Avoid Zucchini Syndrome - How Many Vegetables to Grow

Your kids sneak out the back door at dinner time, your neighbors won't answer their door: nobody needs yet another zucchini from your garden.

It's easy to go overboard when planting your own vegetable garden. But think carefully about how much you really need, and if you are willing to can or freeze the excess.

If you haven't grown vegetables before, you'll be amazed at how prolific they can be. To avoid too much of a good thing, plant carefully. Here are suggestions based on today's smaller families:

• Cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli: 2 to 4 plants of each kind (they generally ripen all at the same time)
• Carrots: one or two 4-foot (120 cm) rows
• Cucumber: 1 to 3 plants
• Corn: a dozen plants arranged in a square block (corn is wind pollinated, so if you grow it in a single row, pollinated is reduced: no pollination = no corn)
• Beans, green or yellow snap type: one 4-foot (1.2 m) row; or if pole beans, one tepee, made of three bamboo stakes tied together at the top (about 3 seeds planted at the base of each tepee pole); pole beans are great for limited space - they produce over longer period of time, while bush beans yield just one crop
• Lettuce; greens such as spinach: 2 to 4 foot (60-1.20 m) rows of each kind
• Peas, shelling or snow pea types: one 8 foot (2.5 m) row
• Peppers: 4 to 6 plants; try one or two plants of three or four different varieties
• Potatoes: 12 plants
• Tomatoes: 3 or 4 plants of one or two varieties
• Zucchini, summer squash: 1 or 2 plants, and don't try more than a couple varieties (you've been warned!)

Yvonne Cunnington is an avid gardener, garden writer and photographer. She contributes regularly to gardening magazines and is the author of Clueless in the Garden: A Guide for the Horticulturally Helpless. For more gardening tips, visit her website at http://flower-gardening-made-easy.com | Sign-up for her free gardening webmagazine here: http://www.flower-gardening-made-easy.com/sign-up.html