Similkameen Garden Club

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Planting Options for Everyone

 

1  Traditional rows: This is your grandpa’s vegetable garden. Single rows of vegetables. A classic.

 

2  Raised beds: A more modern approach to vegetable gardening. Basically mounded dirt in the shape of beds (usually around 4’ wide by however long you want). They can but don’t have to have wooden sides. The benefit of a raised bed is the water drains more freely, their slightly raised height makes them easier to work on and they are less likely to become too compact.

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3  Square-foot gardening: Square beds that are 4’ x 4’ encased with wooden sides, divided into 16 individual 1’ x 1’ sections that are intensely planted.

 

4  Waist-high raised gardens: Basically a raised bed on stilts. An example is the Vegepod®, which my mother owns. These super-raised beds are perfect if you have trouble bending down, or if you are really good at bending down but not so great at getting back up again. They also work well in areas where you don’t have room for a traditional garden bed. You can set them on your balcony, patio or on some paving stones in the middle of your lawn.

 

5  You can grow an entire vegetable garden – from tomatoes to lettuces to carrots, beets and potatoes – in a container garden. I can’t really think of any vegetable that couldn’t be grown in a pot.

 

6  Smushing vegetables in with your regular front or backyard plants: Most vegetables are actually beautiful and can easily blend with ornamentals. If you don’t have enough room to dedicate to a vegetable garden, just plant your edibles in with your landscape plants. Tomatoes do well planted near the foundation, where they absorb heat from the side of the house. Carrots, with their delicate frond tops, look like ferns when planted together. And lettuces look like pretty greenery. Honestly, you can shove vegetables into almost any landscape design and they’ll blend in.

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