I'm Erik, with Landscape Garden Centers and we're going to talk about gardening. Specifically, we'll talk about finding a garden spot: the best place to grow your vegetables, the best place to grow your flowers.
When people think about vegetable gardening, I look at, there's three different places where you can set up the garden. One is basically in the ground, ground floor is what we call it. Then, you have a raised garden, or you have container garden. In some cases, people can use all of those areas.
A regular garden that's basically cut right into the earth can be very successful type of gardening if your garden has very well-drained, good soil. It also needs to be in full sun. If you have less than that, you might want to look at the different types of plants that you grow there. Typically, your cooler season plants would be all right to grow in an area that has less than that six to eight hours. If you have those things, then it's just basically choosing the type of plants that you would like to grow.
We highly recommend is that you just do small gardening, it tends to be more successful than a large garden. A small garden that's 10 by 10, and well-kept, is better than an uncontrolled garden that's 25 by 10 feet long. You'll end up with more produce and it'll be healthier.
If you don't have great drainage, then maybe you look at doing a raised garden bed. The best thing about having a raised garden is you get to control exactly what you put into that raised garden as far as soil. You can put as much compost as you’d like and you can make sure it's going to be well-drained. It's always going be a successful way of gardening or vegetable gardening.
The other way to do it is if you don't have the space and maybe you don't have an area for a raised garden, is to do container gardening. And that's basically exactly what it is, is you take a pot or a container and then you put one of these in, and one of these in, and at some point we call them patio plants or patio gardening. This works really well for people that live in an apartment or just a small area with limited space.
Here's something to think about, too, that's becoming very popular and it's a lot of fun. You can kind of create your own mini restaurant. You'll take basil and tomato and you'll have that in the same pot. And that's your pizza pot. So anything you're gonna to put in there, you’re gonna make pizza sauce out of that. There's no rules to anything and have fun with it. That's the main thing.
Raised gardening and container gardening are also awesome for people that don't like to get down on their hands and knees. It's something that you can put up and you can have for a few years and you can also take down. It's one of those things that offers a ton of flexibility and it works really well for just about any type of gardener.
Now, getting back to the person that has been gardening year after year in the same spot. Something to consider is crop rotation. What is that? Crop rotation is one of the oldest horticultural practices as far as maintaining soil health and plant health. Certain plants are going to take nutrients out and certain ones are going to put them back in. Well, all plants are from certain types of families. There's a family of the carrots and the celery, fennel, and parsley. Those you would not want to be planting over and over in the same spot from one year to the next. You're going to want to rotate that. Your other reason why crop rotation is so important is that when you have a particular plant family that is in the same spot year after year after year, diseases and insects decide that, "Hey, this is a really good spot for us to live in." So they continue to grow and thrive. So that's why we say, “Hey, rotate those out every year move your tomatoes from the position A and move it over to position B and then position C” and just keep on rotating those out, because you'll end up with a better product. You'll have less diseases, you'll have less insects and you're just going to have an overall better product at the end of the season. I'm Erik with Landscape Garden Centers, keep it growing.