It's important to emphasize that you need to draw a plan of your vegetable garden first. When doing this, always leave space to get at your vegetables for harvesting and maintenance. You'll also find that drawing your plan to scale will be a great help in allowing you to decide where your vegetables are to be planted. You will make excellent use of the space you have available by doing this.

Now you need to make some decisions about what you'd like to grow. Make a list of your choices while keeping in mind what's readily available from your local plant nursery. Try to avoid any unusual vegetables, they can often be expensive, hard to get or hard to grow.

Now go back to your garden map and decide what plants go where. The importance of a good plan is to avoid any problems as your plants start to grow, so plan carefully. It's also important to follow your plan closely.

Put a lot of thought into your vegetable plants requirements. You need to know you're planting your chosen vegetables in the best position for maximum growth. For example, learn which ones tolerate shade and which ones require full sun.

What if you have limited space? The French have an ingenious way of making full use of a small vegetable garden. You plant fast and slow growing vegetables together. This simply means that you mix something like packets of spinach and carrot seeds with each other.

You then sow your seed mixture into a furrow about 1/2 inch deep. The spinach grows rapidly and helps break up the soil to give the carrots more room to grow.

In about four weeks, you can start to harvest some spinach to thin it, making room for the slower growing carrots. By the time the carrots start to reach maturity, the spinach will be completely used up, and the carrots will have plenty of room to grow.

Another illustration would be parsley or lettuce with radishes. This system can be used with lots of vegetables that mature at different times. Early varieties of radish sown with turnips and lettuce is often done in France.

The radishes are harvested first and are finished by the time your lettuce are ready. In a similar manner, the turnips will only be starting to mature as the last of the lettuce are harvested. All your taller growing vegetables should be planted on the north side of your vegetable garden if your rows are in a east-west direction.You do this so that your shorter plants aren't in the shade from the shadows of the taller ones.

This is to ensure that the taller plants don't block the sunlight from reaching shorter plants. Corn is the tallest plant that is normally grown in vegetable gardens, so it should always be placed where it won't block sunlight from other plants.

Of course the reverse of this can be useful if you're wanting to grow vegetables that prefer dappled sunlight or shade. You can be imaginative and make use of larger plants to shade these smaller ones. A case in point would be to grow a tall row of peas or beans to provide shade for a cool climate vegetable like spinach.

This could help you grow shade-loving vegetables in your garden, even if you don't have any shady spots available. By being creative with placement, you might be able to grow vegetables you never thought you'd be able to grow in your location!