Reasons Your Vegetable Garden Underperforms Every Year

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Are you struggling to get your vegetable garden to look good all year round? Does it look amazing in April, only to die by July? This is a common problem many people have, and the reality is that the failure was already in place before planting started.

What exactly are the reasons your vegetable garden fails every year?

Not Knowing What Beds Get Full Sun

Most vegetables need six to eight hours of sunlight per day. This means you need to know what beds get what amounts of sun each day. Tomatoes, peppers, squash, and corn, for example, need closer to eight hours, while leafy greens and root vegetables can get away with closer to six hours.

Planting without mapping where full sun actually falls across your beds means you’re probably leaving crops living in partial shade and producing far less than they should.

Before you plant anything, track your garden through a full day in early spring and note where direct sunlight falls at 9 am, noon, and 3 p.m. Then allocate beds based on this.

Sowing Too Much of One Thing

The truth is, six zucchini plants will produce way more than the average household will ever need. And they’ll crowd out everything around them by midsummer. This is a common over-sowing issue.

The same issue can happen with indeterminate tomatoes that weren’t staked to account for the actual mature size of the tomato plant, or planting climbing beans in front of lower-growing crops.

You need to map out the full-grown dimension of every crop before it goes into the ground, not the seedling size, the mature size, or before you end up sowing too much.

Putting Crops Together That Compete for the Same Nutrients

Heavy feeders planted side by side aren’t going to give you the results you think you’ll get or that you want. Brassicas next to corn, for example, as these both draw hard on nitrogen. And when they’re together, they don’t perform as well as they would surrounded by less competition.

Legumes, however, fix nitrogen in the soil and benefit brassicas, while basil planted near tomatoes repels aphids. Getting this right means that not only do you need to plan properly, but you also need to know your crops so you can plant them accordingly. Using a free garden planner can help you plan your space accordingly so everything gets the space and nutrients it needs.

Ignoring Crop Rotation

Growing the same family of crops in the same bed year after year allows soil-borne diseases and pests specific to that family to build up to levels that significantly reduce yield.

This could mean you end up with clubroot in brassica beds, potato blight spores, or even onion white rot. And these will persist in the soil and worsen with each planting.

A basic four-bed rotation cycling brassicas, roots, alliums, and legumes annually prevents this. But it does require you knowing which family each crop belongs to and planning where each one goes the following year. This means using a planner so it’s easier to track and observe results and avoid making the same planting mistakes year on year.

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