Knowledge from Olle Garden Bed: Sunshine - The Necessary Condition for a Successful Vegetable Garden

Sunshine .This is the first thing you should think of when you consider building or creating a kitchen garden. The following content also has some reference value for raised garden beds.

Sunshine is very important for most plants in the garden. For many plants in the garden, the longer the sunshine is, the better.

Plants are creatures that need food to grow... just like animals. But much cooler than animals, plants actually know how to make their own food. In fact, they are basically a food factory.

Like factories, factories need something to run.

First, like any good factory, a factory needs a machine to produce food. Good news for us gardeners: plants are machines themselves. It has all the mechanisms needed to turn raw materials into the exact food needed to keep growing.

Second, like factories, plants need some raw materials that can be converted into food. For plants, these materials include carbon dioxide, minerals and vitamins from the soil, and water. These three things provide the raw materials for plants to create their own food, so that they can grow and grow, and then plant more.

Finally, like factories, factories need electricity. Unplug the plug in the factory. Even if the machine is top class, and the raw materials have just been delivered, nothing will happen until the machine is re inserted. Where does the factory get power from the internal food factory?

Sunshine!

The sunlight is the power source of the amazing power of the self sustainable development of plants. The sun is the fuel that drives plant engines to increase their food supply so that plants can continue to grow.

Now we know why a vegetable garden full of plants needs sunshine. Let's find out how much sunshine a vegetable garden actually needs.

How many hours of sunshine does the garden need?

The answer to this question actually depends on the type of vegetables you grow and grow in your kitchen garden.

Back to the factory analogy, the power required by your machine to make a certain product actually depends on the complexity of the product, right? If it just makes toys slinky, a little power is needed to create one or two or three slinky every few minutes. However, if the factory is making electric toy cars or iPhones, then I guess the factory will need more fuel and energy to produce products.

The same is true in the vegetable garden.

If the plant you want to grow is a simple and fast growing plant, such as arugula or chives, there won't be so much sunshine for this plant to grow until a beautiful harvest. However, if you plant eggplant or calabash, these plants need more complex steps to reach maturity. It takes longer for them to grow to the point where you are ready to harvest their fruits. The long growth period and complexity mean one thing: they need more sunlight.

Even if you don't have much sunshine, you can still have a vegetable garden

The fact is that the more sunshine in the garden, the greater the overall success. If you plant plants in your kitchen garden at the right time and season, they will thrive if they get enough sunlight.

But that doesn't mean you still can't achieve much success in the kitchen garden in less than eight hours of sunshine. There are many edible plants that grow even if their leaves are not covered by light from sunrise to sunset.