Top Tips To Take Your Organic Gardening To The Next Level!
In the gardening world, it is important to to try to grow and maintain the best plants that you can. That is where smart gardening techniques come in handy. This will help you grow the most plentiful, beautiful and healthiest plants that you can. Follow these tips to become a better gardener.
A tip to prevent dirt from accumulating under your fingernails while working in the garden, use a bar of soap before starting. Rake your fingernails across a bar of soap and it will seal the undersides of your nails so that dirt will not collect beneath them. When you are finished in the garden, just use a brush to scrape the soap from beneath them and your nails will still be sparkling clean.
Be realistic about the types of plants you can grow in your garden. If a particular plant has failed you in the past, don’t try it again. You need to right kind of climate, soil, and sun/shade ratio for certain plants. If you don’t have it, no amount of effort will make those plants a success. Choosing realistically will increase your yield while decreasing your effort.
A key element to having a great garden is to fertilize it. There are many different types of fertilizers available at most home stores, but what works for different types of gardens varies. Manure is a great choice, but it does smell. A commercially produced manure will have no pathogens to contaminate the vegetables in the garden. Some people swear by chemical fertilizers, yet they are not an organic way to grow.
A helpful solution for getting rid of a few slugs in your garden is to set out a container of beer. Just take a small plastic cup or container (plastic margarine bowl works great) and tuck it down into your garden beds near the area where the slugs are known to appear. Be sure the lip of the dish is level to the ground and then fill it with beer. The beer attracts the slugs into the dish where they will drown. You will have to dispose of the slugs and reset the beer “trap” every couple days, but your slugs will disappear.
To create nutrient rich soil for your garden in advance, gather unused fish parts and bury them in the soil. Leave the fish parts untouched in the soil for as long as you can before planting over it. For best results, be sure to bury the fish parts at least 8 inches in the ground.
If you are growing a vegetable garden, you may find that pests can be difficult to control. It’s likely you don’t want to spray pesticides around the vegetables you intend to eat. The key to keeping garden pests at bay is to be relentless. If you catch pests right away, the easiest way to eradicate them is to pick them off plants by hand.
Experiment with different shades of green. Many people think that if they don’t have a lot of flowers, they don’t have enough color in their garden. This couldn’t be further from the truth. A garden is filled with many different shades of green, and it can be argued that it is the most important color in the garden, as it provides the backdrop. Mix warm shades of green with cool shades. Use variegated plants as much as possible. Concentrate on shape and texture, as well as color.
When watering plants use recycled water, but avoid re-using water from sources such as baths, washing machines, or dishwashing. These water sources may contain harmful chemicals that can be absorbed into your vegetables such as nitrates and phosphates. This water may even contain pathogens that could harm you or your plants.
Embrace earthworms in the organic garden! Earthworms are an organic gardener’s best friend. Through tunneling and their nitrogen-rich castings, they can help to aerate the soil. This improves the amount of oxygen that gets to a plant’s roots, improves water retention capacity, and keeps the soil loose and workable. They actually raise much-needed minerals from the garden’s subsoil to the topsoil, where plants can get the greatest benefit. These worms also break up hardpan soil, which is detrimental to root growth.
As you can see from the previous list of tips, gardening can really be an enjoyable hobby or career. It takes a lot of hard work, a lot of maintenance and a lot of patience, but it is all worth it in the end to have a beautifully maintained garden.
