Thinking of creating a vegetable patch in your garden? Or maybe there’s no space, but you have a plot of land elsewhere, or you rent an allotment from your local council? In any case, before taking up your spade, check out the area: what type of soil it has (clayey, sandy, stony...), how many hours a day it is exposed to the sun, how long it remains in the shade (overshadowed by buildings, trees and so on) and whether it is near to an easily accessible source of water.
For a family vegetable patch, approximately 40 m2 may suffice, but even as little as 10 m2 is sufficient for a mini-vegetable patch on which to put your growing skills to the test. In this article we will find out how to start and, in particular, how to organise a vegetable patch, by dividing it into beds.
Setting up the vegetable patch: clearing and preparing the soil
The area set aside for your vegetable patch must be tidied: assuming that you aren’t using herbicides, cut the grass with a brushcutter, lawnmower or wheeled brushcutter and gather up the cuttings, then break up the topsoil with a fork or hoe and remove any roots by hand. Bushes and trees should instead be cut down with a bladed brushcutter, pruner or chainsaw, then uprooted with the help of a hoe, pickaxe or possibly mechanical equipment such as a tractor or excavator. If you a tidying an existing vegetable patch, it will be less laborious and will mainly consist of eliminating the remnants of previous crops. Besides residual vegetation, also remove stones, a task that will need to be repeated in the subsequent steps.
If you intend to sow and transplant in the spring, start preparing in the autumn: the winter break will help the soil of your vegetable patch to soften and regain its fertility. Tidying should be followed by tilling the soil to break it up, using a spade, fork or – for larger areas – a rotary tiller, as well as basal dressing using fertiliser that is rich in organic substances, such as mature compost or manure. Near to the sown (or transplanted) area, lightly till the soil using a hoe or rotary tiller, then level it with a rake so that the water doesn’t pool in depressions. Once you have done that, your seedbed is ready.
It may be appropriate or even necessary to separate your veggies from the surrounding environment: how can you segregate your vegetable patch from the garden? In some cases, all you need to do is mark out its perimeter with stone blocks, concrete pavers or bricks. Alternatively, you could surround it with a wooden fence or a hedge, which would also function as a windbreak (but it must be sufficiently far away from the vegetable patch to avoid overshadowing it and competing with the vegetables for nutrients and water). Do you have pets or farmyard animals? Depending on how "invasive" they are, protect the garden with a 1-2 m high net. However you construct it, the entrance through the fence must align with one of the aisles between the vegetable beds, or with the main walkway if there is one.
Are you creating a vegetable patch for the first time? Here you will find some focus articles with advice on when and how to prepare soil and how to till it with a rotary tiller. We also have a checklist of useful tools for gardening jobs, from working the soil to tending vegetables.
How to organise your vegetable patch into beds
Once you have prepared the soil, start giving a shape to your vegetable patch. Organising it basically means determining the position and size of both the beds (or plots) and the paths that separate and connect them. These aisles should also provide convenient access to your tool shed, water source (a tap, well, rainwater butt or similar) and homemade compost bin. The aim is to be able to work comfortably and make best use of the available space by dividing it into cultivated areas and serviceways, according to a neat grid layout of plots alternating with walkways.
The plant beds should generally be rectangular and no wider than 1 or 1.2 m, so that you can tend the vegetables in the centre of the plots without trampling the edges. As for their length, there is no hard and fast rule, but 2-3 m should be more than enough, because if you build beds that are too long you will be forced to walk along them all the time, for example to access other beds.
If the walkways are just for moving from one point to another easily without stepping on the beds, they only need to be 30-40 cm wide or even slightly less. If you intend to manoeuvre a rotary tiller, wheelbarrow or transporter along them, they will need to be around 50–60 cm wide. For larger vegetable patches, it is generally advisable to differentiate the walkways into main and secondary paths of differing widths.
Before tilling the soil ahead of the sowing season, create the grid of plots and walkways to divide up your vegetable patch. Don't approximate! To precisely mark the limits of your beds and create a regularly shaped vegetable patch, use a tape measure and stretch some string between pairs of stakes (bamboo canes will do just fine). Once you have divided up the vegetable patch into beds, you can protect the pathways between the plots with straw, bark chippings or gravel, or even wooden planks, paving stones or pebble-embedded slabs: that way, you will always have a clean surface to walk on, even during wet days, and at the same time, weeds will be prevented from growing.
You can keep the plant beds in-ground or shape them into raised beds, also called ridges or berms. Raising them into 15-30 cm mounds above the walkways will facilitate water drainage and avoid stagnation: this is particularly useful when the soil is hard, i.e. clay-rich. Make the raised mounds when working the soil before sowing or transplanting, preferably with the help of a tape measure, string and pegs. Using a shovel, take the tilled soil from the strips of ground intended for the walkways and deposit it onto the beds. These mounds will need to be reshaped every year.
Another technique for dividing up the vegetable patch into raised beds is by growing in planters. These are typically wooden box structures that contain substrate for growing, separate the vegetable plots from the garden and are interspersed with pathways. You can build the planters directly in contact with the ground or rest them on supports (this latter variant can also be used for growing on a patio or balcony). To reduce back strain you can raise the height from a minimum of 20–30 cm high to 50–60 cm. If the soil in your garden does not have the optimal properties for growing – perhaps because it is extremely clayey – you can fill the planters with a better substrate, such as good quality soil or backfill material.
How to arrange plants in the garden
Organising your vegetable patch also means assigning a specific function to the beds. So, how should you arrange the plants in a vegetable patch? Most of them need 6–8 hours of sunlight a day, so the vegetable patch must have good sun exposure: make sure it is oriented east-west or, especially in colder areas, facing south. Generally the orientation of the beds is determined by the orientation of the plant rows. Although it is not always possible in practice, the ideal solution is to orient the beds and rows in a north-south direction, so that both sides of the rows are well exposed.
Besides sunlight requirements, how should you allocate the vegetables among the beds? Consider the practices of crop rotation and intercropping. Crop rotation consists of alternating the plants grown in the various sections of the vegetable patch from one year to the next, taking into account various factors including their nutrient uptake (i.e. how much they deplete the soil). Intercropping refers to planting species either next to each other in the same bed, or in separate beds, depending on how intercompatible they are: for some species, proximity generates mutual advantages (for example between plants with different growing cycles), whereas for others it creates negative interference (such as between vegetables in the same family).
With intercropping, you can diversify your crop and increase biodiversity, which in turn leads to greater resistance against diseases and harmful insects. Therefore, resort to pesticide treatments only when strictly necessary, favouring natural treatments (which you can apply with a mistblower or sprayer pump).
All species have their own role to play in the ecosystem, but sometimes they can get out of hand: here are our tips for keeping slugs and snails, ants and moles out of the vegetable patch.
