Vegetable Gardening
A Permanent Garden

Consider seriously planning a permanent garden. This is the best way to ensure that you reap all the benefits of your vegetable garden. More and more people are beginning to seriously go into gardening for the long haul.

The benefits associated with planning a permanent garden are numerous. Vegetable gardens also assure you of fresh produce because there's no need to pick the vegetables and refrigerate them. Vegetables stay fresh as long as you don't pick them from your garden, except if they become overripe. If you plan carefully, you can succeed without commercial pesticides at all. Aside from health reasons, planting vegetable gardens is also economical because your produce will always be cheaper than the ones that you buy from markets or groceries.

People who have been successful in planting vegetable gardens usually know that you can't keep growing only one type of vegetable in your garden. It's usually more advisable to rotate crops instead of planting only one kind of vegetable year in and year out. Rotating crops will make sure that the micro nutrients in the soil will be preserved and that diseases will not build up in soil particulates.

You will have to make some careful planning if you decide to build your permanent garden. You will need an understanding of plant families to know which vegetable types are compatible with each other. Here are some examples of groups of vegetables that can be considered "compatible" and safe to be rotated together:

==>Alliums - onions, leeks, shallots, and the likes,
==>Crucifers - such as radishes, turnips, broccoli, cauliflower, and the likes,
==>Brassicas - brussel sprouts, mustards, cabbages, kale and the likes,
==>Legumes - peas and beans,
==>Cucurbits - cucumbers, squashes, melons, etcetera,
==>Solanaceae - peppers, eggplants, tomatoes, and the likes,
==>Mescluns - arugula, endive, radiccio, etcetera

More often than not, rotating vegetables of the same family would also mean that they would be susceptible to the same kind of pests. This makes pest control a bit more manageable for you since you don't have to adjust to different types of pests for different families of vegetables.

Vegetables such as asparagus, rhubarbs, and other perennial vegetables must not be rotated; so they should be planted apart from the rest of the garden.

The more hardy and semi-annual vegetables can be rotated yearly so that no family of vegetables is planted in the same bed for four years.

If you have done your planning diligently, your small plot would likely include four beds for plants that can be rotated, and one bed for perennial, non-rotating plants.

Plan carefully the kinds of vegetable you plant so that you will not harvest too much of the same vegetable in one season. Cucumbers are good to eat and good for your health, but after awhile, I am sure you will prefer more variety in your diet. Throughout the growing season, try and plant varying types of short-season vegetables so that you'll be assured of many different types of vegetables.

To get the most out of planting vegetable gardens, do your research first.

More precisely:
==>Check which plants go together,
==>Check whether you have enough space to rotate your plants,
==>Check which plants you can actually rotate to prevent poisoning and depleting the nutrients of the soil,
==>Spread out the type of vegetables you plant so you won't have too much of the same thing for the whole planting season.

To your good health!