Vegetable gardening is a wonderful way to feed your family with safe and healthy food at a fraction of the cost. Most Americans spend just 2-5 hours per week cultivating their gardens and, in the end, they wind up saving $500 in food! With just $70, you can begin home vegetable gardening, growing tomatoes, cucumbers, beans, squash, peppers and more! Here is everything you need to know to get started — from picking a spot, to making raised beds, to cultivating the ground and choosing your planting patterns.
The first step in starting a vegetable garden is choosing the right size and location. First, be sure your location is very, very sunny. Most vegetables need a good six to eight hours of direct sunlight each day for the best results. If you have a shadier area, you can stick your spinach and lettuce there.
As you assess your yard, be sure to take into account the shade cast by the deciduous trees and the house during certain times of the day. Ideally, the garden will be conveniently situated near the kitchen, so you can tend to it more easily and harvest without hiking long distances. The best soil will be full of nutrients and drain well, so you may need to add organic compost and use garden tools to aerate the soil before you begin.
When choosing what goes into your garden, you’ll need to consider how much space the crops you want take up. Vegetable gardening items like corn, winter squash and tomatoes tend to take up a lot of room, so you’ll need a 20 x 20 garden, at least.
If you want to grow a few herbs, peppers, cucumbers and greens, a 12 x 16 plot should be sufficient.
Garden guides from the National Gardening Association recommend growing plants in succession in three foot wide beds with 18-inch paths between each row. It’s also a good idea to add a few flowers (such as marigolds) into your garden to add some beauty, deter pests and attract helpful pollinating bees .
Over the years, you’ll begin to fine-tune your vegetable gardening. You may find some crops do extraordinarily well, while others are a flop. You may decide to add new veggies to the mix or plant more of a certain crop that worked very well.
Once your cool season crop finishes its season (like peas), you can try planting a warm season crop (like zucchini). You may also try a technique known as “interplanting,” which involves planting a quick-maturing crop like lettuce next to slow-growing broccoli.
The idea is that you’ll harvest all your lettuce by the time the broccoli is looking to stretch out. Try growing plants from several different varieties to increase your chance of success and to find the best performing types.
Vegetable Garden Related Items For Sale
[phpbay]vegetable garden, 15, “”, “”[/phpbay]
Making a Heirloom Organic Vegetable Garden Start To Finish 2011
This year for 2012 we are going with http://www.incredibleseeds.com as their seeds rocked, the other 2 companies we bought from all their seeds were complete…
Read more …
Possibly related posts:
