Photos: Pictures are an excellent way to track the sun's movement across your garden/property. If it's an area that goes back into shade as the day progresses, write that time down also. Write it down: Draw a map of your garden, or yard and write down when the sun first hits each area. The first is obviously the one I wrote about above. There are a few different methods you can use. I really should have put it somewhere else!
Almost my whole garden gets less than 8 hours of direct sunlight a day. Partial sun or partial shade plants like 3-6 hours of direct sun a day. Most do much better with at least 8 hours.
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Plants with full sun requirements need at least 6 hours of direct sunlight a day. Unfortunately for me, most fruits and vegetables prefer full sun. This is bad news for plants requiring full sun. Even with taller plants in the back and shorter ones in the front, some shade was being thrown. By 5pm shadows were being thrown on most plants by the plants in front of them. The sad news was that my garden wasn't wholly in sun till after 1 pm. Or because the sun started to dip below the trees on the other side of the yard. This meant the sections in the back were often in shade because of the trees behind them or the plants in front of them. As the day ended I also wrote down when the sun was no longer hitting each section directly. I wrote down exactly when each section of the garden got sunlight. I spent an entire day checking on the garden about every hour. For my location I needed to see what time the sun came above the trees. I just needed to check exactly how it moved over my garden. We all know that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west.more or less. I marked the directions and every feature I was working with, like the gardens.Īs you can see from the image below my apple trees can't even be seen because the trees from the woods grow over top of them! This obviously blocks out the sunlight they need.
The first thing I did was to go to google maps and get a screenshot of my property. In fact, over the next few years.pretty much everything that had been here, failed. The grapes developed a fungus problem from being planted where they didn't get enough ventilation. The apple trees they had planted were directly under the canopy of leaves from the woods and had constant problems. Things that needed a lot of sun like corn didn't grow well in most of the garden. I quickly found that many places in my garden were too shady. I thought they had known what they were doing! So I used the garden plot they had already dug. It's super easy to make a sun map and once you have one it makes garden planning much simpler.įirst of all, don't be like me! When we first moved here I looked around at all the things I had never grown before and thought the former owner must have been an amazing gardener! A mini weeping cherry tree in a color I had never seen, flower filled rock gardens, exotic colors and styles of lilies, apple trees, grape vines and more were growing throughout the yard. Had I made a sun map of my property and then chosen a spot for my garden based on that, I'd have much better harvests from my garden because I'd be able to plant more efficiently!Įven if you already have a garden plot that your sticking with, a sun map can help you plan your garden so it makes more sense. I could have avoided this if I had made a sun map of my garden way back in the beginning. Not knowing my sun pattern was an expensive gardening mistake.
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