Plant Gardens 101

As a rule, we choose to grow bush beans rather than pole beans. I cannot make up my mind whether or not this is from sheer laziness. In a city backyard the tall varieties might perhaps be a problem since it would be difficult to get poles. But these running beans can be trained along old fences and with little urging will run up the stalks of the tallest sunflowers. So that settles the pole question. There is an ornamental side to the bean question. Suppose you plant these tall beans at the extreme rear end of each vegetable row. Make arches with supple tree limbs, binding them over to form the arch. Train the beans over these. When one stands facing the garden, what a beautiful terminus these bean arches make.

Beans like rich, warm, sandy soil. In order to assist the soil be sure to dig deeply, and work it over thoroughly for bean culture. It never does to plant beans before the world has warmed up from its spring chills. There is another advantage in early digging of soil. It brings to the surface eggs and larvae of insects. The birds eager for food will even follow the plough to pick from the soil these choice morsels. A little lime worked in with the soil is helpful in the cultivation of beans. (more…)

In many parts of the Taxes the soil is unsuitable and difficult to work with. In the summer the baking heat of the sun can cause the hardiest of plants to succumb to the sun’s rays, containers can be moved to a shadier spot. If you live on a zero lot, or in an apartment, it can be impossible to find space to garden so using containers will help your plants thrive almost anywhere. Selecting the right variety for vegetable for container gardening in Texas is very important. You can grow delicious vegetables in containers, if you find yourself with insufficient space to grow a vegetable garden. Your ideal vegetables for container gardening are squash, lettuce, beans, green onions, egg plants, cucumbers, peppers, and of course delicious tomatoes. You can set up two containers over in the corner with a bamboo tee pee set up in each and grow pole beans all season long. Your cucumbers will need a large container also and you can let them grow up and over and down the sides of their container. Most vegetables will need water daily especially in hot weather. You can plant a few marigolds in your container garden area to keep away garden pests. Use Miracle Grow for vegetables to feed your plants on a regular basis. Problems with soil-borne diseases, nematodes or poor soil conditions can be easily overcome by switching to a container garden. Crop selection almost any vegetable that will grow in a typical backyard garden will also do well as a container-grown plant. Vegetables which are ideally suited for growing in containers include tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, green onions, beans, lettuce, squash, radishes and parsley. Most varieties that will do well when planted in a yard garden will also do well in containers. The size of the container will vary according to the crop selection and space available. Regardless of the type or size of container used, adequate drainage is a necessity for successful yields. Best suited for container culture are vegetables which may be easily transplanted. Most vegetables should be transplanted into containers when they develop their first two to three true leaves. (more…)

Organic is hot these days, markets with organic vegetables, -meat and -clothes, supermarkets who advertise with their organic products but also growing your own food with organic vegetable gardening. Showing your children how vegetables grow and how much better they taste when you know how they grow.

People fall in love with the idea of growing a garden without the use of any chemicals. With organic vegetable gardening they try to grow and harvest vegetables in a completely natural way. But how do you start with organic vegetable gardening and where do you find information about this subject? (more…)

Why Rotate Vegetable Crops?

· To prevent a build up of pests and diseases in your soil.
· To prevent a continual loss of particular nutrients in your soil.
· To allow for liming and manuring the soil. Some crops are happy to be planted immediately after these actions while others prefer to be planted two or more years afterwards.
· To allow for the growing of green manure crops which you will dig directly back into the soil.
· To allow ‘fallow’ times when animals can be put on the land.
· To reduce the need for artificial fertilizers and pest controllers.

How to Rotate Crops

There are literally as many crop rotation systems as there are gardeners. Everyone does things slightly different. If you do nothing else just do this:    (more…)

My last quarter-acre block had a bore to provide plenty of water. I planted some garden beds with vegetable seeds in the conventional way. Then I scratched little trenches (about 2 inches deep and wide) and buried my potato peeling in the trenches. Then I took a kilo (2.2 lbs) of broad beans (fava beans) and broadcast them over the same ground, then I went over the same ground placing sweet-corn seed carefully under the weed stubble.

