KITCHEN GARDENING (PART-2)
Planning and site/layout selection for your Kitchen Garden
Part 1 : General ideas of kitchen garden is available on Why should we go for Kitchen garden?
Developing a kitchen garden is a skilled approach that can provide healthy herbs, fruits and vegetables to our beloved family. Careful study on different aspects like, where to establish the garden?; how to prepare the land?; at what proportion one should divide the plots?; what are the crops one should choose for cultivating?; how to take proper care of those crops?; and finally what nutrients/ fertilizers one can use or produce to supply the crops?; should be taken care off before establishing the kitchen garden. In this blog, we will be discussing the overall pre-planning requirements for establishing and efficiently managing the kitchen garden.
Site selection
for the Kitchen Garden:
It is a very common question for all, “where to establish the garden”? Here one must have a little bit of prior knowledge on growing a few crops. If not, no worries I am trying to elaborate the criteria for site selection for the kitchen garden in detail. Kindly follow those while selecting your site.
Important considerations for selection of Site for Kitchen garden:-
Your land should get proper and sufficient sunlight throughout the year. As the plant needs sunlight to produce its food, hence we should see whether our area is free from any obstructions or not. If there are any large trees or buildings, which we can’t destroy, then it will be better to choose an alternative location. We have to select a place that is free from the shade effect of buildings or big trees.
There must be a good facility for hygienic water all-round the year. The name of this garden itself can solve the issue regarding the water requirements. Here the water used in the kitchen can be diverted and used to irrigate the crop plants grown in your garden. But it can’t fulfil the whole water requirement, hence we should have proper arrangements (bore well, dug well, tube well etc.) for irrigating the crops. The hygienic water must be used or else the contaminated water may destroy the crops by inducing disease and pest load in our nutritional garden.
Ø
Along
with a proper irrigation water source, the soil of the land we have selected
must have proper drainage.
Water stagnation for a prolonged period may aggravate the soil-borne diseases
and cause root/ crown rotting and many more diseases. To understand the
drainage behaviour of the soil we must analyse the soil type. If the soil is
sandy or loamy type then no need to worry about drainage. These soil types
drain the water much faster compared to clay soil. But for clay soil, we must
prepare a drainage channel to divert the excess water from our garden. Make the
deep open drain channel towards the low laying areas of your garden (Fig-1) or
make the garden a gentle slopy during the levelling operations (Fig-2). For
suitable crop growth, it is preferable to go for the sandy loam soil, which has
numerous good attributes like good aeration, better anchorage to the root
system, good drainage, optimum nutrient holding capacity and so on…
In
recent day’s rooftop gardening, terrace gardening, soil-less farming techniques
like hydroponics, aeroponics, aquaponics, and vertical gardening are very popular.
When you want to go for such technologies then there is no specific requirement
of land. Whereas you must consider a sunny area for the garden while
constructing your kitchen garden (we will be discussing the different types of
gardens in the fore-coming blogs).
Next- KITCHEN GARDENING
(PART-3): Preparation of land and small plots for your Kitchen Garden
