What's the Time Frame of Growing a Vegetable Garden?

Time Frame of Gardening

On this week's episode, Travis is discussing the needed time frame of growing vegetables in a garden. When keeping everything maintained, growing, and harvested it can all depend on the size of your vegetable garden and what crops are planted. Travis is going to give a personal example of how long it takes him to manage his garden area. He currently has four subplots that all total about 5,000 square feet plus an additional new garden area that has six subplots that will total up to 11,000 square feet of garden area. However, Travis does not always grow food in each of these plots he likes to use some subplots for cover cropping to help build the soil. The time frame that he prefers to use every day is at least 30 minutes a day out in the garden. It can vary from working or just walking around monitoring the plants to ensure there are no pests or diseases that need to be fixed. On the weekends, he likes to spend a little more time in the garden when weather permits to get the garden nice and cleaned for the upcoming week ahead. On average, Travis spends about 10 to 12 hours per week in the vegetable garden.

Maintaining Time in the Garden

Before growing or planting, it's important to determine how much time frame you will have each week to devote to the vegetable garden. You don't want to grow to large of a garden where it becomes overwhelming to deal with and you don't have enough time to work in maintaining the area. In order to break down the garden daily or weekly Travis is going to explain some percentages to help determine what activities take the most time when it comes to growing vegetables. The most common problem that people have when it comes to maintaining the garden is not having enough time to control weed germination. However, contrary to popular belief the time spent weeding in the garden is smaller percentage-wise compared to the time it takes to do other activities. This has a lot to do with having the right tools to control weeds quickly and effectively. Using tools such as the single tine cultivator, push pull hoe, and the diamond hoe are all excellent in providing efficient weed control in the vegetable garden. Similar to weeding, spraying the area will take about the same amount of time as controlling the weeds. It takes Travis about 20 to 30 minutes to mix up an injector tank of Monterey B.t. or Neem Oil and get it nicely coated on all the plants once a week in the garden. Once the temperatures increase and pest pressures get it higher then he will do it at least twice a week. Another task that doesn't take a lot of time in the garden is fertilizing. By streamlining the fertilizer using the fertilizer injector it only takes about 10 minutes to set it up and flowing through the drip system. When side dressing with Chilean Nitrate he prefers to add that on the same day he plans to weed or cultivate because it saves time by doing both tasks in one pass through along the rows. Using a drip irrigation system is another way to save an efficient amount of time in the garden as well. Not only does it save time, but it allows an accurate amount of irrigation to crops at the roots of the plants. The most amount of time spent in the garden comes when planting or harvesting vegetables. The time spent planting vegetables can vary based on transplants or direct seeding. As well as, what kind of crops you are harvesting in the vegetable garden.