Contrary to popular belief, growing an organic garden doesn’t mean you’re one step away from joining a commune or living off the land. It just means you want healthier food, bereft of the harsh chemicals that are used by mass-producing farms. Here are some tips to ensure that your garden will always grow.
Plant your own seeds to guarantee organic produce. Sowing your own vegetable seeds gives you the comfort and assurance that your produce has been grown organically from seed to table. Choose plants that are easy to germinate such as broccoli, cabbage, basil and tomatoes. Find out the best time of the year to sprout your chosen produce.
Plant slightly more than you will need. Pests and poor weather can diminish yields from your garden, especially if you are new to organic gardening. To account for this possibility, plant a little more than what you will need. However, don’t go overboard, if it is successful, you could have more vegetables than you could possibly use.
In order to offer your organic gardening the most success, mulch it with 3 inches of organic material. By mulching your organic garden you will conserve water, add nutrients to the soil and stop weeds from growing. As an added bonus, mulching also gives your organic garden a bit of beauty.
Fertilize your soil with organic compost. Organic gardeners tend to fertilize their soil twice in one season: once prior to planting, and then again in the middle of a growth cycle. The best fertilizer to use is an organic compost, as it releases nutrients slowly unlike chemical fertilizers, which release nutrients in one go and then lose their effect.
When you collect your vegetables from your organic garden, use an old plastic laundry basket. First of all, it has a lot of room to gather many fruits and vegetables at one time. The basket will also also allow you to rinse off your harvest quickly since it will serve as a strainer to remove soil and debris from your fruits and vegetables.
A great tip that can help improve your organic gardening is to start keeping a gardening journal. Noting all of the changes that occur and when they occur, can be great information to have. A gardening journal can help your next year of gardening be much more successful.
If you plan on starting an organic garden, you should always properly cover your seeds. If your seeds are not properly covered, then they will not grow. You should aim to cover most of your seeds about three times as deep as the thickness of your seeds in order to ensure optimum growth. However, certain seeds, such as alyssum and snapdragons, should not be covered because they need a lot of light to germinate.
Keep your plants from going into shock. When you are buying plants that are already started, you need to pay close attention to the light they have when you buy them. If they are in full sun or shade, keep them in that condition. Slowly move them into their permanent lighting over a few days.
A great tip that can help you with organic gardening is to make sure you have the right soil. In order for your plants to get the proper nutrients, the soil needs to have a pH of about 6.5. If the soil is much higher or lower your plants won’t grow.
A great time saving tip is to use both portable and stationary hose reels in order to store your hoses away in a faster time period than the typical hoses that require more time for dragging and storing. Using these hose reels will free up more of your time for other gardening activities.
If you are running your own organic garden, a great tip in being more economical is to use scrap wood for fencing your garden and use fallen tree branches and saplings for building your vegetable trellises and arbors. Using these will save you time and money from purchasing an alternative.
If you have old pantyhose that you are thinking about throwing away, keep them. You can use them in your garden to make garden ties. In addition, they can be used to bag your cantaloupes that are growing on trellises to give them more support. Using pantyhose can be a cheap, economical way of assisting you in your garden.
Try using organic matter for your organic garden. The best organic matter that you can use for your garden’s bed preparation is a type of compost that is made from anything that used to be alive. Examples of this would be compost comprised of dead leaves, any kind of kitchen waste, or even grass clippings.
To keep air flowing through your compost pile, stand a large PVC pipe with punched holes in the center of your pile so the air flows up and down the pipe, and then through the holes directly into the pile. The air movement helps your soil decomposers create the heat needed to jumpstart the decay process.
To insulate the soil and protect against weeds, you should consider different types of mulches. Use things like wood chips, leaves, hay, and lawn clippings. Protecting plants with a mulch helps them in many ways, such as guarding soil against erosion. You can even look into living mulches, which are plants that serve the same purpose as a mulch.
When harvesting tomatoes from your organic garden, you do want to pick ripe tomatoes; however, you do not want your tomatoes to be too ripe. Certain tomatoes that are too ripe might be mealy. You should aim to harvest tomatoes when they have their full color and are at their largest size.
Yes, there is a stigma that comes with the word “organic,” but that’s because most people fail to realize that the word organic, basically means natural. In fact, growing organic is as natural as you can possibly get. So make sure to use these gardening tips when you’re ready to grow organic food.