Filed under: Gardening Techniques | Tags: fertilizer, Natural Fertilizer, new vegetable gardener, safe fertilizer, starting seeds, vegetable gardener, vegetable gardening, vegetables
This year, there is a ton of interest in vegetable gardening! There is even a vegetable garden on the White House lawn for the first time in decades. Something we care about a lot is making sure that all of the new gardeners joining our ranks hit the ground running and get a good start to their vegetable experience. There is nothing to kill the enthusiasm more than failure! We’d like to help you prevent that. With that in mind, here are some tips for new vegetable gardeners.
- Start with the soil. You will have many times more healthy vegetables-in terms of quantity and quality-if you start by building up the soil. There are a number of ways to do this. You can order a load of compost from a local soil company. For instance, in Wilmington, NC, you can order compost, or compost/topsoil blend from a place called Seaside Mulch. You can also fertilize with a natural fertilizer like proto-gro, which is full of trace elements and nutrients that many soils lack. Your vegetables are only as nutritious as the soil in which they grow, so make your soil healthy!
- Plant your vegetables in full sun. Some vegetables will grow in a bit of shade, in the hot south. Most vegetables need at least ten hours of full sun a day, and you will be disappointed with the results if they don’t get it.
- To feed your family sustainably, grow open-pollinated vegetable varieties. This is especially important these days, because many of the seeds you can get at the store are hybrids that will not produce reliable seeds from year to year. Look for seeds that are NOT labeled as F1 hybrids in your local garden center.
- Plant flowers and vegetables together. Flowers attract the bees that pollinate the vegetable plants so that you’ll have vegetables.
- Provide plenty of water. If you live in an area that is prone to drought, set up rain barrels under the gutters to catch the runoff from your roof, and use that to water.
- Invest in a good vegetable gardening book. One of the best books out there is the A-Z Guide to Growing Organic Food by Storey Press. It tells you when to plant seeds, when to transplant, which plants grow together well, what to do about pests, and good varieties to grow.
- When planting fine seeds like lettuce or dill, cover with a thin layer of lightweight potting mix instead of regular garden soil. This will hold water well and be easier for young plants to push up through.
- Don’t be tempted to bite off more than you can chew. Start with a few vegetable beds and gradually expand. For people with little time or space, the book Square Foot Gardening or the All New Square Foot Gardening are excellent books about gardening in small spaces, on a couple of hours a week.
There is almost nothing as fun as watching your own veggies sprout from seed and grow into delicious ingredients for meals. The most important part about getting started with vegetable gardening is, well, getting started. Scratch a bit of soil, plant some seeds, water and watch them grow!
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