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| Flowers and Vegetables Garden At Home |
How to Start a Vegetable Garden
There are 7 steps to start a vegetable garden at your house as follow:
Select the Space
First thing you should do to start a vegetable garden is selecting the space or choose your garden space. Just find out a small section of your house yard that receives 6-8 hours of sunlight. You can choose an area with a north-south orientation, it gives the east-west sun movement and gives vegetables more exposure to full sun that they require to produce bumper crops. The vegetable garden require hands-on tending, Also select the space for vegetable garden that close to a water source and easy to access, since food crops require hands-on watering, tending, and monitoring for problems including daily checking on how big and colorful those vegetables are getting!
Choose the Crops
Second step to start a vegetable garden is choosing the crops, what vegetables or may be combined with herbs. You may discuss with your family member so you can plant the favorite foods. In early cool-season spring, you can try to grow lettuce, spinach, cabbages, carrots, chard, peas, beets, radishes, onions, and potatoes. You can select smaller varieties of vegetables such as mini carrots, cherry or patio tomatoes, and bush varieties rather than vining types of beans, cucumbers, and melons which take up more room. This way can be used to maximize space in the garden.
Draw it out
To start a vegetable garden, you need to make a simple drawing of the garden to know exactly how much space you have for each plant. This way will prevent over-purchasing at the garden center. To prevent from shading out, you can place the tallest plants at the back, down the middle or on the sides of the garden, depending on the orientation of your vegetable garden. Don’t forget to allow room for either paths or pavers lined with straw, hay, or several inches of grass clippings to encourage daily visits so you may not compact the soil due to your foot. Most vegetables can be planted in rows or bands, just clearly marked at the end of the row with a seed packet to remind you what's coming up.
Dig It
You need lightened soil to start a vegetable garden. So you need to dig the soil when the weather and the soil is dry. Garden soils can be organically lightened with a good mix of compost, ground-up leaves, and / or composted manure. You may blend several inches of these natural amendments with the soil, in spring and again in late fall.
Raised Beds
You can construct a raised bed that outlined with durable and untreated lumber to start a vegetable garden if your soil is heavy, clay, or even tainted. Just fill the boxed bed with a lightweight mix of topsoil, leaf mold and compost. Or you can grow your vegetables and herbs using pots or containers with same soil mix. You may take a soil test if you suspect the soil is contaminated.
Seeds or Transplants?
You can start a vegetable garden whether from seeds or transplants. Growing plants from seeds is economically and can give great fun for children, such as radish, it will sprout from a seed into your salad in around 3 weeks. You may scatter the seeds such as lettuce, radish, peas, spinach, and carrot lightly in prepared soil in early spring or you can start a vegetable garden indoor in March. The cool-season crops can handle chilly spring or fall weather. These crops are often planted again later in the season and harvested as fall crops. But hot summer weather is not suitable for the cool crops, so make sure to balance your spring garden selections with some heat-loving veggies. Since these veggies take longer to mature, so you may purchase them as small plants ready for the vegetable garden once all danger of frost has passed, usually by the end of May. You may plant warm-season crops such as peppers, cherry and patio tomatoes, smaller eggplants, bush cucumbers and beans which are good for small vegetable gardens.
Read more: Spring Gardening Tips
Grow On
The real work begins after the seeds germinated into seedlings and small transplants become larger. You need to keep out weeds of the vegetable garden since they compete with your crops. You may distribute a few inches of mulch throughout the garden to help you keep the weeds out, even keep moisture in the soil and the garden tidy.
Vegetables and herbs need moisture in their root zones so you need to water them close to the ground so the roots can be satisfied. It is important to maintain moisture in the soil rather than let them drying out to the cracking point and then flooding them with too much water. Tomato plants are especially sensitive to extreme soil moisture variations. Don’t forget to keep the vegetable garden organic and sustainable, as long as the soil is fertile and full of good rich compost then supplemental fertilizer should not be necessary.
You may plant summer crops once the spring crops are done so the garden will continue to provide fresh and healthy foods and great enjoyment to all. But if you want to harvest the crops around the year, you can start a vegetable garden with hydroponic system indoors so the weather factor can be minimized. If you want to start a vegetable using hydroponic system, you may try simple hydroponic system for beginner at home. Good luck ..
photo credit: en.wikipedia.org