As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, the front of the house faces the south, which makes the front lawn a better location for a vegetable garden than the back lawn. What I don’t have on the drawing are my TWO garden nemeses (nemesi?), and the reasons why I will never be a tree-hugg’in hippie. To the immediate west of my front yard is nemesis #1: my neighbor’s huge black oak tree (sorry, Adrienne…but would you mind getting rid of that thing?) :
Arch Nemesis #1: The Oak Tree
Don’t get me wrong, it’s huge and old and beautiful and whatnot (blah, blah, blah…), but it casts a huge shadow over my front lawn in the evening. I’m not exactly sure how much of the day it is causing me problems, so I’m planning to keep track over the next couple days.
To the immediate south of the right side of the lawn is a ginkgo baloboa tree in the boulevard between the sidewalk and the street:
Arch Nemesis #2: Gingko Baloba Tree
Nemesis #2 is pretty thin, so even when it has leaves it doesn’t create quite the annoyance of Arch Nemesis #1.
For the first half of the day, shown in the above photo, we get beautiful, direct sunlight. In the evening…not so much. So I guess this means that my taller plants, such as the corn, okra and tomatoes should be 1) towards the house (which is the northern side of the front yard) and 2) on the west side of the lawn. This way early in the day they will still get good direct sunlight, and later in the day they won’t shadow the plants because of the Big Jerk Oak Tree.
EdibleLandDesign posted this article on the Top 10 Rookie Gardening Mistakes. I may-or-may-not be guilty of at least half of those from my garden last year. I am trying really hard to avoid mistake 2 and 8 by making sure that these trees will not prevent my plants from flourishing. This might mean that the Okra I started from seed a month ago might not be a good plant to include in my vegetable garden, which would definitely hurt my fee-fees. This article does include a link to some vegetables that do well with some shade, though. Also, mistake Number 3 was a big problem last year, and I will definitely avoid it this year by planning the locations of the vegetables and sticking to it. When I’m actually planting it’s so easy to sneak the plants just a little bit closer together…until they end up on top of each other…so it might be a challenge for me.
