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Len Penzo dot Com

The offbeat personal finance blog for responsible people.

45 Tips to Help You Grow a Successful Vegetable Garden

By Len Penzo

garden veggiesHow do you plant a vegetable garden? More importantly, how do you plant a garden that actually yields a cornucopia of veggies large enough to reduce your produce bill?

Last year I planted a couple of tomato plants because, after all, there is nothing better than a homegrown tomato. Unfortunately for me, a combination of my poor gardening skills, ravenous squirrels and other hungry critters resulted in a very disappointing harvest of fewer than two dozen tomatoes. I know.

With that in mind, we’re now smack-dab in the middle of vegetable-planting season again, which has me wondering if I can do something to increase my homegrown tomato yield so much that it doesn’t matter how many veggies the critters run away with this summer and fall.

Hey, I’m sure I’m not the only brown thumb out there who wonders about the best location for planting my veggies, how far apart they should be, and how long they need to grow. And these answers get even more complicated when your planting a garden with multiple veggies!

The good news is, AnglianHome has put together a nifty little green-thumb cheat sheet for people like me that is loaded with tips to help you grow — and successfully harvest — the most popular garden vegetables this summer.

In fact, this cheat sheet will show you everything you need to know to plant a successful vegetable garden including:

  1. The best time to plant
  2. How far apart to plant seeds
  3. What vegetables needs propagating
  4. What veggies need to be in a greenhouse
  5. The optimal container sizes for planting veggies in pots
  6. Distance to thin seedlings out to
  7. Germination & maturation times
  8. Which pests to look out for
  9. What veggies work best together
  10. When to harvest!

The only thing it doesn’t tell you is how to keep the wildlife from eating it all! Then again, if I follow these tips, I’m hoping there will be more than enough tomatoes for me and the squirrels this year.

Who knows, if I’m really lucky, maybe I’ll even have enough to share with my neighbors.

Vegetable-growing-cheat-sheet

Photo Credit: The Marmot; Infographic: anglianhome.co.uk

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10 Comments April 6, 2015

Comments

  1. 1

    Clarisse @ Make Money Your Way says

    We have a small vegetable garden in our house. We made sure that the plants are have enough space.

    Reply
  2. 2

    Money Beagle says

    We do a lot of camping throughout the summer, and there are multiple stretches of 3-8 days where we aren’t home. Vegetable gardens need to be tended to regularly, so we figure our chances of success are pretty slim with our schedule. It certainly is something we’d love to do with the right opportunity.

    Reply
    • 3

      Len Penzo says

      My issue is the critters. It’s bad enough that I have a brown thumb. Then toss in the wild animals who pilfer what little I do coax from Mother Nature and it’s almost not worth it!

      Reply
    • 4

      Marcia says

      Have you considered self-watering containers? Or do what my neighbor does, which is tell us to pick her tomatoes/ strawberries/ whatever while they are gone. We never do, but we could!

      Reply
  3. 5

    Lauren says

    Interesting charts, Len, but that ‘Mange Tout’ threw me until I realized they’re snow peas. :o) We follow the ‘Square Foot Gardening’ method, and have good success in a small plot. We also have a fence around that plot to keep the deer, squirrels and rabbits away (and this year we’ll be adding a mesh roof to keep the hail from destroying our veggies!)

    Reply
    • 6

      Len Penzo says

      Yeah, I should have explained that one, Lauren. I had to look it up too!

      Re: the fence. I was told the squirrels will just dig under barriers like fences and chicken wire. Is that not true?

      Reply
      • 7

        Lauren says

        We’ve never had a problem with squirrels or any other critter getting into our fenced garden area, Len. But then we have lots of tasty flowers and shrubs growing OUTSIDE the fenced garden area, so they don’t really need to ‘come into the garden’ to graze!

        Reply
  4. 8

    Sue says

    For deer, my mom places shiny pinwheels in the ground. The movement and shine are supposed to scare them…I am like you, can’t grow anything so i support my local farm stand.

    Reply
  5. 9

    Marcia says

    This is a really great chart. I have a black thumb. I have successfully grown some things, like parsley and tomatoes. The gophers got my parsley.

    This year I will probably try tomatoes in a pot again (we have sandy hilly soil, so pots or raised beds are it.) I randomly won some self-watering containers (and built one also), so that’s what I use for my tomatoes. Added bonus is that we can fill them with water before a vacation and they usually survive.

    Reply
    • 10

      Len Penzo says

      I’ve tried potted tomatoes too. I actually had better luck with yield. Maybe, I should try that again.

      Reply

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