Now whether you have a large, medium, small or even ‘no’ garden at all at your home, you can still grow vegetables virtually ‘anywhere’ with a little knowledge, care and persistence.
(If you have ‘no’ garden, check this post out Here!)
There are many reasons why people decide to pursue vegetable gardening as a hobby. Some people feel it’s a relaxing way to lower their stress levels. Some people just enjoy growing their own food.
Others get satisfaction from knowing that they know where some of their food is coming from. No matter what your reasons for wanting to take up vegetable gardening, it’s a very rewarding hobby.
Some people even choose to try to make some money with their vegetable gardening. You can make a little extra money by selling your vegetables at a local farmer’s market, boot-sales or roadside stand, and you can even try to sell your produce to a local health food store or restaurant.
When you’re planning your vegetable garden, you need to decide how large you want your garden to be. You may be tempted to buy dozens of different vegetables and all sorts of varieties, but this may be more work than you’re really prepared for.
First, you should make a list of all of the different vegetables you’d like to plant. Write down anything that comes to mind. Don’t worry about whether or not you’ll have time to plant or take care of something, or whether you can afford it, just write down everything you’re interested in.
Once you’ve completed your list, you’ll start narrowing it down. The first step to narrowing your list down is to eliminate anything that you can get locally at a reasonable price. Potatoes and cabbage, for example, are usually very inexpensive in most locations.
Then you should eliminate anything that you can get locally that won’t see a significant improvement in flavor over the store-bought version. Again, cabbage and potatoes probably won’t taste significantly different if you grow them yourself.
What you want to have on your list is the produce you can’t get locally, is generally too expensive to purchase, or would taste significantly better when grown in your own garden. For example, you may choose to grow fresh herbs because they are very expensive in stores.
You might want to grow tomatoes because it can be extremely difficult to find tomatoes that taste good in stores. And you might want to grow a variety of specialty lettuces that are hard to find locally, or are generally a bit expensive.
Most people can’t handle caring for a very large garden. It is hard work. It can be very relaxing, but it can be back-breaking work in unbearable heat. You have to contend with dirt, bugs, heat, bending, lugging, pulling, hoeing, and weeding.
In can be miserable work if you create a garden that is larger than you’re prepared to handle. If you go overboard, your fascinating hobby can quickly turn into a nightmare. So be sure to choose only those varieties which you really believe you’ll enjoy, and which you can’t easily find locally.
If you only eat peas once per month, don’t plant a whole row! If you detest tomatoes, don’t plant them just because you think you should for some reason. Some people plant things they think look pretty in the seed catalog, even though they know they won’t enjoy the produce!
Be careful not to get carried away. It’s tempting to plant one of every variety of tomato, or six different kinds of peppers. Those seed catalogs are beautiful, but keep it realistic!
The Easy Way to Start a Vegetable Garden:
The first step to starting a new vegetable garden is to map out your garden. Simply draw up an approximate plan of where you’d like everything to go, keeping as close to scale as possible. Make sure you take into account paths and such.
Next, you need to decide which vegetables you wish to grow. Make a list of everything you’d like to grow, and then narrow the list down to those that you can easily get locally. For example, exotic lettuces may be expensive and hard to find, and tomatoes from grocery stores usually taste terrible.
Map out where you’d like all of your plants to go in your garden. Be sure to plan carefully, because improper planning can lead to disasters later. Once you develop your plan, it’s very important to stick to it.
You should study your plants carefully. Some vegetables will need a lot of sun, and some will require more shade. It’s very important to be sure you’re planting all of your vegetables in areas where they’ll grow well.
If you’re low on space, you can utilize the French cultivation method. This is an easy way to make the most out of the little space you have. Let’s say you wish to sow spinach and carrots. You’d take one packet of each and mix them together.
Then you’d make a ½ inch deep furrow in a row and sow the mixture of the two seeds into that furrow and cover. The spinach will grow quickly and open up the soil so the carrot seeds can germinate better.
In about four weeks, you can start to harvest some spinach to thin it, making room for the slower growing carrots. By the time the carrots start to reach maturity, the spinach will be completely used up, and the carrots will have plenty of room to grow.
This method can successfully be used for many different types of vegetables. Radishes can be planted well with lettuce or parsley, for example. The French will often sow early radish varieties with lettuce and turnips all at the same time.
The radishes grow extremely quickly, and are gone by the time the lettuce starts to mature. Then the turnips don’t get large until the lettuce has been harvested. If you’re planting your rows in an east-west orientation, you should plant all of your taller plants on the north side.
