8 Vegetable Garden Layout Plans to Boost Your Homegrown Harvests

Vegetable garden ideas that involve children help establish healthy habits and get young kids excited about eating produce. Use this easy vegetable garden for fun, and to pass along gardening lessons. Once planted, it takes only a few hours a week to keep it looking its best.

What better way to celebrate spring than whipping up a salad with just-picked radishes, spinach, or lettuce? You can enjoy the freshest flavors of the season with this simple spring vegetable garden plan. Designed for a four-foot-square raised bed, it nestles in 10 different cool-season crops that do their best growing in lower temperatures and can even take a light frost.

Once the soil warms, plant summer-yielding vegetables such as tomatoes and peppers as in this vegetable garden plan. It's designed to follow the spring vegetable garden plan for a four-foot-square raised bed, so it has carrots, cabbage, onions, snow peas, and parsley already growing in it.

Tender lettuce, spinach, and peas aren't limited to spring. Enjoy these and other cool-season crops by following this fall bounty garden plan for a four-foot-square raised bed. This plan is designed to follow the summer vegetable garden plan, so it includes previously planted crops that would be reaching maturity as your fall-planted crops are starting to grow.

This vegetable garden plan features a central diamond-shape bed with four larger raised beds around it and wide brick pathways running between them. A row of ornamental perennials or shrubs of your choice can serve as a hedge around the perimeter, set off by a white picket fence. The raised beds are filled with a variety of vegetables, herbs, and edible flowers, as a nod to the efficient yet beautiful kitchen gardens of Medieval monasteries.

If you're planning your garden with the hope to grow lots of different vegetables and have the space to spread out, try this large-scale vegetable garden plan. It's got a little bit of everything: leafy greens, root veggies, herbs, and tasty pods.

Kids like plants that appeal to their senses and spark their imaginations. This easy children's vegetable garden plan will please gardeners of all ages with unusual and fun-looking vegetables such as kohlrabi and 'Scallop' summer squash. They'll also love making the garden pretty with the marigolds and sunflowers that flank the bed's edge.

Bigger is not always better when it comes to vegetable gardening. Small beds require less time to plant and maintain than large ones, and you can still harvest plenty of produce by choosing more compact crops. This small-space vegetable garden plan for a 6 x 8 foot raised bed brims with fresh greens, herbs, and edible flowers.