After having a good time with our daughter growing greens with our indoor garden, we started to think about building an outdoor one as well.
There are so many more logistics involved in building an outdoor garden.
Here are the initial questions that came to mind. How much sun does a vegetable garden need? Where should you put your vegetable garden? How do we create a successful garden environment?
It all came down to sun exposure.
Table of Contents
How Much Sun Does A Vegetable Garden Need?
Before we looked into sun exposure, we picked the backyard for our future garden.
We thought it would be a great place where we could plant, weed, take care of our plants in peace. Our dream was to have a zen garden in our backyard.
Other reasons for choosing the backyard include:
- It’s isolated from the street
- Semi-private: backs into our neighbor’s yard
- Ground is flat
- Plenty of space
These reasons are great, but would this location get enough sun?
How much is enough sun?
Turns out, you need a space that gets at least 6-8 hours of sunlight per day for vegetables to thrive.
Some vegetables may grow in partial sun, meaning 4-6 hours per day.
Vegetables will die in partial shade, which is 2 hours or less of sun. That is sad.
Method 1 – Draw A Sun Map For Your Vegetable Garden Plot
The first method to figuring out where you get the most sun is to draw. Take a piece of paper and draw to-scale, your house, your trees, shrubs, and walkways.
Draw circles in the areas where the sun falls around your house at 8am, 12pm, and 4pm. Shade in all the areas where you see shade.
Photo/Illustration: John Pendleton
By the end of the day, you’ll have a bunch of sun circles drawn around your home. Where those circles overlap, is where you’ll want to place your vegetable garden.
If we’re honest, our drawings weren’t the best. It was difficult to see where there was overlap and we didn’t feel 100% about the results we saw.
From what we could tell, our drawings pointed to the right side of our house, not the backyard. Unfortunately, the house and trees blocked sunlight from hitting the backyard.
The backyard was a poor choice again because it does not drain well. After a heavy rainfall, the area can become a swamp (as it sits at the bottom of a hill). Rather than a beautiful garden with tons of veggies, it might turn into a soggy dirt pile.
Method 2 – Use Suncalc.org App To Calculate Where and When You’ll Get Sun
The second and our recommended method would be to use a tool online called Suncalc.
We wish we had known about this tool first. It’s free and shows sun position, height, for any date, time, and for any location. This is a time-saver!
Visit www.suncalc.org.
SunCalc: app that shows sun movement and sunlight phases during the given day at the given location
Type in your home address and zoom in on your specific location. The image above is of a nearby park. Don’t want to give out my address to anyone. 🙂
Move the cursor to the area on your property you’d like to have your garden. This will be marked with a red circle.
The yellow shaded area is the movement of the sun throughout the year.
The orange line represents sunrise.
The pink line represents sunset.
The yellow line in the middle is what you can alter. Use this to determine if the garden spot you chose (the red circle) is optimal for vegetable gardening.
There’s a bar at the top that you can move. Dragging the bar back and forth allows you to see the path of the sun from hour to hour. As you do this exercise, imagine the obstructions that block sunlight.
These obstructions could be trees, shrubs, fences, statues, signs, or houses.
Remember, vegetables need at least 6-8 hours of direct sunlight per day to thrive.
Then, change the calendar’s month setting to see how much light that area gets in the fall, winter, and summer months.
Take into account how many hours you will have shade because of the obstructions.
From there you can then calculate how many hours of direct sunlight that area will receive.
Our Suncalc Results
- February – 8 hours
- July – 10 hours
- October – 9 hours
February – 8 hours of sunlight July – 10 hours of sunlight October – 9 hours of sunlight
This tool was amazing. It confirmed our garden space we chose with our drawings above was right!
We will build the garden on the right-side of the house, and more toward the south.
Locate Your Utilities
Before we go prepare our garden beds, we need to make sure it doesn’t interfere with our utilities. This was a great tip from a friendly neighbor.
Knowing where your utilities are is important. What if there was a gas or plumbing issue and the utility company needed to dig up the area you put your garden?
All that time and money setting up the garden would go to waste, because they’d have to dig it all up.
That would be devastating right? This would be worse than setting up a garden in an area that doesn’t get enough sunlight. Even in partial sunlight, some crops would grow, just not to their full potential. With a garden interfering with utility lines, you’d lose everything.
Let’s avoid the latter scenario.
How To Locate Utilities On Your Property
Search for Miss Utility in Google for your state. For Virginia we used https://va811.com/.
This tool will allow you to submit one ticket to your utility companies. Each company will then come out to mark if there will be an issue with where you plan to dig.
Utilities include: Energy + Water + Sewer + Internet FIOS + Gas
Go to https://va811.com/single-address-tickets/ and click the green “Submit Ticket” button.
You’ll select the “Homeowner” option and type in your street address.
After you submit your ticket, wait a few days.
The utility companies will come out and mark your yard with flags or spray paint. These markers let you know where the utilities are in your yard.
If there is any conflict with utilities and your proposed dig site, those will show up in the final report. You’ll receive an email notification with the complete assessment.
Luckily, our report came back with no conflicts, so we are good to go!
Get The Kids Excited About Your Sunny Garden Spot
We felt good and accomplished for taking this small, yet large step in planning our garden.
We wanted to get our daughter excited too.
How do we get a two year old involved in the planning process?
Here are some ideas to get them jazzed about gardening at home and growing fresh veggies with you.
Coloring Glueing veggies onto planned garden space
Use a free printable like this one of a girl in her garden and have your kid color.
Our daughter preferred to have her hand traced on the paper, but that’s OK!
Use the aerial house image from Miss Utility and show your kid where you will build the garden.
Give her veggie cutouts to glue onto the space.
To find veggie images, go to Google Images and type in vegetables. You’ll get a ton of photos you can print and cut out.
Kids love glue and they love crafts, so use this activity to get them excited about building a garden with you!
Conclusion
We are so glad we took the time to do a sun survey first.
As idyllic as it would have been to have a backyard garden, our crops would not thrive. This would have been disappointing. There is no sense in spending all your resources in a location if it’s not the best environment for your plants.
Our garden will be visible to the public, which is pretty cool and amazing. Our hope is other families will see what we’re doing, ask questions, and will want to get started at their own homes.
Growmuse’s goal is to help families grow their own food, so having a garden for all to see could be idyllic after all.
Comment below if you have an outdoor garden. What’s been easy, what’s been hard? Let us all know!
This is so great and helpful! I am definitely the type of act first think later person that would have not considered the importance of sunlight in a garden! Awesome tools and guidance!! Now to find that sunny spot…
I know how that feels when you get super amped up to do something new. If you’re going to spend the effort planting anything, might as well increase the odds of a successful harvest by doing a little bit of planning first. Hope you can find the best sun! Let me know how it goes.
Just did my suncalc survey for the proposed garden plot. Looks like my spot is ideal. Time to get my hands dirty!
Wasn’t that a fun exercise?!