Catherine Abbott - The year-round harvest: A seasonal guide to growing, eating, and preserving the fruits and vegetables of your labor

Understanding the strengths and challenges of your outdoor space is the first step to planning a successful garden. By maximizing strengths, thinking creatively, and viewing challenges as guidelines rather than limitations, your garden will be a unique reflection of your home and personality as well as an optimum growing environment.

Sunlight, water, and soil are the key ingredients to a productive garden. Depending on the area you have to work with, the quality and quantity of these components can differ widely and can affect how you design your garden. Other factors, like wind, pests, drainage, and space can also affect how and what you can grow. The gardener turning an expansive suburban lawn into a vegetable garden is working with different variables than the urban resident converting a rooftop into a place to grow food. Both of these scenarios, and everything in between, can easily result in a beautiful and productive garden so long as all factors are assessed and understood early on.

Open sunlight for your garden is your top priority when deciding where to plant. While not all crops require the same amount of sunlight as others, the majority of your plants will need direct sunlight for at least 6 hours a day during the height of their growth.

If you have a yard or an outdoor space large enough to provide you with options for garden placement, then chances are you already have some idea as to where you would like to put your garden. There might be a spot in the yard that looks too vacant, or an area that you could access easily from the kitchen. Maybe you want the garden to be near an outdoor eating area or a space where your children like to play. When determining the consistency and directness of sunlight for your garden placement, you will want to observe the location you have in mind, but choose some other sites to observe as well.

By pinpointing and observing multiple sites, you can better gauge the quality of sunlight in each area. One spot might seem sunny enough on its own, but when compared to a different section of your outdoor space, you may notice that the sunlight in your spot is less present at certain points throughout the day, or that there is more consistent shade than you expected. It could turn out that the area that you were imagining for your garden is not the best option, but if you observe a few different locations at once, youll be able to adapt your plans.

Hardiness plant zones are growing zones based on the average annual minimum temperature of an area. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) divides North America into eleven zones based on temperature. In order to understand the hardiness of certain plants, when to plant, the best varieties for your garden, and how to care for plants throughout the colder months, you need to know which hardiness zone you are growing in.

Hardiness Plant Zone Map

If there isnt much option for where your garden can gofor example if you have a very small yard, patio, deck, or an assigned community garden plotthen the goal of making your growing-site observations is to understand the type of sunlight your garden has access to. Being familiar with this beforehand will allow you to plant strategically. When observing your space, you want to determine if your garden area receives mostly direct sunlight, mostly shade, or a combination of both. Once you determine which category your garden space fits into, you can plant crops that will thrive in your particular environment.