Growing your own organic fruits and vegetables is a great way to save money and adopt a healthier diet, but it also requires efforts from you. You also have a wide variety of seeds that you can select from. Here are a few tips and techniques you can use to get started in your own organic garden.
Strawberries are a great plant to grow in any organic garden, especially if you happen to have kids or any strawberry lover in your home. Kids delight in the idea of growing things and seeing how things change over time. Explain every step to your child and he or she will hang on to your every word.
If you want a sustainable garden, leave part of it undisturbed as a home for the wildlife in the area. One side effect of this is that where animals thrive, so do birds and insects that help nurture and pollinate plants, which will increase the quality of your garden.
If you are growing plants inside of your home, you need to keep the thermostat set to 65 to 75 degrees during the day. Your plants will not grow well if it is too cold. Another option is the use heat lamps that will protect your organic plants.
One of the problems that people come up against when trying to grow organic plants indoors is a lack of natural light. If you’re living in a home that doesn’t receive much sunlight, you should consider growing plants that thrive in environments with low to medium amounts of light. If you want to grow plants that need a lot of light, consider using artificial lighting.
Try to keep plastic bags on hand to cover shoes that are muddy. When you do this, your flow stays going, and you can just get right back out to your garden and finish quick.
Pine Needles
Pine needles should not be overlooked as a great source for mulch. Some garden plants have a high acidity, and prefer acidic soil. For such plants, pine needles function both as a handy mulch and as a soil amendment to lower the pH. Cover the plots with pine needles. As the pine needles decay, they’ll raise the soil’s acidity.
Coffee grounds are good for your soil. These coffee grounds have many nitrogenous nutrients that your plants could use. Generally, nitrogen is the limiting nutrient with any plant and having a good nitrogen source either by coffee grounds, compost, or even diluted urea, will make your plants bloom faster and grow taller.
Looking for a natural way to kill weeds in your garden? Layer sheets of newspaper on the surface of areas where you are trying to control weeds. Weeds can only grow when there is adequate sunlight. When you place layers of newspapers on top of them, the weeds will suffocate from the lack of light. In time, the newspaper will decompose into the soil. You can add mulch on top for aesthetic reasons.
If you are planting seeds in containers, a good rule of thumb is that the seed’s depth should be around three times its overall size. However, you should be aware that certain seeds should not be covered at all because they are required to be in the sunlight. Petunias and ageratum are two examples of seeds that require sunlight. If you are unsure as to whether or not your seeds should be covered or not, try to read the package or find the answer online.
A useful technique for organic gardening, is to gently disturb your seedlings by using your fingers or a piece of cardboard one or two times daily. That may sound like a silly thing to do, but it’s been proven to help plants grow larger than they would otherwise.
Slugs are a nuisance that can be easily remedied with the use of an organic beer tramp. Dig a hole the size of a glass jar, and bury the jar with the top at ground level. Fill it with beer to about one inch below the top of the jar. The beer will attract the slugs and they will be trapped in the jar.
Organic foods do not possess any pesticides on them. This is great for your health, but you do want to check the produce for bugs prior to using it.
When checking out tomatoes to buy, do a bit of poking in the soil. When you are purchasing tomato seedlings for your organic garden, you should watch out for lush green starts with bad root systems. Reason being, these kinds of starts stay attached to the seedlings for many weeks, which causes the seedlings to not grow until the starts are gone.
As discussed earlier, there are many benefits to growing your garden with natural and organic methods. This opens up a world of possibilities for your flowers, vegetables and herbs. Apply the tips you just read to start your garden to save money and eat healthier foods.