How to start a vegetable garden? Rule number one: use no synthetic chemicals.
But organic gardening – or any kind of gardening, for that matter – does not come without its challenges. If you’re thinking about starting an organic garden, here are seven tips that, if followed, will save you a lot of headaches, time, and sore muscles.
1. Use raised bed or container gardening.
Raised beds are a bit labor-intense to create, depending on which technique you use, but once you start using them you will have very little digging or weeding to do. Containers require no weeding or digging, are back-friendly, can be set up as self-watering systems, make pest control easier, and allow you to meet the individual watering and fertilizing needs of the plants better.
2. Start small.
And unless your livelihood depends upon it, keep it small until your oldest child is at least three or four years old. Believe me, you don’t need the kind of “help” that a toddler offers in a garden. Even if you don’t have little ones around, you are likely to experience burnout and frustration quickly if you try to grow all your own vegetables the very first year that you garden.
3. Don’t treat organic sprays as chemical sprays.
Unlike conventional pesticides, the environmentally safe, natural sprays will only take care of the pests that you see. After the odor wears off a couple hours later, the hidden hungry critters will come out.
In addition, the organic sprays will kill beneficial insects as readily as the toxic sprays do. Keep their use to a bare minimum; use companion planting (see next tip) and healthy soil as your main pest control.
4. Plant naturally repelling plants when you plant the vegetables.
Plant blooming repellent flowers – such as marigolds and nasturtiums – and six- to twelve-inch tall herbs around your tomato, pepper, cucumber and other transplants as soon as they go into the ground. That way, you have an instant insect repellent built into your garden and may make #3 irrelevant.
5. Learn your bugs.
Use online or print sources on gardening to find pictures of beneficials and pests. The last thing you want to do is kill off the beneficial bugs in your garden.
6. Befriend diatomaceous earth.
But like the sprays, use it judiciously, as it will kill the good guys as well as the bad.
DE is best used to kill/repel slugs and snails from your greens, and cabbage worms from your cabbage family crops.
7. Build your garden near your main water source.
Plan and make your beds as close to the outdoor faucet and/or rain barrels as possible. There’s nothing more frustrating than having to drag hoses all over kingdom come or walk a hundred steps to fill up your water can. This one tip will make caring for your vegetables a much more enjoyable task.
Need a detailed plan on how to create the lowest-maintenance garden ever? Be sure to check out my e-book, Weird Gardening.