The Kitchen Garden - good advice for gardening

Vegetable gardens can be both big or small, wild or extremely well organized like the  Kitchen garden here on Nature.is, but it is considered to be a kind of a “model garden“ that everyone can adjust to his own needs and wishes, depending on family size and size of the garden, available time and interest.

The idea intended by the Kitchen garden* is to develop and assist the cultivation of vegetables that can be quite complicated, in a simple and fun way. Detailed organisation can seem overwhelming at first sight, but it is, eventually, much simpler than to miscalculate the size or the quantity in the garden from the beginning, and then maybe to give up completely at the middle of summer, without harvesting hardly anything. Each and everyone of us can of course choose what advice he chooses to heed.

It is of course convenient to plant this and that haphazardly depending on what plants you have and what seeds are available, left over from last year and so on. But those of us that have to save space, time and money, but who nevertheless have the ambition to harvest as much edible food as possible from the garden this summer - we need organisation that saves space, and which provides good overview over what can be cultivated and how.

In order to examine the Kitchen garden click here.

In order to examine the seed calendars click here.

*In the Kitchen garden we use the square meter as a unit of size. The drawings show how many plants of each category fit into each square meter (bed). Then we can calculate how many square meters we consider feasible for our own garden. The beds in the carden are 12 and they thus form an area of 12 m2 to cultivate in. The total size of the whole garden is 6x3 meters or 18 m2, with paths and an luxury island which is used for better maneuvering, and in order to be able to relax and enjoy, and to dispose of tools, plans, seeds and the harvest itself as the summer turns into autumn.

Graphic: 12 unit Kitchen Garden with fully grown vegetables, herbs and flowers. Guðrún Tryggvadóttir and Signý Kolbeinsdóttir ©Nature.is.