Growing your own organic garden can be a great way to get some clean, healthy produce into your house, while also providing yourself with a relaxing, stress-relieving hobby. If this sounds great, but you aren’t sure where to start, don’t worry. Read on to find out how to make your own home garden! When planning your home garden, be sure to choose some crops that are typically costly to purchase from your local grocery store. By doing this, you can end up saving yourself a lot of money, sometimes fifty dollars or more every month, depending on the crop. Plus, you are guaranteed to have the freshest vegetables available!
Tips for Gardening:
- Protect your seedlings from frost with clay pots. Early spring is a perilous time for a new garden. You want to get your plants going as soon as possible to ensure plenty of grow time, but a single frost can wipe out your fragile seedlings. To protect your tiny plants from frost at night, simply place a small, upside down clay pot on each seedling. They will insulate from the cold and protect from the wind.
- Easily dry herbs using your car. Your car is the perfect place to dry herbs, providing a safe, dry, and warm location. Simply place some newspaper or other protection on a car seat, and arrange the herbs in a single, even layer. Make sure the windows are rolled up, and close up the car. Your herbs will be dry and ready to store. Length of time will depend on the temperature, but can be as little as an hour or two. As a bonus, your car will smell wonderful!
- If you are growing tomatoes, be sure to pick an airy spot that gets plenty of light. Tomatoes require at least ten hours of sunlight during an average summer day in order to grow to their peak flavor levels. Good air circulation between and around the plants is also vital to their survival.
- Do not mow your grass when it is wet. When you mow wet grass, the wet grass clippings will turn into mush and stick to your lawnmower’s blades, which can result in jams. In addition, if wet grass clippings get onto a paved area of your garden, the paved area will have grass stains.
- Make sure the hole you plant for a tree or shrub is at least three times wider than the root ball of the seedling. Most of the root system of a tree or shrub is found in the top foot of the soil. Planting a seedling in a small hole will result in slower growth and failure to thrive.
- Plant evergreen shrubs. Certain shrubs can provide triple duty throughout the year: they bear leaves year-round, produce flowers, and sometimes have ornamental fruit that attracts birds and other wildlife. This makes them very desirable in any landscape design. Excellent varieties are Berberis, Holly, Camellia Japonica, Ceanothus, Viburnum and Skimmia. Most will survive in any conditions.
- Toads can be a gardener’s best friend because of all the troublesome bugs they eat. To attract toads to come visit your garden and stay awhile, keep the garden bedding moist and offer some places where they can safely hide from predators of their own. A useful trick many gardeners use is to place old, broken clay flower pots upside down in the garden to function as a comfy shelter for the hard-working toads.
- The best way to water your organic garden is to use a soaker hose. Soaker hoses not only conserve water, but also direct the water exactly where it needs to go, into the dirt, rather than on the leaves and into the air. By watering the leaves, you leave your plants susceptible to fungus growth.
Final Verdict:
Home testing kits are readily available. Your soil should have a pH around 6.5 for most vegetables. If the pH is too low, you can boost it by spreading lime. If it’s too high, you can use powdered sulfur. Start your home organic garden today, and soon you’ll have plenty of delicious fresh produce, and the satisfaction of knowing that it came from plants you grew with your own hands. Don’t hesitate, use the information you’ve learned now to start building your own organic garden in your home!