How to Section Out Your Vegetable Garden

Decide what vegetables you want to plant. Read the seeds packages to find out how much space is necessary for each plant to grow properly. Determine how many plants you want of each vegetable.

Measure out your actual garden space. Draw out on your paper a grid of 1 square yard sections. Leave a path down the center of the garden if necessary so you can reach the grids from both sides.

Write the name of the vegetables you want to plant in each grid. Use two grids for one vegetable if you want to grow more of those. Plant tall vegetables, such as corn, at the north end of the garden to prevent it from blocking the sun to the other plants.

Keep plants from the same family together so you can more easily rotate your plantings in future planting seasons. Plants in the same families -- peppers and tomatoes, cucumbers and squash, or different types of peas and beans -- attract certain pests that can damage a crop planted in the same space the next year if it is also susceptible to the pest, or use more of one soil nutrient, depleting it from the soil for the plant that comes next. Planting a block of beans next to tomatoes, which are planted next to cucumbers, allows you to easily shift your blocks over by one each year, so the same plant type is only in the same soil every three years.

Transfer your grid design to your prepared garden soil. Mark out the different grids by measuring out the 1-yard sections. Use the wooden stakes to mark off your measurements.

Attach the string from stake to stake to mark out the grid of your garden. Put the string low to the ground, maybe 5 inches off the ground so it is easy to work around.

Plant your seeds or seedlings in the appropriate grids. Remove the string if desired once the vegetables begin sprouting and can easily be seen.