Vegetable Organic Gardening
How do you plan and grow an organic vegetable and herb garden?
I want to have my very own organic vegetable and herb garden for my family and my consumption. Please share with me how to do so. Thank you in advance.
To get a good organic garden going takes years of soil building. start small as a big garden will get overwhelming come the hot part of summer. I would say a garden no bigger than 10 feet by 20 feet the first growing season.
Now is the time to start garden prep by choosing where you want the garden and opening up the sod. smothering the area where you will have the garden is a good first step or you can plow the sod open and till it in next spring. plowing is a lot more effective than tilling for killing grass.
You will also need some tools. Get a couple of hoes, my favourite is the shuffle or stirrup hoe. You can find these at any box store. they are lighter and easier to use than the standard concrete hoe most people think of when they think about hoes. You will also need a wheel barrow or garden cart, a potato fork (looks somewhat like a pitch fork but fatter), a shovel, a spade, a couple of trowels.
You will need seeds. My favourite place to get seeds is Johnny’s Selected Seeds in Maine. http://johnnysseeds.com
Start with easy things to grow and pay attention to the fact not everything grows in every season. Lettuce for example is best planted in the spring, it likes cool damp conditions. Tomatoes and peppers like it hot. A good seed catalogue will tell you such information. You will likely want to use seedlings for a lot of things such as tomatoes. Do not buy these at places like Wal-Mart. Go to a local nursery and tell them you are just starting out and you will get a lot of advice. One caveat, most nurseries (and box stores) are NOT organic and do not know much about organic growing so ignore all advice to use chemicals. But you will find healthier seedlings at most local places than box stores.
Good luck
Vegetable Organic Gardening
Intensive Organic Gardening – How to Double Food Production in the Garden
Here’s an easy way to increase dramatically the growing area of the organic garden. It helps you grow many more vegetables the natural gardening way, plus little fruits and salads for much less effort: Here’s an organic Lazy Barrow – plus handles!
Create a pile about four foot across by five foot in length and four foot deep from any woody, organic matter. Twigs, little branches, ancient logs, bushy stems, briars, sawdust, the roots of shrubs… whatever you have easily to hand.
The basic dimensions are not significant, provided you build the tumulus as high as is practical. Intersperse the fibrous stuff every two or three inches with rough soil, and plenty of fresh compost if you have it. Form the surface of the mound using the best soil into a fat wall with slanted flanks plus a flat top.
If you look at the flanks as well as top part of the barrow you’ll find that they amount to almost double the planting area of the bottom.
It’s a great idea to hold the soil in place utilizing slabs sliced from the lawn (turves) and turned upside down. We could slice them from any field. They’ll keep the tumlus in immaculate shape plus rapidly rot down into good compost. Failing which, hessian sacks, burlap, carpets of organic material, old trousers, fishing nets or robust curtains might be staked around the sides to prevent soil erosion. You could still push plants into gaps made in this shroud.
You have your own ‘Wayland’s Smithy’
We now have a model of the celebrated Wayland’s Smithy, the long tumulus on England’s historic Ridgeway that was the cemetery of tribal warriors. You can grow virtually any thing in the sides of that barrow. Big plants that grow deep roots could be set at the apex. The roots will come across all the depth they want without fear of being impeded by hardpan beneath.
A lazy idea for organic vegetable growing
As we build the barrow, push into it several strong upright sticks so they protrude a foot over the soil. The gardener will find these valuable later for support as they lean across to harvest edible plants from the tops of the hill without treading on as well as compressing the soil. Gardeners in the 19th century erected upright hills for strawberries six foot high by means of this plan. However, they erected ziggurats: a complex series of tiers of decreasing area, each on top of each other and each one comprising its own bed.
We now have a Lazy Pyramid
You could quickly refine the Lazy Barrow into a Lazy Pyramid on the Aztec model. You just make the barrow into a pyramid. At its base are the toughest degradable things, followed by further tiers of friable woody waste. Cover the flanks with slabs cut from a lawn to avoid soil erosion.
Pyramids have no advantage over Lazy Barrows, however pyramids will amuse speculative writers in later generations with evidence that a connection was once in place between your garden plus South America.
A Lazy Barrow is actually the perfect strategy for intensive organic gardening. It can yield you up to twice the planting potential of its base area. We can raise plants requiring bright sun or space for long roots near the top or upon the southern and western slopes, like a herb spiral. Shade-tolerant plants like cabbages or kale may be grown about the northern and eastern flanks and thirsty plants such as celery and cress might be set around the perimeter where they can benefit from the downflow of rain.
Waste wood becomes nutritious compost
A further benefit of the Lazy Barrow is this: it gets rid of annoying woody materials. After three or four years, you can dig out the mound and at its centre will now be well-rotted compost, fit to plant potatoes or any other robust plant. So if we must get rid of large volumes of briars and dead wood, and you aren’t able to shred them, build Lazy Barrows – and harvest food from them!
About the Author
Dr John Yeoman PhD is director of the center for
natural Gardening Ideas
, the Gardening Guild. Discover hundreds of ingenious strategies to grow more food in your garden with less expense and work in his practical manual Lazy Secrets for Natural Gardening Success. Acquire it entirely free at:
http://www.gardeningguild.org/lazy
Is it easy to grow an Organic Vegetable Garden?
Yes, do a little homework and learn what organic means when growing a garden. Bug control can be the most frustrating part. But, don’t give up. The internet has tons of information to help and inform.
Grow a Vegetable Garden for 20 Cents or Grow an Organic Garden for $1.50