Of all the gardening questions that are asked of me, one that rarely comes up is where to start the garden. I wish this question would always follow, "can I grow a garden?". Because you can always grow some kind of garden. Anywhere.
But where you decide to put that garden makes all the difference as to what you can grow and how easy or laborious gardening will be for you.
The most important thing for growing annual vegetables (lettuce, tomatoes, zucchini, etc.) is sun. At least 6 hours of full on sun. You can get away with less, but you really gotta start knowing your plants and what they like to begin skirting the sun issue, and you can't deviate too far with some, like tomatoes.
Watch where the sun goes throughout the day. Look for the parts of your yard, easement, roof that gets bathed in the most sun. This will be the best place for most of your vegetables.
Now the most important thing for you is making sure you can tend your plants easily. The only thing worse than spending many hours in the blazing sun, breaking your back to grow some cucumbers is getting lazy, not tending the garden and watching it get eaten by weeds You absolutely want to set yourself up for the least amount of excess work.
This will entail two things: proximity to your dwelling, and proximity to water. The closer your garden is to your front or back door, the more you will go to it. The closer your garden is to water, the less you have to transport water or hosing long distances.
If you visit your garden regularly, you'll almost never have a weed problem. This is because of a peculiarity among people in gardens to constantly pull weeds. If you visit often, you'll pull often. And the best part is you won't need to pull a lot at any particular time. If you walk through the garden five times in a day and you pull five plants each time, that's 25 weeds. You'll get them while they're small and you won't get the huge late summer community garden disaster where all the water hungry veggies have withered due to lack of water and all the drought resistant pigweed and lamb's quater (both edible, btw) are 7 feet tall with 3 inch corky stems.
After these two considerations, sun and proximity, you may want to consider what, if any, garden space already exists. If you have moved into a place that already has some perennials growing, you have a garden in waiting. If the garden hasn't been tended, there is a good chance it is full of non-native or weedy species.
(YOU MUST LEARN WHAT YOU HAVE FIRST!!! I can not emphasize this enough. Chickweed, while a "weed" in perennial gardens, is also a tasty cooked green. Common milkweed, an aggressive native, is host plant for the Monarch caterpillar and 11 other butterflies and moths. Canada thistle sucks, but Canada goldenrod, also an aggressive native, is a fantastic host for beneficial insects and pollinators in the late summer and fall... )
If your existing garden is in good shape, just add to it. Extend it along a side, bring it out another foot, put a little bubble on it. This way, your veggie garden will become part of the existing landscaping, saving you from aesthetic fear. But it still has to get at least 6 hours of sun! No woodland vegetable gardens yet!
Soil is the next thing you'll need to worry about, but for veggie gardening, we can have a good amount of control over that.
Next post I'll show you how to begin preparing your soil and killing lawn if you are making a new garden
Check out your landscape, observe the sun, look at shadows
<-Garden, late June 2009