That still left about half my garden unplanted. So I mowed the ground, mixed up all the left-over seed from my seed packets and broadcast them over the remaining soil.

Each seed finds the micro-climate conditions best suited to it – or dies. (more…)

To grow your organic vegetable garden is not a difficult thing and in fact many people who enjoy gardening are now turning to organic gardening methods. This doesn’t mean that you need to grow only organic herbs and vegetables in your garden. Organic gardening can encompass all aspects of gardening, including a flower garden or an ornamental garden as well.

Just because you want to have an organic vegetable garden that doesn’t mean that you only need to stick with the organic vegetable garden. You can expand to include such things as herbs as well if you like, not mention flowering plants and others.

The one thing that you do want to look out for when you’re growing your organic vegetable garden alongside your flower garden, is that your flower garden is also grown organically. After all, it kind of defeats the purpose of growing an organic vegetable garden if right next to it you use all sorts of chemical pesticides and fertilizers in your flower bed. (more…)

Growing vegetables in your garden can save you money. During harvest time, your own produce becomes part of your meals. Home gardeners feel deep satisfaction in preparing salad or seasoning the casserole with freshly picked plants from their own vegetable gardens. Their feeling of the taste is incomparable. Fresh surplus are distributed to friends and love ones while some are keep frozen.

It doesn’t require much space to grow vegetables. Even a container pot or a window box will do the trick. Where space is limited, you can grow a mini-garden indoor or outdoor. If you have a good sun, access to water and enough containers, growing a garden’s worth of fruits and vegetables in a limited space is a no-brainer. You can even harvest more than one crop if your choice of plants and planting schemes are all well planned and executed. Windowsills, balconies and doorstep areas can be used, as well as empty packs of milks, pails, plastic buckets and cans. (more…)

In the early spring, the cooler months, that is when I get my spinach, radishes and lettuce in the ground. Within a month or so I have fresh vegetables ready to be harvested. The only problem is once I pick those vegetables it leaves me empty space.
Succession cropping is the process by which you plant something new, typically a warmer weather plant, into the area vacated by a cooler weather plant like those mentioned above.

When you properly plan out in advance your succession cropping you can easily three crops from the same area. For example, in the spring you plant your lettuce, then the weather warms up, spinach is done so you replace it with squash or tomatoes. As the hot summer months come to a close and it gets cooler again, you can put the spinach back in and get some more. (more…)

When I started vegetable gardening I was a mere seven years old. I would go out and help my dad turn the soil over, plants some seeds, even bury the food waste in the backyard. Of course back then burying food waste was an oddity in society, whereas today it is not only accepted but encouraged. I will get to more on that in a moment.

From the moment I was a young child up until today I learned quickly that there are certain tools I just could not live without to help with the tasks of cultivating my home vegetable garden. These tools make it easier to aerate the soil, mix in compost and other materials, and break up the bigger chunks of dirt.

Let me start with my trusty shovel or spade. My shovel is as basic as it gets. It is a simple shovel with a wooden handle and the spade is made of forged steel. You can buy one similar at any home or garden center, although they probably are made with fiberglass handles today. My shovel allows me to dig deep holes to bury my food waste. I will dig a hole about eighteen inches, dump the food waste in and cover the hole with the dirt. I build up great nutrients in my soil this way and my shovel allows me to get to that depth fairly easily. Why this depth? Because that is where the worms live! (more…)

Back when I first started home vegetable gardening, what seems like many many moons ago, I never even heard of intercropping. In fact the first time I even heard the word I thought someone had made it up. So I did some research on the matter and found out that yes it is a real world and intercropping has tremendous benefits for your garden.

Traditional home vegetable gardeners just like to plant what they like to eat, in rows that make sense to them, harvest the fruit that they expect, and perform the work (i.e. weeding, watering etc.) they need to do to get their plants to grow.
Not many, at least the ones that I have talked to, partake in the activity of intercropping. Intercropping gives you the ability to utilize unused space and do so for more than just more fruit but for a purpose.

