Kitchen Garden 101

For everyone who thought kitchen garden is fancy, and thought this needs heavy work, EXIN is happy to help you out! Exterior & Interior magazine brings for you the basic rules of Kitchen gradening!

In its simplest form, a kitchen garden produces fresh fruits, vegetables and herbs for delicious, healthy meals. A kitchen garden doesn’t have to be right outside the kitchen door, but the closer it is the better. The best location for a new garden is one receiving full sun (at least six hours of direct sunlight per day), and one where the soil drains well. If no puddles remain a few hours after a good rain, the area is perfect. Building raised beds is a good idea if your soil is poor or doesn’t drain well, and if someone likes the look of containers made from wood, stone or corrugated metal. This approach is usually more expensive, however, and requires more initial work than planting in the ground.

Whether you’re going with raised beds or planting directly in the ground, you’ll need to decide what to do with the sod. One can remove it or compost it, both of which require hard work. It has to be ensured that grass and weeds won’t come up in the garden. For removing grass from a larger area, renting a sod cutter is always a good idea. One of the easiest and most rewarding kitchen gardens is a simple salad garden.

When the time comes to planting, one has to decide which plants to start from seed and which to buy as transplants. Many gardeners choose to plant all of their crops from seeds for a variety of reasons, including lower costs, greater selection, and the challenge and satisfaction of seeing a plant go from seed to soup bowl. Doing so increases the chances of success, especially with crops such as brinjals, peppers and tomatoes that require a long growing season. Fruits and vegetables are made mostly of water, so one has to make sure the plants are getting enough to drink. 

And no discussion of kitchen gardens can be completed without mentioning flowers, which should be added from the start. Flowers add beauty and color to the garden and they also helps to attracts beneficial insects.

So, the base of kitchen garden stands on the above mentioned pillars and it is up to an individual as to how he or she wants to improvise it.