Sun, Shade, and Being Honest About It
Every beginner tells me their yard gets "pretty good sun." Then I ask them to actually watch it for a day and half the time they come back a little sheepish. The garage shadow eats the whole morning, or the neighbor's tree they forgot about takes out 3 to 6 pm. Your yard doesn't care what you assumed about it. It just does what it does.
This lesson is about figuring out what your yard actually does, not what you hope it does.
Six hours, honestly counted
Most vegetables that produce fruit, tomatoes, peppers, squash, beans, want six or more hours of direct sun. Leafy stuff like lettuce and spinach will get by on four or five and actually prefer some afternoon relief once it heats up.
Here's the thing. "Six hours of sun" doesn't mean six hours between sunrise and sunset where the yard is generally bright. It means six hours where the sun is hitting that patch of ground directly, no roof, no fence, no tree canopy in the way.
So go count it. Pick a Saturday, or really any day since the sun doesn't take days off, and check your yard every hour or two from about 8 am to 6 pm. Write down which spots are lit and which are shaded. Yes, actually write it down. I keep this stuff in my garden journal because my memory of "oh it's sunny back there" turns out to be wrong more often than I'd like to admit.
Steps for your own sun survey
- Pick a clear day, spring or early summer if you can. Trees are leafing out by then, and that changes shade patterns a lot. Checking in March when the tree's still bare will lie to you almost as bad as the seed packet does.
- Walk the yard every hour or two and note the light. A rough sketch works fine. I draw squares for "full sun," slashes for "part shade," and a dot for "forget it, that's shade all day." Nobody needs a legend as fancy as mine, but some kind of marking system keeps you honest.
- Watch for the sneaky stuff. Fences and garages cast long, obvious shadows, but the thing that gets people is a neighbor's tree that's grown taller since they moved in, or a shed roofline that clips the morning sun without you noticing because you're not out there at 8 am.
- Total up the hours for each spot. Six-plus hours, that's your tomato and pepper and squash bed. Four to six, that's lettuce, spinach, chard, the leafy crowd. Under four, honestly, don't fight it. Grow shade-tolerant herbs there or use it for your compost bin.
The part where I stopped babying everything
A few summers back I hiked up a ridge in the Wasatch, one of those trails where the dirt is basically gravel and there's barely any topsoil to speak of. And there were plants up there doing just fine. Thriving, actually, in worse soil than my raised beds, with way less water, at a higher elevation than my yard sits at. Nobody was out there with a watering can and a sun chart.
I came home and looked at my garden different after that. I'd been treating every plant like it needed perfect conditions and constant fussing or it would keel over. Some of that's true for tomatoes, they're not tough plants and they'll tell you about it. But a lot of what I grow can handle more than I was giving it credit for. Part shade isn't a death sentence. A little stress isn't either. I loosened up.
That doesn't mean skip the sun survey. It means once you know what you've got, work with it instead of trying to force six hours of light out of a spot that's only ever going to get four.
Matching plants to what you actually found
If you did the survey and most of your yard is full sun, lucky you, put your tomatoes and peppers there and don't overthink it.
If you've got a mostly part-shade yard, that's still a garden. Lettuce, spinach, kale, chard, peas, herbs like mint and chives, these will all produce in four to six hours. You will not grow a great tomato crop back there, and I'd rather tell you that now than have you plant six starts in September shade and wonder what went wrong in August.
If you've got real full shade, under a big tree, north side of a two-story house, that's not really vegetable garden territory no matter what you do to the soil. Save that spot for a shed or a bench and put your growing energy where the light is.
Where this fits with the raised bed plan
If you're building raised beds, and I think you should be, this is the lesson to do before you build, not after. I've seen people put beautiful cedar beds in a spot that gets four hours of dappled shade because it was close to the hose bib, and then fight all summer for tomatoes that never ripen. Pick your sunniest spot first. Convenience is a real consideration, but it's the second consideration.
Before next time
Do your sun survey this week, even a rough one beats no data. Bring your notes, or your phone photos of the yard at a few different times of day, and we'll figure out together what you're actually working with.
- D