Planning Space Helps Vegetable Gardening Be More Productive
June 3rd, 2008 Subscribe To Our Feed
One outdoor hobby that can be rewarding is vegetable gardening and the type and amount of plants you tend can help with meal planning throughout the year. Different plants have different times to reach maturity and some will require different spacing, but they all require food, water and air. Making sure they receive all of their needs as well as have a means of being pollinated can insure success in your attempts at vegetable gardening.
One of the common crops for vegetable gardening is sweet corn, planted in rows about 18-inches apart. While they will sometimes grow well in small lots, three rows of about two dozen stalks will insure proper pollination allowing them to grow large, succulent kernels. While corn is a difficult crop to weed, vegetable gardening should be more about the productivity of the plants and less about the manual labor needed to get them to grow.
Many different types of tomatoes can be planted when vegetable gardening and they can be used for sandwiches, made into tomato sauce or eaten fresh off the vine. A traditional blend of fertilizer will usually provide all the food tomatoes require but for a juicier crop when vegetable gardening, they must receive sufficient water and sun to grow into large ripe orbs.
First Time Planters Should Follow Directions
Many seed plants, such as beans, peas and cucumbers all have planting directions on the package and regardless of how easy you think they are to grow, successful vegetable gardening is more than shoving a seed in to the soil and hoping for the best. That is why all seed packages offer tips on how far apart to plant the rows and how deep to plant the seeds. Failing to follow these simple instructions may place the plants too far apart for pollination or too close together to give their root the room they need to grow.
Some types of tomatoes, for example can grow plants over eight-feet tall and three to four feet in diameter. If they are planted less than the recommended four-feet apart, they can be difficult to maintain and end up with one plant choking the other. With vegetable gardening, it is important the plants have the room to grow and less competition for the food in the ground.
Beans, peas, carrots and some of the leafy plants can be arranged when vegetable gardening to offer not only prime growing conditions but also a good looking patch of plants. However, taller plants should be placed further from the line of the sun to insure the shorter plants receive an appropriate amount of sunlight for growth.
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Growing House Plants With Organic Indoor Gardening
May 31st, 2008 Subscribe To Our Feed
indoor gardening is a popular hobby, and one that can actually improve your décor and your health. Glossy green living plants are an unbeatable decorating accessory, whether you favor the bold statement a snake plant makes or the ethereal lightness of an asparagus fern. By surrounding yourself with healthy green plants, you oxygenate your living environment and gain more energy.
Grow Houseplants Organically
You can do some organic indoor gardening with houseplants. Growing organically means you don’t use chemical pesticides, herbicides, or fertilizers in your gardening routine. Organic indoor gardening also means not using genetically modified seeds, cuttings, or other elements.
indoor gardening The Organic Way
If you’re serious about indoor organic gardening, you might want to purchase indoor gardening the Organic Way: How to Create a Natural and Sustaining Environment for Your Houseplants, by Julie Bawden Davis.
The beginning of the book explains how houseplants are grown and shipped to your local garden center. Young house plants are fed the equivalent of a fast food diet to pump them up so they’ll look good in the garden center. When you bring your new house plants home, they may have a bit of a chemical fertilizer hangover at first. Be patient with them, and soon they will become accustomed to an organic lifestyle.
Organic Fertilizers
The best organic fertilizer is homemade compost. Even if you live in an apartment, you can make organic compost for gardening indoors.
Use a coffee can or another metallic container with a tight fitting lid. Make a few ventilation holes around the side of the coffee can with a nail or a drill. Fill the can with alternating layers of crisp, dry ingredients and wet ingredients.
For the crisp, dry ingredients, use dry leaves if you have access to them. Otherwise, you can use shredded newspaper or crumpled up paper bags.
For the wet ingredients, you can use raw vegetable scraps – nothing with oil or butter on it – and coffee grounds.
Keeping the compost can indoors will heat the compost up fast and help process it quickly. You can get the compost to make itself more quickly by stirring it periodically.
When one coffee can is full, start another. Turn the first can upside down every day to mix the ingredients and keep the compost cooking. Soon the first can will be full of rich, crumbly compost – the key to indoor organic gardening.
Mix a little bit of compost in with your plants’ soil to provide long-lasting nutrients. You can grow almost any houseplant with this indoor organic gardening trick.
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Organic Gardening Supplies Every Organic Gardener Needs
May 28th, 2008 Subscribe To Our Feed
Do you want to start an organic garden, but you’re not sure what you need? You are not alone. Many consumers today are concerned about the prevalence these days of food-borne bacteria.
Recent news stories tell us that nutritious vegetables like spinach are contaminated with bacteria from factory farm animal waste, and that the average American child is exposed to cancer-causing pesticides four times as much as an average adult. Pesticides are also associated with birth defects, genetic mutations, and nerve damage.
It’s time to start thinking about buying produce grown locally, from small organic farmers, or about starting your own organic garden. Before we get into the organic gardening supplies you’re going to need, let’s be sure we’re on the same page about what the term “organic” means.
What Is Organic Produce?
Organic produce is food that is not grown in sewage sludge or raw manure. Organic food has not been exposed to synthetic fertilizers, weed killers (herbicides) or bug killers (pesticides). Organic food is not genetically engineered or irradiated. It contains no antibiotics, no growth hormones, and no synthetic preservatives.
The kind of gardening you plan to do will determine the kind of organic gardening supplies you need. If you are going to be taking care of an organic lawn, you need a push reel mower, organic lawn fertilizers, and organic weed control products.
If you want to grow herbs, flowers, and vegetables, the organic gardening supplies you will need include organic dry and liquid fertilizers, and sprayers or pumps to apply them with; soil pH and test kits; soil amendments; heirloom flower, herb, and vegetable seeds; organic seeds; compost bins; and plant propagation supplies.
Organic Gardening Supply Gadgets
There are plenty of optional supplies to make organic gardening more fun, or to expand your organic gardening practices.
Rain Barrels
Use a downspout diverter to save the rain water that flows into your roof gutters in 60 gallon rain barrels. These attractive, food-grade barrels automatically store water every time it rains.
Lawn Aerator Sandals
Strap on a pair of these lawn aerator sandals and drive 1-1/2″ steel spikes into your lawn. Aerating your lawn literally breathes new life into it, as you form new channels for water, air, sun, and nutrients to reach the roots of your grass.
Butterfly House
Attract and retain butterflies with a handsome, hand-shingled cypress butterfly house with a solid copper roof. Enjoy watching the copper change color naturally. This is one of those organic gardening supplies that looks more like a work of art.
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