Gardening : Make Vegetable Plot a Success This Year : Planting: Proper soil preparation, planting and fertilizing will pay off in bountiful harvest.

To successfully grow vegetables, you need to plan for as well as plant and maintain your vegetable garden. This is especially true in Southern California because of our unique climatic conditions.

Newcomers to the Southland are often surprised to learn that we can grow vegetables most of the year. Our gardening year is divided into two seasons--a cool season and a warm season.

In the cool season, which runs from late September through mid-March, plant cool-season crops such as lettuce and other leafy greens, the cabbage family members, root vegetables, peas and others that require cool weather to mature to perfection.

Warm-season vegetables are planted from April through mid-June and include tomatoes, peppers, beans, the squash family, corn, melons, eggplant and others that love warm weather.

Although a few vegetables will grow in warm- or cool-season situations, most will not. If you plant peas in June or peppers in November, they will fail miserably.

There are four steps necessary for success with vegetable gardening--planning, soil preparation, planting and garden maintenance.

Proper location of your vegetable garden is of prime importance. Think back to last summer and the site of the hottest, sunniest area of your yard. Although a few vegetables will tolerate partial shade, most require full sun to make rapid growth. The area you choose should receive, at the minimum, six hours of sunlight daily--the more, the better.

The selected site should be away from trees or other structures that might shade the plot. In addition, trees have extensive root systems that tend to rob vegetables of nutrients and moisture.

The southern side of a home or other building often provides a good garden plot as it receives full sun, and the building will also shelter the vegetables from northerly winds.

Do not despair if your yard does not contain the ideal growing area. Consider using areas along sunny fences or inter-planting vegetables in your flower beds.

Pole beans and other climbing vegetables can be trained on your fence, and an alternate row of red and green cabbage along the border of your flower garden will be as decorative as any of the ornamentals.

What if you have no yard at all? Growing vegetables in containers on patios or decks can be a satisfying experience.

After locating your garden in the best possible site and determining the total amount of planting space available, it is now time to draw up a garden plan.

Using a seed catalogue or vegetable gardening book, you can determine the growing characteristics and space requirements of each vegetable variety that you want to include in your garden. With a piece of graph paper, ruler and pencil you can decide the amount of space to allocate each vegetable. Always allow for paths that will assure access to all areas of your garden.

Most gardeners prefer to plant in rows, but you can save space on many of the smaller vegetable varieties by scatter-planting them in individual plots. These plots can be outlined by bricks or other dividers that will help keep water, soil and nutrients in the plot.

Raised beds are ideal for scatter-planting. By scatter-planting the smaller crops in plots, you save the distance required between rows. For instance, in planting beets, you merely scatter and poke the seeds into your beet plot, and then thin the young seedlings to the proper distance recommended between plants, while ignoring the distance between rows.

Naturally, larger vegetable varieties, such as corn or tomatoes, are not suited to plot gardening.

In deciding which vegetables to plant, keep in mind your family’s vegetable preferences. Which ones do you buy most? Try to concentrate on these. Keep in mind that sprawling vegetables, such as melons, require a lot of area and are generally not suited to the small garden. If space allows, try growing some of the new 1990 vegetable introductions from your seed catalogues.

If planting in rows, try to run your rows north and south. If, because of drainage or other factors, you must run them east and west, put your tall growing crops such as corn, on the north side or your garden to avoid shading the lower growing vegetables.

Plan for succession planting of quick-maturing vegetables, such as radishes, leaf lettuce or spinach. After all, what are you going to do with a 30-foot row of radishes that mature at the same time?

Instead, plant three 10-foot rows at 10-day intervals. When planting corn, plant at least three rows, rather than one long row; this will assure proper pollination. It is also possible to save space by inter-planting the quick-maturing crops with the slower-maturing crops. You can easily squeeze a row of radishes in between rows of slower-maturing vegetables.

Soil preparation is a factor that is often overlooked by the beginner, but is never neglected by the experienced vegetable gardener. An old gardening adage states that good garden soils are man-made. This is very true, as good gardening loam rarely occurs naturally in the yard of the gardener.

However, heavy clay or light, sandy soil can be greatly improved by the addition of large amounts of organic materials and other soil amendments. If your soil is impossible, consider gardening in raised beds.

