How To Increase Your Vegetable Yield

We have been growing vegetables for years and years now. The fact is that we have more land than we know what to do with and only a small percentage of it is taken up for growing vegetables. If you want to increase your vegetable yield then I have had a lot of experience with trying out different methods, all with varying success rates.

From extra watering, double digging, raised beds and more there is one sure-fire way to increase your yields and it is the one most often overlooked.

Increase The Quality Of Your Soil

This is the bottom line.

If you improve the quality of your soil then you will retain more moisture, need less watering, grow larger and tastier vegetables, and it takes next to no work at all.

How Do We Do This?

Simple.

You make compost.

Any avid gardener should do all that they can to make as much high quality compost as they possibly can. Use a high quality spade like the Fiskars 9667 garden spade or at least a spade with a sharp edge and first dig over your plot. Double digging is optional but I do recommend it.

Once it is turned over you then add as much compost to the plot as you possibly can. Read my compost tumbler reviews post for the absolute quickest way to make compost, often in under a month. But even if you use a conventional compost heap you should be building up a stock-pile of compos ready for when you want to improve the soil.

How Much compost To Add

As much as you possibly can.

You will be amazed how much compost it takes to cover a decent sized plot so you want to begin to make compost as soon as you possibly can. Add in anything organic to the pile and even ask the neighbors if they do not compost themselves. It really doesn’t go as far as you would think.

As a general guideline you should be aiming for at least a foot of compost covering the whole plot.

After a light rain this really does drop down a lot so even if it seems like it is spilling over the sides of the plot it soon drops down in level.

Once you have added the compost be sure to dig it in to the original soil to incorporate it properly and to make sure it is not too rich for your new plants.

If you can avoid ever standing on the soil so much the better. You stop it from being compacted and it means that when the time comes to dig it over again the job is so much easier.

I never stand on my vegetable plots. EVER!

I make sure that they are only wide enough so that the center can be reached without ever putting foot on the actual soil. This is a great tip to make digging over your plot simplicity itself. My soil is so rich I can actually turn over a whole plot in a few minutes with a hay fork, it is that light and aerated.

So, there we have it.

A simple tip to improve your vegetable yield with little work.

The better the quality of the soil the more nutrients you have, the less watering you need to do and the better the end product.