When it comes to vegetable gardens, there is no shortage of options! Each approach has its advantages and will suit different gardeners. The key is to adapt your vegetable garden to your needs and desires to maximize its potential.
To help you, here are a few typical profiles. Try to identify the one that best matches you, then check whether your vegetable garden is in line with your style. And in the comments, tell me if your vegetable garden really reflects your profile – I’m curious to know!
The Personalities in the Vegetable Garden
The Traditional
Traditional gardeners take pleasure in perpetuating the cultivation methods handed down by their parents and in reproducing ancestral gestures. They prefer to look for old, forgotten vegetable species rather than trying new, fashionable techniques.
The Improviser
The improviser has no plan, he has – at best – a sunny area in which, to avoid getting into trouble, he has brought in rich garden soil. He transplants his plants at random, one after the other. Every year, there is a slight change, but it is not premeditated. There are no great expectations, but when spring speaks to us, we must answer.
The Efficient
The efficient person wants to maximize their harvest in relation to the space and time available. They strive for production, but want to eat healthily and, to do so, they organize themselves.
The Creative
A bit as if beauty nourished him, the creative person is an epicurean, who favors the beautiful and the surprising rather than the quantity of the harvest. Designing the project and implementing it is more exciting for him than the daily care. He much prefers to intrigue his visitors with lesser-known edible flowers than to grow vegetables that are easily found at the local market.
The Persistent
The persevering gardener may no longer be in peak physical condition or have a healthy plot of land to create their ideal vegetable garden, but never mind, at least they have the pleasure of eating tomatoes and cucumbers from their garden, because it’s such a great pleasure in life!
Types of vegetable garden
Whether you’re a traditionalist or an improviser, you probably have a vegetable garden in a row.
The vegetable patch in a row is the traditional vegetable patch that we all have in our subconscious, where there is a row of vegetables and a small path for sowing and harvesting them.
The Advantages
It’s easy to set up: you go to a corner of the vegetable patch, look at the width of the space between the plants and the spacing in the row, and unroll each type of plant, interspersing a path between each row. You don’t even need to make a plan.
The Disadvantages
Today, this type of vegetable garden is generally no longer recommended for manual gardening.
Having a path between each row wastes a lot of space, which encourages gardeners to reduce the width of the paths and makes it difficult to pass. It takes a lot of flexibility to kneel down in a 30 cm row and you are almost certain to damage a few leaves in the process.
This form of vegetable gardening does not optimize either space or ergonomics.
As each row has its own width, the order changes from one year to the next and, before long, there will be a row in the old path where the soil has been compacted by our passage, reducing micro-life. The best thing to do then is to use a small cultivator over the whole vegetable patch before recreating the new paths. So, we end up with increased tillage, which is more work and puts additional stress on the microflora that supports your vegetable patch.
If you are a efficient, the wide-bed vegetable garden is for you.
There are several variants, the best known being the 3 foot bed (for those who want to maximize their effort). For individuals who often have a limited growing area, the crop-to-path ratio is increased by widening the board to 3-5 feet.
Improve the Aesthetics And/or Drainage
Evenly spaced rows of crops are never a work of art, but once filled with vegetables, they are still pleasant to look at. To further improve their appearance, here are a few suggestions:
- Add a border around the boards to make a clearer separation. Depending on the type of border chosen, it may allow you to raise your boards and thus improve their drainage.
- Adopt a few companion flowers to embellish the beds. These generally attract bees, but also draw the eye. In an ideal world, it is best to group 3 to 5 plants of the same species of flower together.
View the Initial Set-up as an Investment
Creating these raised beds initially requires a little more effort than a vegetable patch in rows. On the other hand, these beds are fixed in time and this work will serve you for several years. As you never walk on the beds, there is little compaction of the soil and therefore less tillage is necessary. So less work reducing damage to the soil microflora is a win-win!
The Creative Type Will Prefer the Gourmet Flowerbed
For creative types who are bored with the world of rows and boards, the gourmet flower bed is for you! It’s about designing our vegetable garden as we would design a flower bed. We put the straight lines aside, we adopt the shape. We play with colors, foliage textures, we add edible flowers and we create edible flower beds as magnificent as they are surprising.
The Advantages
Aesthetics. The architect and painter Hunderwasser said that nature does not use straight lines. Opting for a lavish flower bed gives us complete freedom of creation. Tisanji can help you design these flower beds, providing all the necessary considerations at your fingertips.
The Disadvantages
This is the flower bed that requires the most design effort. You need to think about grouping your annuals and perennials separately. It also requires more research to maximize the number of edible perennials that are particularly well suited to this concept.
Although the gourmet flowerbed allows more freedom, it is strongly recommended not to mix edible plants with toxic plants (unless you are 100% certain that all users will be able to distinguish between them and will not risk poisoning themselves).
To design a beautiful and appetizing flower bed, you need to visualize the foliage and the size of each plant. It requires more creativity and familiarity with the plants to be cultivated. It is more difficult to achieve than making a bed where all the parameters are known.
For Those Who Are Persistent, the Raised Bed Is Ideal
Do you have back pain, can you no longer kneel down as you used to, is your soil unsuitable for growing crops? Never mind! Set up some grow boxes and enjoy the pleasure of growing and tasting home-grown vegetables!
The Advantages
The different forms of pool allow ergonomics to be adapted to your abilities. Also, as you are isolated from the ground, this allows for a healthy culture, even in regions where the ground could be contaminated.
The Disadvantages
The raised vegetable garden significantly increases the price of the food produced. This cost can of course be reduced with the following strategies:
- Make your own bins;
- Recover or reuse as many materials as possible;
- Reduce the amount of potting soil in the tray by adding homemade compost or fast-decomposing green materials.
Find the Vegetable Garden Style That Suits You
Of course, I have no training in psychology and these observations are without pretension. The idea is not to judge whether one attitude or type of flower bed is better than another, but to highlight their relative advantages to help you determine whether yours are satisfactory.
What About Me?
I am a creative, mystical, romantic and conciliatory eco-gardener, who brings together more than 300 species, most of them medicinal and edible, on a small city plot of land, arranged in curved flowerbeds with a medicine wheel, a leaf garden and many little secrets just hidden enough to convince you to come back and take a second look.
Is Your Vegetable Garden Really Meeting Your Expectations?
Let me know in the comments if your vegetable garden resembles yours or if this article has made you want to try a different approach this year, one that is better suited to your needs and your gardening style.
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