Vegetable Garden Doctor

With Guy Esposito MD

Episode #1: Planning Your Garden

There are many reasons to plant a home vegetable garden.  It will provide your family with a wide variety of fresh pesticide-free produce. Also, gardening is excellent exercise and is a wonderful family recreational activity. 

The major things you need to think about are the following:

What type of garden should you do? Here are some considerations.

Southern Exposure: You want a plot of land with southern exposure. To determine where southern exposure is you can do the following during the springtime. Go outside on a sunny day and face into the sun. Turn and look towards where you shadow is falling. The direction that your shadow falls towards is South.

Size: Start simple: a 3’ x 6’ foot garden plan is a good start and if you want to be slightly more ambitious try a 4’ x 8’ foot garden plan

Shape: You can do a square or a rectangular shape. The rectangle makes it easier to reach in and harvest the vegetables that are in the center and creates more outside area for the plants to hang out over.

Lack of Land: Do not let a lack of land stop you. You can raise quite a few vegetables from a raised bed garden and even out of various size containers.  In each case you simply need to fill them with the right soil.

Raised beds can be placed in a yard or over a patio area. Containers can be put almost anywhere where they can get some sun. The clay pot is the more traditional but I prefer plastic that look like clay because they will not dry out so quickly. Various sized boxes and vertical space extenders allow you to grow vegetables in rows and get more out of them.

Guy Esposito is an orthopedic surgeon whose other passion is vegetable gardening. From his early medical school days until the present, he has been growing a variety of vegetables in his home garden. He is the head gardener for the PBS series Ciao Italia (www.ciaoitalia.com)  which for the past twenty-one years has featured  in each season several episodes based on his garden. His garden has also been featured in print in Yankee Magazine and Northeast Flavors. He has given public seminars on the health benefits of a lifestyle based on home-grown vegetables. When not attending to his duties as Chief of Surgery of the Wentworth-Douglass Hospital in Dover, New Hampshire, he can always be found in his garden.