Marking your vegetable garden

Keeping your vegetable garden organized will go a long way to a successful home vegetable Garden.

One of the best ways to keep your home vegetable garden organized is to properly mark what you are growing.

When the seedlings are young, I like to use wooden craft sticks that are available at any craft store, or online at places like Amazon.

In the photo shown above, a box of 300 Jumbo craft sticks runs about five dollars sometimes even less if you catch a good sale.

Once you have your Jumbo craft sticks you want to write on them with something that's a little more "permanent" than a pen.

I like to use a fine point sharpie marker.  The reason I choose a fine point is because the wooden sticks will absorb the marker and make the marker ink spread out just a little bit.

Sharpie markers are available pretty much anywhere like Walmart, target,  Amazon, your supermarket, and any craft store.

As you can see in the picture above, I have marked my blue Hubbard squash using this described method.  

The marking is nice and dark as well as permanent.  And that is key because you don't want the marking to run, especially when you water the plants.

You won't however use the same wooden sticks in your garden.  While you certainly can use them, there is nothing wrong with that, I prefer using something a bit larger to mark each garden area.

For my outdoor garden markings I like to take 4 foot wooden posts and using my table saw cut them down to quarter inch strips.

As you can see in the picture above, what I do is take my tablesaw, move the fence over to a quarter of an inch and then slide my post through which gives me the perfect size. 

As a disclaimer I have removed the Saw Blade protector so that I could take this photo.

Before I insert the garden stake into the ground, what I will do is write on it using my sharpie marker with what is planted in that area.

As noted in the picture above that particular area has corn planted in it.

Inserting the garden stake into the ground is very easy, as shown in the picture above, you can see, all I do is use a hammer and just lightly tap on it.  

6 to 8 inches deep is all you will need to keep the garden stake stable.

If you have a different method please write in the comments below and let me know what you use.   I would love to learn all the different ways that marking your garden areas can be done