In the beginning—after a year or so of successfully growing a few dozen varieties of vegetables—I felt confident that I could take on much more… perhaps too confident.
But more vegetables meant I needed more space, so I recruited my husband to build a few new beds in the garden to house the hundreds of seedlings I’d started.
As the season progressed, however, I realized that our deciduous plumerias had leafed out into huge flowering trees and our small banana grove had divided by leaps and bounds, shading our beds for several hours a day.
Be aware of how the sun moves over your yard throughout the day, where your nearest water source is located, and whether one area is more prone to wind or water erosion than another.
If you have trees around your vegetable garden, keep in mind how tall they will eventually grow and how invasive their roots may become. At our old house, we had an herb bed near our 50-year-old fig tree and often pulled up tree roots when we turned over the soil!