Growing Vegetables in the Ground
Part Five of the Vegetable Patch from Scratch Series
The last two posts focussed on raised garden beds and wicking beds. This week I look at a cheaper and more flexible method for growing vegetables: Growing them in the ground.
This serialised gardening guide is designed to help everyone from complete novices to seasoned gardeners to get more productivity from their vegetable patch with less effort.
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Often gardeners have a view that there must be one designated space for the vegetable patch and that vegetables need to be grown in a raised bed. This doesn’t have to be the case.
The benefits of growing in the ground are:
It’s far cheaper to grow in the ground as you don’t need to purchase raised beds and the soil to fill them.
The space is flexible. You can start small, and if you find that you need more space, just take over more lawn. If you took on too much, just let some of it go back to lawn.
Growing in the ground usually provides more consistent soil conditions so your plants will usually thrive much better.
Simply choose an area and remove all the existing lawn and unwanted vegetation. Dig some quality compost directly into the ground and grow vegetables in the space. This approach allows gardeners to parcel out their energy and break the project down into manageable sections. Trying to transform a large landscape in this way would otherwise be impossible.
This approach can also be useful if you have moved to a new property and want to spend a year or more observing the space before committing to any formal kitchen garden plan. You can spend time growing vegetables and improving the soil. It also provides you with an opportunity to observe how different vegetables grow in your particular microclimate. There is nothing permanent about growing vegetables directly in the ground. Therefore, no formal landscape plan or design is required. If you decide after a year or so that you want to grow the veggies somewhere else, then you can easily convert the original vegetable patch to a perennial garden bed or allow it to go back to being lawn. Growing in the ground is my preferred choice for rental gardens.
The main drawbacks of growing directly in the ground are:
Roots from established trees can quickly invade the space and outcompete your vegetables, as discussed in Part 2.
The garden bed boundaries are less defined and can make it challenging to regulate the access of children or pets.
Mobility issues may limit your ability to bend to tend your plants or work the soil.
All things considered, growing in the ground is my preferred method for raising vegetable crops.
What’s your preferred growing method? In the ground? Raised beds?
This post is one of many in my gardening series Vegetable Patch from Scratch. See the series index for a list of other topics in the series.
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It would be interesting to know the age profile of respondents. Older folk like me may prefer the raised beds.
I co-ordinate a Kids Gardening program at our local community garden. I've been experimenting with all three aspects mentioned above...growing in the ground, raised beds and wicking beds. We chose wicking beds to teach sustainability and to minimize Summer watering. We maximize space by growing vegetables that take up a lot of space like cabbages, broccoli, sweetcorn and zucchini in the ground. Quick growing salad greens, asian greens , spring onions, radishes, carrots etc are all grown in the wicking beds. In the raised beds we grow tomatoes, chillies, capsicums and eggplants. I'm in my 70's and do prefer the extra height of the wicking and raised beds.