Intercropping is when you grow multiple varieties of vegetation within the same row or area. What this does, is allow you to use the space that would otherwise be left unoccupied or eventually occupied by weeds if you haven’t taken proper measures with a weed barrier. (more…)

What does it mean to concentrate? By definition it means to focus in on something and ignore the surroundings. In home vegetable gardening the definition is fairly similar, except we do not ignore anything.

Think for a moment the last time you packed for that long vacation to the Caribbean to lay out on the sunny beaches to work on that tan. With all the travel restrictions these days, waiting in long lines at the airport, extra fees for that large red hard suitcase that you have, you make the most of every inch of space in your luggage so you can get through the airport “experience” rather quickly and without extra cost.

You stuff the sandals in pockets in your piece of luggage that you never knew existed, and then of course your favorite blue flowered Hawaiian shirt gets rolled up and stuffed into the sandals. In other words you make use of every inch space that you have.

Getting back to home vegetable gardening, concentration gardening is similar to packing that suitcase and that is to utilize every inch of space that you have available. Lets’ face it. For most of us that grow home vegetable gardens we do not have the land of Farmer Bob, although some people I know have the blue jean overalls and yellow straw hat, but we’ll save that for another conversation. (more…)

How do you determine which vegetables you grow in your home garden? I was recently watching a television program about gardening and the host was interviewing a home owner and the vegetable garden they had planted. The host was asking what the homeowner had planted and like clockwork the homeowner pointed out that in row 1 they had this vegetable and in row 2 they had another and so on, and that got me thinking about vegetables that we as home gardeners rarely plant.

When I plant my vegetables I, probably like most, plant vegetables that I enjoy eating the most, and completely overlook those vegetables that I eat but not probably as often as the most popular like tomatoes and peppers.

I have recently designated one row in my home vegetable garden to those vegetable plants that I eat, although not a lot of, to help reduce the costs I would normally incur on my shopping bill. Celery falls into that category. I do not eat a lot of it, and one single plant gives me plenty for an entire season. (more…)

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It is Monday morning and it is raining cats and dogs. You think to yourself that the buckets of water that are falling out of the sky are a good thing. Good because your vegetable garden really does need a good watering. So you grab your hot cup of coffee, stair out the window and watch as much needed rain falls onto your plants that you are hoping will produce a lot of vegetables.

Later that week, Thursday rolls around faster than a cherry red Corvette on a straight away leading you to wonder where did the go? You check you calendar and have marked on there that it is time to water the vegetable garden.

Instead, you choose not to because, after all, on Monday the rain was tremendous. This scenario is the trap that we as gardeners can fall into if we are not careful, and that is not watering the plants enough. Many studies have shown that vegetable plants, especially those still in their infancy, need plenty of water. (more…)

Have you ever wanted to know what it would be like to walk right outside you r door and pick a nice fresh tomato? Have you ever wanted to grow your own vegetables but simply don’t have the space? Can container vegetable gardening be the answer? Container gardening is fast becoming more and more popular since many vegetables will grow just as well in a confined area. Depending upon what you plan to plant your containers should be large enough to allow for root spreading and growth. Oversized wooden tubs and half barrels are the most popular because they make excellent garden containers. Planters made of plastic, metal or clay should always be checked for proper drainage holes. (more…)

Imagine biting into a perfect ripe strawberry, still warm from the summer sun without having to worry about chemical or pesticide residues. More people are turning to organic gardening for the peace of mind it provides, knowing that their home-grown food is free of potentially dangerous chemicals. By following a few simple guidelines and with little cost, you can have your own organic piece of gardening paradise.

At it’s most basic, organic vegetable gardening is a way to grow plants without the use of chemicals. In practice, what makes organic gardening different is that it uses a variety of natural methods to support the growing needs of plants.

What’s wrong with using chemicals?
Most pesticides that are used to kill insects also kill many beneficial insects and bacteria. Continued use of chemical fertilizers actually reduces soil quality, requiring the use of larger and larger amounts of fertilizer to provide the nutrients that are normally present in the soil. A vicious cycle begins, with more chemicals being added to a soil that is increasingly void of life. (more…)