Are You Making These Mistakes in Your Kitchen Garden?

This spring, many of us are busy in our kitchen gardens. But whether you are an experienced gardener who has been growing your own for many years, or a new gardener making your first forays into food production, there are some common mistakes you might be making. 

Today, I thought I would share some of the most common mistakes I have encountered as a garden consultant, to help others to avoid some of the most common pitfalls for gardeners in this arena. 

Poor Planning and Preparation

Without a doubt, many of the biggest mistakes that people make come from a lack of planning and preparation. There is a lot to do before you sow any seeds or do any planting—not thinking about this is where many gardeners, even more experienced ones, can fall down. 

Before you start gardening in spring, it is best to make sure you have a plan for the whole of the gardening year in place and even to think about crop rotations and other longer-term gardening strategies. 

Having good plans in place helps you avoid many pitfalls down the road and also helps you avoid expending unnecessary effort. 

Kitchen Garden Placement Mistakes

Another important area where planning and forethought are important is in the placement of a kitchen garden in the first place. Positioning a kitchen garden incorrectly can lead to a number of environmental issues for plants. 

So always make sure that your kitchen garden is positioned in the right spot for the plants you wish to grow, and think about sunlight, wind, water, soil, etc., when coming up with a holistic plan for your garden and deciding the place of a kitchen garden within those plans. 

Kitchen Garden Layout Issues

As well as making mistakes when it comes to the positioning of a kitchen garden, other frequently made mistakes center around the layout of plants within the kitchen garden. 

When planning a kitchen garden layout it is very important to think carefully about the different plants we are growing and how to combine them. 

First and foremost, in companion planting, we need to consider how we can gain benefits from companion plants without introducing too much competition or creating adverse environmental conditions (such as too much shade, for example). We need to make sure that, in short, when we combine plants, we are enhancing things rather than making things worse. 

Using beneficial combinations of plants can bring many benefits, however, and failing to think about this at all is one of the biggest mistakes of all. So we should always think about combining plants when planning our vegetable gardens. 

Timings Mistakes

When planning and preparing a kitchen garden and when coming up with the perfect layout, it is easy to get hung up on space and spacing. But it is always important to remember that time is just as important as space in any garden, and getting the timings right is just as crucial as using the space optimally. 

Some of the most common issues relating to timing revolve around when we sow our seeds and when we place indoors grown seedlings out into the garden. Both sowing or planting too early, and doing so too late, can be a problem. 

Though we can look at rough guidelines for our particular areas, it is important to remember that we should always use our common sense and look at the conditions in a given year before we decide when to sow and plant out. Conditions can definitely vary from year to year. 

Watering and Irrigation Mistakes

One of the biggest mistakes that you can make in a kitchen garden is failing to think about watering and irrigation up front. 

These things will be especially important where water can be in short supply through the spring and/or summer. But they are things it is a mistake not to think about, no matter where you live. 

Before you even create a bed for a kitchen garden, before you sow or plant anything at all, it is a very good idea to think about where water will come from. 

It is a mistake not to have a rainwater harvesting system of some kind in place, along with a composting system and other basics that will be fundamental as you continue to care for your garden. 

Different water solutions work best in different areas, and the methods and practices you adopt and the choices you make will depend on what you are growing. But thinking about this from the very beginning can save you a lot of trouble down the road. 

Of course, there are plenty of mistakes that people might make in a kitchen garden. But thinking about the above should help you to avoid some of the most common issues in your garden.