The Vegetable Garden: Location, Location, Location

Vegetable gardens don't need to be huge.
With the surge of interest in victory gardens, ripping up lawns, homesteading, and self sufficiency, you'll find plenty of Internet ideas for creative vegetable garden spaces. But are they practical? Often, the answer is "no." Before you go to all the work to prepare a garden bed, it makes sense to think through what a vegetable bed needs and whether or not certain locations are practical for your family.

What a Vegetable Bed Needs:

1. Lots of sun. At least 6 hours a day is required if you want a productive garden.

2. Decent soil. If your soil isn't ideal, however, there are ways to get around that. (Read this post for more information.)

3. Water. The garden will need easy access to a faucet or other water source. Even if you get a considerable amount of rain during the summer, raised beds and container gardens will probably need more water than what they get naturally. And if there's a drought, a faucet will save your garden.

Possible Locations:

The Backyard
Front yard gardens don't work for everyone.
Backyards are the traditional spot for family vegetable gardens - and for good reason. If the garden gets messy, you needn't worry about how your home looks or whether you are displeasing your neighbors. However, not everyone has sun in their back yard.

If you have children, you'll also want to carefully consider their outdoor play area. If your front yard is fenced and large enough for the children to run around, then there's no reason not to take up part (or all) of the backyard. But don't use up your yard space, expecting to rely on the park as a place for children to run free; children who can play in their own yards get more outdoor time than those who must wait to go to the park. And remember: Children in the midst of play are often forgetful. No one wants their kids trampling freshly-planted seedlings while they play kick-ball, for example.


Other things to consider:

 * Getting rid of little used play equipment can free up a lot of space.

* It may be tempting set aside shady areas for kid-play, while using up sunny spots for gardening. Do consider that your children will long to play in the sun, too.


If your children are quite young, consider some sort of barrier to protect the back yard garden. This could be a fence - although it’s important to remember a fence will cast shade onto the garden. Or it could be a bit of decorative metal lawn edging, there only to remind the kids where the barrier is.

Espalier fruit trees grow flat against walls or fences.
The Front Yard
It's very common to see homesteading blogs, books, and videos touting the benefits of front yard veggie beds. Lawns use too much water and are useless, they say. But before you use a sunny front yard for your vegetable garden, consider two things:

1. Is there plenty of open (ideally, grassy) space for the children to play elsewhere?
2. Will your front yard garden be subject to theft?

If you can entirely fence in your front yard, then you won't have too worry too much about theft, but in many urban and suburban locations, tall fences are not allowed in front yards.

In my experience, front yard gardens (especially those close to the sidewalk) invite stealing - and few of us want to work hard on a garden only to have someone steal the fruits of our labor.

The Side Yard
If you have a side yard that gets plenty of sun, count yourself fortunate. Often, side yards are wasted space, so putting a sunny side yard to use for growing food is an excellent improvement!

Attach planters to walls, fences, or railings.
Fences and Walls 
If you have sunny fences or walls anywhere in your yard, consider them prime planting areas, no matter how narrow the space may be. Espalier fruit trees (which are carefully pruned so they grow flat against a wall or fence) are the traditional way to use up this space, but vines are also a good choice. You can even make or buy planters that hang flat against the fence or wall (or attach to the railings of a deck or balcony); these are most appropriate for plants with shallow roots, like herbs.

A Mixture
For many families, use of the back, side, and front yard is the best option. For example, we have our main vegetable bed in the backyard. It's not huge; there is still plenty of space for children to play - and for chickens to scratch. Our side yards are both too shady to grow food, but I do maintain a lovely dandelion crop there. (Don't laugh! We eat dandelion greens in the spring and I harvest some of the roots year round for use as medicine.)

We have a front lawn because we know from past experiences (and our neighbor's experiences) that if we plant a veggie bed there, most of our food will be stolen. However, I do have some less obvious edibles in the front yard - mostly right near the house where it would take some guts to come and steal them.
Green roofs are neat looking, but not necessarily practical.

A Note on Rooftop Gardens
Urban homesteading blogs and magazines frequently endorse rooftop gardens, but such an undertaking requires a considerable amount of planning and money. Before you take any other steps toward creating a rooftop garden, check with your city and county to make sure they are legal in your vicinity. Because a poorly done green roof can cause major damage to buildings (possibly even causing the roof to collapse), many local governments that do allow them have very strict rules on their construction.

You'll also need a licensed contractor to inspect your building to ensure it can physically support a rooftop garden. A contractor or landscaper with experience working on rooftop gardens is a real boon, because he or she can also suggest what sort of materials would work best with your current building. For example, you might need windbreaks, even if you wouldn't need them for a garden in the ground. In all cases, a contractor will want to add as little weight to the roof as possible; for example, he or she might suggest using foam instead of pebbles.

Plans or kit for this green roof hen house are available at greenroofchickencoop.com.
Another important consideration is how quickly the rooftop garden will dry out and whether it will be easy to water. Gardens on roofs may get more sun than those on the ground and usually dry out more quickly because the soil layer is so thin. A good contractor or landscaper should suggest a practical and easy way to water the garden. 

Finally, remember that rooftop gardens only work for plants with shallow root systems. When it comes to edibles, good choices include most herbs and lettuces.

NOTE: A more viable option for most people is a backyard hen house with a green roof. Most online tutorials for this sort of thing seem questionable to me; I think they will lead to early rot of the hen house roof. That said, a living hen house roof is do-able. Just remember that if the hens can get up to the roof, the plants you grow there are not suitable for human consumption and should be reserved for chicken food.


No comments