This is to ensure that the taller plants don’t block the sunlight from reaching shorter plants. Corn is the tallest plant that is normally grown in vegetable gardens, so it should always be placed where it won’t block sunlight from other plants.
You can also creatively use larger plants to shade shorter plants that don’t do well in harsh sunlight. For example, you could grow delicate cool-weather spinach behind large, bushy beans or peas.
This could help you grow shade-loving vegetables in your garden, even if you don’t have any shady spots available. By being creative with placement, you might be able to grow vegetables you never thought you’d be able to grow in your location!
Take the Free! ‘Absolute Organic Gardening 21 Day Challenge’ Here!
Ten Great Vegetables for Home Vegetable Gardens:
It’s sometimes recommended that you don’t try to grow vegetables that are readily available at your local supermarket. If a particular vegetable is inexpensive, you might want to skip growing it and just purchase it.
Of course, it can be difficult to find good quality in some types of vegetables, so if there is a big difference in quality, that could be a great reason for growing that type.
Tomatoes – Although technically a fruit, its savory nature leads to this little beauty being considered a vegetable by most people. Tomatoes found in stores are usually picked nearly green and then ripened artificially.
This is done to ensure they are tough enough to survive shipping without being smashed, and so they last longer on the shelves. Since tomato quality can be really poor in stores, this is a very good choice. Tomatoes are the most popular choice for vegetable gardeners, because they probably have the most noticeable difference over store bought.
Lettuce – Although iceberg lettuce doesn’t very that much from store to home, leaf lettuces and other fancy lettuces can taste much sweeter and crisper if grown at home. Plus, exotic lettuces can often be very expensive.
Peas – Peas can be very hard to find fresh. Canned peas are often mushy, and although frozen peas are certainly better than canned, they still pale in comparison to fresh peas. Tiny baby peas are sweet, delicate, and delicious, making them well worth the effort.
Carrots – Store bought carrots are often woody, tough, and bitter. Even organic carrots often carry a strong bitterness caused by being kept at temperatures that are too cool for too long. Fresh carrots are generally very sweet and delicious.
Radishes – Radishes are cheap and easy to find in stores, but most store bought radishes are already turning pithy. If you’ve ever bitten into a radish that was dry and spongy inside, you’ll understand how bad pithy radishes are. Fresh radishes are delightful!
Greens – Although most greens are readily available in stores, they’re often yellowing and wilted by the time you buy them. By growing them yourself, you can be sure you have fresh greens when you want them.
Asparagus – Fresh asparagus is often ridiculously expensive, and canned asparagus is mushy and horrible! The only way to get affordable asparagus that isn’t mushy and bland is to grow it yourself.
Peppers – Peppers in stores are often shriveled and pathetic. Plus, peppers that aren’t standard green peppers can often be very expensive. My local store has sold red peppers for as much as $2.99 each, which is crazy! Grow your own and save money.
Cucumbers – Store bought cucumbers are often bitter and dry. If you’ve ever had a dried out, semi-hollow cucumber, you’ll understand the importance of growing your own!
Corn – Sweet corn is a delight to eat when it’s freshly picked. Corn is extremely sensitive to being off the stalk. Once it’s been off the stalk for 6 hours, it starts to deteriorate rapidly. You’ve never had corn until you’ve eaten it cooked fresh.
Raised Bed Vegetable Gardening:
Raised beds are a very popular method for growing vegetables and other produce. There are several distinct advantages to growing in raised beds. They can really make growing vegetables much easier, and you can usually get a much larger harvest for the space.
One of the biggest advantages to growing in raised beds is the fact that you can save a lot of space over traditional gardening. If you plant in rows, as most people do in traditional gardening, about half of your garden space is taken up by the paths between rows!
That’s a lot of wasted space. But if you plant in raised beds, you save a lot of space, and you can plant more per square foot than you could in rows. This means you can harvest a lot more produce from the same amount of space.
Another distinct advantage is the fact that you can have good soil more easily than you could in a traditional garden. In a traditional garden, you have to mix your compost in with your tilled soil. This means you have to first use a tiller to loosen the soil.
Then you have the back-breaking task of turning the compost into the soil. This can take a very long time, and is very hard work. With raised bed gardening, you can simply use compost as your soil!
You can choose to till the soil underneath your raised bed, or you can leave it alone. Most plants will grow without the tilling of the soil underneath. Then you can just fill your raised bed frame with compost and plant directly into it. It’s certainly much easier than turning compost into existing soil.
Raised beds are generally about 4 feet wide and 6 feet in length. They’re made from a wooden frame set on the ground, often on tilled earth. They’re generally spaced about 18 to 24 inches apart to allow for walking between the frames to care for the plants.
