Tricks for Growing a Garden in a Shaded Yard

One thing I found I had to do in order to grow vegetables in my yard was find whatever sunlight I could and make sure my plants were getting it. Basically, this meant I had to abandon the idea of a traditional garden and, instead, set up a series of mini gardens around my yard.

For example, I currently have a number of vegetables, ranging from onions to peppers, in wooden planters up by my house. In addition to this, I have other plants, like potatoes, in buckets, flower pots and just about anything else that can hold soil.

Regardless of what I ultimately use to plant my vegetables, I have one primary rule, it has to be mobile. That way, when the sun starts to shift in mid-July, leaving previously sunny areas of my yard shaded, I’m able to move the majority of my plants to a place that still has sunlight.

The main disadvantage to growing my vegetables this way is it has forced me to be a little better about pre-planning. I have to pick out plants that won’t outgrow whatever it is I ultimately decide to plant them in and, just as important, I have to make sure I’m planting vegetables that will be easy to transport from one part of my yard to the next without damaging them. However, that being said, I have had a great deal of success doing this and am now growing plants that, 5 years ago, wouldn’t survive a month in my garden.

Sometimes, no matter how many times you move a plant to keep it in the sun, it just won’t grow. However, I’ve found that doesn’t mean you need to give up on that particular vegetable. Instead, all you have to do is experiment with other varieties of that same vegetable.

Tomatoes are the perfect example of this for me. This is the 7^th year I have attempted to grow them in my yard and, up until this year, it had been a complete failure. Up until this particular gardening season, I was lucky if the tomatoes didn’t die on me a few weeks after I planted them. However, I kept experimenting with different varieties, looking for tomatoes with shorter and shorter harvest times. And, finally, this year, I found one that actually works for me.

The tomato plants aren’t very big (about knee high) and the tomatoes themselves are a little smaller than many other varieties. But, for the first time since moving into our house, I was able to harvest enough for our everyday use. All it took was 6-years worth of trial and error.

This was actually a lesson I had to learn the hard way. Plants that are even partially in shade don't use water as fast as plants that are in full sunlight. As a result, if you aren't careful, it's very easy to give your vegetables too much water, especially if they are in planters that don't have enough drainage.

A specific example of this happened to me last summer. Last year, in addition to the shade, I was contending with cooler summer weather and ultimately ended up losing my zucchini plants to some sort of white mildew. I also had some onion sets rot in the too-damp soil they were planted in.

The best I've found around this is by watering by sight rather than on a schedule. If the dirt around my plants is still damp, I don't add any more water and, instead, only water plants that legitimately need a drink. Ever since I started taking that approach, I haven't had a problem with this.