In preparing your garden plot, you should spade and work the soil to a depth of 12 inches and add lots of organic materials to it. Such materials as compost, well-aged manures, peat moss or bone meal not only add nutrients to the soil, but also improve the structure of the soil.

In addition, it would be wise to add a multipurpose vegetable fertilizer to your soil. Although your organic materials supply some of the necessary nutrients to the soil, it takes time for the organic material to break down and supply these nutrients to the vegetables. While commercial fertilizers do not improve the soil structure, they do provide nutrients that are immediately available to the plants.

After your prepare and fertilize your soil, water it deeply and allow it to settle for a few days before planting.

If you continually add organic material to your soil every time you replant, you will note great improvement in the composition of your soil.

You have planned your garden, the soil is prepared and now comes the exciting business of actually planting the seed. One of the biggest mistakes the beginning gardener is apt to make is sowing the seeds too deep or too shallow.

Follow the suggested planting depths on the seed packet and if planting in heavy soil, plant at a more shallow depth than recommended. If no directions are available, a general rule is to plant seeds at a depth equal to approximately four times their diameter.

Plant your seeds in soil that has been thoroughly moistened the day before, rather than watering dry soil after planting, which may result in washing the seeds away. If you plant in rows, you will probably want to stake out your rows by tying string between the stakes to guide your seed sowing.

After planting, tamp the soil down gently over the seeds with your trowel or by hand. If scatter-planting in plots, you may want to use a pencil tip to make your planting holes.

The day after planting and until the seedlings emerge, sprinkle the soil with a very light mist so that it will not crust over.

Plant more seeds than recommended; some will not germinate. When the young seedlings grow to a couple of inches high, thin them to the distances recommended on the seed packets. It is sometimes difficult, especially for the beginning gardener, to pull up young, healthy plants, but thinning is an important process for successful gardening and must be done ruthlessly.

When transplanting vegetable plants into the garden, try to avoid making the transplant during the heat of mid-day. The best transplanting time is toward evening as the plant will have the cool night temperature to recover from the shock.

Never transplant a plant grown in the house directly from house to garden. Always harden the transplant by gradually exposing it to more direct sunlight each day. The plants should be exposed to full sun for five days before transplanting occurs.

Watering, weeding, fertilizing and pest control are not really that much fun, but to successfully grow vegetables, they are a necessary evil. One slow, gentle soaking of your vegetable crops is far more beneficial than several light sprinklings.

Avoid overhead watering as this encourages mildew and other disease. How often do you water? It all depends on the weather conditions, the water-retention capability of your soil and the vegetable you are watering. For most vegetables one slow, heavy soaking a week is sufficient.

Avoid watering too often, as a soggy soil will deprive roots of oxygen and will suffocate the plants.

Weeds compete with your vegetables for sun, moisture and nutrients and should be removed immediately after they emerge. Hand weeding is the only way to weed the plots or the rows themselves. Between the rows you should cultivate shallowly with a hoe or other weeder.

Mulching with organic materials or black plastic film will smother weeds and make your weeding chores much easier. Mulching is an excellent garden practice, for in addition to controlling weeds, mulches conserve soil moisture and the organic mulches and nutrients, and improve soil composition when they decompose.

If, when preparing your soil, you have added generous amounts of organic materials and a multipurpose vegetable fertilizer, you probably will not need to fertilize again during the growing season of most crops.

However, vegetables that set fruit, such as tomatoes, peppers and eggplant, will benefit from a side dressing of a 6-12-6 fertilizer when they begin to blossom. Make certain to water thoroughly after fertilizing. Never use a high-nitrogen fertilizer on tomatoes or other fruiting crops, as it causes the blossoms to drop and the plant will not set fruit.

Maintaining a clean, well-weeded garden will help prevent insect infestations and plant diseases. Products such as Dipel, Thuricide or Attack that contain Bacillus thuringiensis, a biological control, will kill tomato worms, cabbage worms and other harmful caterpillars, but will not harm beneficial insects or warm-blooded creatures.

If you are new to vegetable gardening, when planning the size of your garden, my advice would be to think big but start small. Start with a small plot and see how you like vegetable gardening and how much time you have to devote to it. A large garden can easily overwhelm the novice, as proper garden maintenance makes large demands on one’s time.