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Your Own Vegetable Patch
Filed under Gardening TipsJun 11It could be you live in the city but have always had green fingers. Perhaps you have a small patch of land in your garden that you want to transform into a productive garden. Perhaps you may even have read a short article or two about organically produced fruit and vegetables and would like to try growing them on your own.
No matter the reasoning for growing your own vegetables, you’re at the stage where you are planning to jump into growing in some manner. Before you do so, there are a number of things you should look at to make sure that your experience is enjoyable and worthwhile.
The initial, and possibly most straightforward, subject that you should ask yourself is really what sort of garden would you like to have? Still writing purely about vegetable gardens, there are a number of forms of them depending on the space available to you plus your lifestyle.
Maybe you are interested just in herbs or smaller plants? They can easily be kept in a container garden using flower pots. And container gardens have the added benefit of being able to be brought into the house when the weather gets too cold outdoors. There’s no need even for transplanting!
If you are thinking of more of a ‘regular’ style of garden, the ground will have to be prepared and tilled before you plant. The earth will need to be tested as well to create the best marriage of soil variety to what’s being cultivated. With a big enough garden, you have the potential of harvesting enough fresh vegetables to eat throughout the growing season and store/pickle/can the remainder for the off-season.
Finally, an improvement to the idea of the ‘regular’ garden is a raised garden. At its most basic, raised garden beds resemble sandboxes with fruit and vegetables growing out of them. These enclosures have a large number of benefits over ‘regular’ bed gardening. The earth itself warms up more quickly at the start of the growing season and the construction of the enclosure itself assists with drainage. There is also the added return of not having to bend or stoop quite as much when working in your garden, which anyone with lumbar pain can easily identify with.
After research into the type of garden, another question to ask yourself is why. Why do you want to get into gardening? Is it for one of the reasons that has been mentioned at the beginning of the article, or possibly another more personal one.
Gardens can provide a plethora of fruit and vegetables that are unique to individual tastes. Should you love pumpkins, for example, turn part of your back yard into a pumpkin patch. And honestly, the texture and flavour of freshly grown produce picked at almost the minute that they ripen can’t be surpassed.
Once bitten by the gardening bug – no pun intended – you will probably find that you lean towards organic gardening to produce vegetables and fruits that are free of pesticides. Or you might find that your garden soil is especially suited to one kind of vegetation or another; for example, blueberries tend to thrive in soil that has an acidic pH level.
When you make the choice that this is a hobby that you would like to engage in, the possibilities are almost endless, subject only to your imagination. Every year provides a new blank slate of options that you could work with. If one thing doesn’t work particularly well, don’t do it again next year. If you love something and you don’t mind the extra work involved with care and maintenance, you can plant double.
The choice is up to you.
Tagged as: Container Garden, Container Gardens, Encl, Flower Pots, Fruit And Vegetables, Garden Beds, gardening, Green Fingers, Growing Vegetables, growing your own vegetables, Herbs, lifestyle, Marriage, Pickle, Plants, Productive Garden, raised garden beds, Remainder, Rsquo, Soil, Vegetable Gardens, Vegetable Patch, Weather
