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When you decide on a site for your vegetable garden, it is well to get rid once and for all, the notion that a garden "patch" is ugly spot in the home. If thoughtfully planned, carefully planted and thoroughly cared for, vegetable gardens can be made beautiful and harmonious. This lends a touch of comfortable homeliness that no shrubs, borders, or beds can ever produce.
With this fact in mind we will not restrict vegetable gardening to any part of the premises simply to put it is out of sight behind the barn or garage. In the average moderate-sized place there will not be much choice. It is necessary to take what you have and then do the very best you can. However, there is probably a good deal of choice when you consider exposure and convenience. Other things being equal, select a spot nearby, easily accessible. A few hundred yards difference may seem like nothing, but if you expect to spend very little of your spare time to work and watch your garden, then convenient access will be of much greater importance than is likely to be at first recognized. Add in the time you need to make for a dozen time-wasting trips for forgotten seeds or tools, will you realize fully what this means. More... / Hide...
Exposure.
The most important thing to consider when picking out the spot to yield you delicious vegetables all summer is exposure. Pick out the "earliest" spot you can find. A plot sloping a little to the south or east, that seems to catch sunshine early and hold it late, and that seems to be out of the direct path of the chilling north and northeast winds is best. A building, or even an old fence, that protects it from this direction will help your garden along wonderfully, as starting early is a successful factor. If it is not already protected, a board fence, or a hedge of some low-growing shrubs or young evergreens, will be useful. Beginners often underestimate the importance of having such a protection or shelter.
The soil.
It is unlikely that you will find a spot of ideal garden soil ready for use anywhere on your place. Nevertheless all but the very worst of soils can be brought up to a very high degree of productiveness. More so if you consider that home vegetable gardens require small spaces. Large tracts of soil that are almost of pure sand, and others so heavy and mucky that for centuries they lay uncultivated, have frequently been brought under commercial cultivation where tremendous crops are yielded annually. So do not be discouraged about your soil. Proper treatment of it is much more important, and a garden-patch of average run-down, or "never-brought-up" soil will produce much more for the energetic and careful gardener than the richest spot will grow under average methods of cultivation.
The ideal garden soil is a "rich, sandy loam". Soils are usually made, not found. Let us analyze that description a bit, for right here we come to the first of the four all-important factors of gardening food. The others are cultivation, moisture and temperature. "Rich" in the gardener's vocabulary means full of plant food. This is a vital point. It means full of plant food ready to be used at once, all prepared and spread out on the garden table, or rather in it, where growing things can immediately absorb it; or what is known as "available" plant food. In practice no soils in long-inhabited communities remain naturally rich enough to produce big crops. They are made rich, or kept rich, in two ways; firstly by cultivation — this which helps to change the raw plant food stored in the soil into available forms; and secondly by adding manure or plant food to the soil from outside sources.
The term "sandy" means a soil containing enough particles of sand in that water will pass through it without leaving it pasty and sticky a few days after a rain. It is called "light" enough, in that a handful, under ordinary conditions, will crumble and fall apart readily when being pressed in the hand. It is not necessary that the soil be sandy in appearance, but it should be friable.
"Loam: a rich, friable soil," says Webster. That hardly covers it, but it does describe it. It is soil in which the sand and clay are in proper proportions, so that neither greatly predominate, and is usually dark in color, from cultivation and enrichment. Such a soil, even to the untrained eye, looks as if it would grow things. It is remarkable how quickly the appearance of a well cultivated ground changes. I once noticed in one of my fields, a strip containing an acre had been used to grow onions for two years, another little piece jutting off from the middle of this had been prepared for just one season. And the rest had not received any extra manure or cultivation. When the field was plowed up in the fall, all three sections were as distinctly noticeable as though separated by a fence. And I know that next spring's crop of rye, before it is plowed under, will show the lines of demarcation just as plainly.