to go hungry, or no one is going to get all the food they need. It’s the same with plants.” There is only so much water and nutrients available to plants. Thinning them reduces competition between plants and ensures that the remaining plants will get the water and nutrients they need.