Choosing and preparing the site of your vegetable garden

Making a vegetable garden in your backyard is great for a number of reasons - it makes a nice addition to any home, it makes cooking easier and there's something rewarding about planting and growing something from scratch with your bare hands. 

Here are a few tips for those of you thinking about embarking on your own DIY garden project.

A site for sore eyes

Site selection is probably the first - if not most important - step in creating a vegetable garden. You'll need to pick somewhere that gets plenty of sunlight, five hours a day at least, and where your plants will face south. Try and find an area that's protected from the wind, by a fence for example. 

Also, choose a (relatively) flat piece of land to ensure even water distribution and minimise the risk of erosion. Avoid anything at the bottom of a slope, or you could find that garden you put all that work into has been flooded by water flowing downhill.

Finally, pick a spot far away from any trees, so you don't get any root incursions. Keep in mind that this will involve predicting where any future trees will end up growing. 

Clear the area and weed out the enemy

If you want your plants to grow, you'll need them unencumbered by any stray material littered around the yard - old paint tins, scattered branches, a rusty shed that has no place being on your property any more.

Clear this away, and be sure you remove the topsoil on any areas that have been contaminated by any kind of chemical which has leaked onto the ground.

At this point, you'll also want to remove the weeds. A regular spade and garden fork, along with your hands, can do the trick, but if you need something a little more heavy duty, you could hire a sprayer or wick wiper to apply herbicide, or even take a flamethrower to the yard.