They’re usually separated into 1 foot sections, with each section holding a certain number of plants based on the size of the mature plant. Very large plants may need an entire 1×1 foot square. Smaller plants may be planted 4, 8, or even 16 per 1 foot square. You can plant up to 16 radishes or carrots in a single square foot!
In order to divide your raised bed, you would section off 1×1 foot areas. Then you would section those off into smaller sections based on the size of the plants you wanted to grow there. For larger plants like tomatoes or broccoli, you’d simply plant one in each square foot.
If you wanted to plant lettuce, you can fit 4 per square foot, you you’d divide each square foot into four equal squares. For radishes or carrots, you’d divide each section into 16 equal squares. Once the space is divided using string or small pieces of wood, you plant your seeds or seedlings in the center of each section.
Another fantastic benefit of raised bed gardening is the fact that you don’t have as many weeds to deal with. Since the soil you place on top is generally fresh compost or soil mix, there shouldn’t be as many weed seeds in it as there would be in tilled soil. Any weeds that do make it into your garden are easily spotted and pulled out.
Raised bed gardeners often find caring for their gardens much easier. With fewer weeds and plants that are closer together, gardening becomes a pleasure rather than a chore. It’s a great way to get more produce out of the space you have available, and it’s generally easier, too.
Common Vegetable Garden Pests:
Pests are a big problem for most gardeners. Some types of pests can destroy a crop in just a few hours! Most pests are more annoying than wantonly destructive, but finding bugs chowing down on your crops can drive anyone crazy!
We’re going to look at some of the most common vegetable garden pests, how to identify them, and how to get rid of them. Aphids are extremely common in vegetable gardens. You’ll usually see clusters of very tiny insects with soft bodies in various colors. They might be gray, pink, red, green, black, or yellow. To rid your garden of aphids, you can use neem oil or an insecticidal soap.
Beetles are annoying little creatures that love to chew on leaves. They can do an extraordinary amount of damage to crops, so it’s important to get rid of them. You can pick beetles off by hand, or you can spray your plants with an insecticide that poisons them.
Borers get into the stems of plants like melons, squashes, cucumbers, and pumpkins. You’ll notice the leaves start to wilt, and you may find a hole in the stem where they bore into the plant. You have to cut the borers out of the plants. If the borer is found at the base, you’ll have to destroy the whole plant. You can use insecticide to try to prevent these.
Grubs are fat white worms. They cause plants to wilt, or their growth may seem stunted. Grubs can be controlled by treating the soil with milky spore. The adult beetles that grubs turn into can be killed with stomach poison insecticide.
Cutworms usually cut off the plant stem at the base of the plant. The only effective way to control these is to use a paper collar on your plants about an inch below and above ground level. These bugs usually infest cabbages, peppers, and tomatoes.
Corn earworms will eat the kernels off of the cobs while the corn is still on the stalk. A similar worm, the tomato fruitworm, will eat the insides of tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants. You can use an insecticide that is made especially for earworms, and be sure to get rid of the plants at the end of the season so hopefully they won’t be back next year.
Slugs and snails leave nasty slime trails on plants and eat plant leaves. They are especially destructive to cabbage, lettuce, tomatoes, turnips, and carrots. You can buy bait to kill them, but placing a shallow pan of beer in your garden should attract them and drown them.
Thrips cause irregular white marks on leaves and leaf tips that look deformed. They infest beans, cabbage, carrots, melons, peas, squash, turnips, celery, tomatoes, and many more plants. You can hose the bugs off of the plants and then spray with a contact poison.
Tomato hornworms are one of the scariest looking garden pests. They eat the leaves and fruits of tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants. They are large, fat, green and white worms that look like caterpillars.
They have a large horn that looks like a stinger. You can remove them with gloved hands and drown them in soapy water. You can also spray with neem oil, stomach poison insecticide, or Bacillus thuringiensis.
CONCLUSION;
Remember; having the right information will make your job much easier and can help ensure the lasting success of your garden. Did you get your free copy of the E-book ‘Absolute Organic Gardening’? It goes into far more detail there.
If not, Click Here! to get your free copy in seconds.
Plus! … Take the Free! ‘Absolute Organic Gardening 21 Day Challenge’ Here!
If you don’t initially see what you’re looking for here, please use the ‘Search Bar’ in either the Sidebar or Footer.
And please don’t forget to sign up to the ‘CheckFred Community Newsletter’ via the form below …….. Thank You…….. Pete.
Click The Button Above To Visit
‘The CheckFred Merch Shop’
.