The first step to starting a new vegetable garden is to map out your garden. Simply draw up an approximate plan of where you'd like everything to go, keeping as close to scale as possible. Remember to include spaces for pathways and the like. Next, you need to decide which vegetables you wish to grow. List all the vegetables you want in your garden, after which you have to eliminate those that aren't easily available. Some terrific crops to plant are tomatoes and unusual lettuces since store-bought ones may either be very expensive or have poor quality.

Figure out where your crops would be placed. Be sure to plan carefully, because improper planning can lead to disasters later. If you've got a good plan already, make sure to stand by it.

You should do some research on your plants. Plants have different requirements. It's very important to be sure you're planting all of your vegetables in areas where they'll grow well. Apply the French cultivation technique if you have restricted garden area. Using this technique makes you garden space efficient.

For instance, you fancy planting spinach and carrots. You just take a pack each of spinach and carrot seeds and combine them. Then you'd make a 1/2 inch deep furrow in a row and sow the mixture of the two seeds into that furrow and cover. The spinach will grow quickly and open up the soil so the carrot seeds can germinate better. In about four weeks, you can start to harvest some spinach to thin it, making room for the slower growing carrots. By the time the carrots start to reach maturity, the spinach will be completely used up, and the carrots will have plenty of room to grow.

Many crops can be planted using this method. Radishes can be planted well with lettuce or parsley, for example. Radishes can be grown with lettuce and turnips, too. Of the three, radishes grow quickest and will be picked before the lettuce starts to fully grow. The lettuce in turn will be harvested before the turnips mature.

If you're planting your rows in an east-west orientation, you should plant all of your taller plants on the north side. This is to ensure that the taller plants don't block the sunlight from reaching shorter plants. The placement for corn plants should be done with care, since this is the most common tallest plant found in gardens,

You can also creatively use larger plants to shade shorter plants that don't do well in harsh sunlight. Cool-weather spinach can shade behind peas or beans.

This enables you to grow plants that need shade even if your garden doesn't have shaded areas. You can get so much out of creative placement.

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