Vegetable Garden Layouts

Vegetable garden layouts include kitchen gardens, functional gardens planted directly into the ground, and raised bed gardens. From simple plots filled with salad greens to elaborate potagères, vegetable garden layouts blend the practical with the beautiful.

Learn the best types of soil for your garden in this slideshow.

Vegetable garden layouts need to combine practical, functional and aesthetic elements.

In order to grow great vegetables, you need three basics: full sun, plenty of water and rich soil. While soil conditions can be improved and water brought into the garden through irrigation methods, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to improve the sunlight on a given patch of earth. Tree branches can be trimmed to let in more light, but you can’t exactly move your house if you have a suburban backyard with only a north-facing yard to grow vegetables. Look for an area that receives six or more hours of sunlight each day during the late spring, summer and early fall.

When designing your vegetable garden, you need to allow not only enough space to grow particular vegetables, but space to walk among the plants without compacting the soil. Create beds that are no more than three feet wide, and allow at least three feet between the beds to accommodate your wheelbarrow and other equipment. Making beds wider than three feet won’t hurt the plants, but it will make it difficult for you to perform gardening tasks and harvest vegetables.

Other functional elements for a vegetable garden may include stout fencing. Deer, rabbits, ground hogs and other garden pests will quickly decimate your harvest unless you use physical barriers like fences or organic scent repellent products. It is wise to think about a fence for your garden area.

Aesthetics refers to the beauty of a given garden. Vegetables can be as beautiful as flowers. Many herbs, for example, produce lovely blooms or scented blossoms and leaves. Lettuces grow in a wide variety of leaf colors, from bright chartreuse green to fiery red and bronze leaf varieties. If you are an organic gardener, companion planting, such as marigolds near tomatoes, repels the tomato hornworm pest while adding lovely color and flowers to attract bees.

Gardeners worldwide create unique vegetable garden layouts. There are many styles of vegetable gardens, but three common ones include planting vegetables directly into the ground, raised bed gardening and kitchen gardening.

Planting vegetables directly into the ground is probably the simplest and most common way to create a vegetable garden. Using a rototiller or spade, gardeners turn over the earth in the spring as soon as it’s dry enough to be worked. Amendments, such as compost and cow manure, may be added to enrich the soil. Vegetables are then planted in rows, either directly sown as seeds or tiny plants transplanted into the ground.

When planning such a garden, it may be helpful to use a sheet of graph paper to mark out how many rows of each vegetable you plan to grow. Keep in mind the size of your family and their likes and dislikes when planting vegetables, as well as how long certain vegetables keep. If you don’t mind preserving the harvest through drying, freezing or canning the produce, you can plant extra. If you don’t have time to save your harvest, plant only enough for your family to use right away.

Keep the rows about three feet wide, and leave several feet of space between the rows for you to walk on and be able to bring your gardening equipment back and forth. Try not to walk on earth that is intended for planting; it will compact the soil.

Raised beds contain the soil in rectangular or square wooden boxes. The boxes are filled with soil, compost and cow manure. The resulting beds heat up faster in the spring, are easier to work and are easier to maintain.

Raised beds are easy to make from kits purchased at garden centers or from lumber and hardware purchased at any home improvement store. Use a piece of graph paper to mark out your raised bed garden plan. Pencil in the varieties and types of vegetables you wish to plant, bearing in mind that cold-weather loving vegetables and heat-loving vegetables can be rotated, sometimes in the same bed, to get double the garden space out of each raised bed.

Kitchen gardens once graced homes throughout America. Simple, functional and beautiful, kitchen gardens combine vegetables, herbs and flowers for a beautiful garden.

Some kitchen gardens are simple backyard plots. Many follow a traditional European pattern of having a circular center with paths radiating out from the center and beds along the outside as well as in spaces near the center. The center bed may contain a bird bath, fountain, dwarf fruit tree, strawberry pyramid, or other special plants. Flowers are frequently planted among the vegetables, both to attract bees and to provide cut flowers for the home. The salad garden, consisting of lettuces, radishes and herbs, may be planted closest to the house to make it easy to run outside and snip some fresh salad for dinner. If any walls flank the kitchen garden, such as a garage wall, many gardeners will plant espaliered fruit trees against the walls, a technique first used in Medieval monasteries.

There are hundreds of ways you can lay out a vegetable garden. Each layout depends on your personal tastes, what you want to grow and the area available. These resources will help you choose the perfect layout for your victory garden.

• Helpful Gardener discusses what home gardeners need to consider when planning a vegetable garden.
• Gardening Know How provides ideas for vegetable garden layouts.
• Better Homes and Gardens provides free plans for vegetable gardens.

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