Growing your own healthy food, does take some time, effort and planning, but it is certainly well worth it when you get to enjoy the harvest! Now is a good time to start planning your garden and taking the first steps towards your own harvest.
If you are planning a garden for the first time the first step is determining the size of your garden. This will tell you how much planting space you have and how much you can grow. If you are just starting out with a garden my advice is to start small. You will have better success if you can focus your time and energy on a small space rather than get frustrated and overwhelmed with a larger one.
Before you plant, plan first. Check your seed packages or plant tags to see how much space each plant needs. Make a blueprint of the garden and decide what, and how much, is going where. It is always a good idea to save your blueprint from one year to the next, for future reference in the years to come. Throughout the season, keep notes of varieties that you did or did not like, and any problems that you have, so that in the future you can use the notes for reference.
While you decide the size or your garden consider where it will go. Most vegetables need at least six hours of sun, and the more sun they receive the greater your harvest will be. If you are creating your garden for the first time use a good black earth mixed with either compost or manure to provide your plants with the nutrients they need to grow. Last year’s garden will also benefit from a good topdressing of compost or manure. Ensuring your soil is healthy and has proper nutrients will save you a lot of time in fertilizing later on.
By the time Spring really arrives many gardeners simply cant wait to get into the garden, but you should wait until the soil is dry enough. Your soil should break down into fine particles, if it is too wet it will be muddy and clump up. Before tilling the soil, remove any of last year’s debris, especially if there was a problem with disease or pests and throw it in the garbage. You don’t want to spread last years problems in this years garden or compost.
Adding manure or compost to the garden before tilling the soil will integrate it into the soil when the soil is tilled. This is also a good time to take soil tests and see if you need to add anything else to the soil. Depending on the size of the garden, take a few different samples from different areas of the garden, digging down 10-15 cms, so that you get an accurate reading. There are inexpensive soil test kits available at the garden centres.
Another way to make sure your soil is not being depleted of nutrients is to practice crop rotation. This simply means changing the place you plant things from year to year as different plants take different things from the soil. Ideally, you want to wait three years before that type of vegetable is grown in that spot again.
Crop rotation is also an important step in keeping pests and disease to a minimum. Different plants attract different pests, for example carrots attract the carrot rust fly which can lead to maggots in the carrots. Members of the Brassica family (cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, etc.) can get maggots that burrow into the main stem of the plant, just below the soil’s surface, which will kill the plant. Onions are also prone to maggots that can kill the plant. Potatoes can get scab. To help prevent these problems from re occurring you want to be able to rotate the crops so that the same thing is not growing in the same spot the following year.
Clean all your garden tools before using them again this season. Spades, rakes, water cans, hoses, pruners, and hand tools, along with any used containers, pots, and trays should all be washed with a mild bleach solution of 1 part bleach mixed with 10 parts water. This will help prevent diseases from spreading. It never hurts to clean your tools periodically throughout the season to prevent any spread of disease or pests.
Keeping the weeds down is another important step to growing a healthy garden. Weeds take nutrients, moisture, and light away from the plants as well as harbour pests and disease. You want to get rid of the first crop of weeds before you even start planting. Weeds are easier to eliminate when they are young and have a small root system. On a warm sunny day, go through the garden with a hoe to dig up the weeds.
By doing the prep work, and planning now, you are one step closer to a growing a healthy garden this season!
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