How to Start a Garden for a Beginner
Want to be self sufficient? Want to grow organic food to feed your family but not sure where to start? Want to have a productive and bountiful garden but you don’t have enough space? This article is for you. Here are a list of basic steps for you to start your garden. Read before you start your garden, and you can garden with confidence and enjoy doing it.
Choose The Best Location
Site selection is foremost step. Vegetables need sunlight to grow well. Please make sure the place you pick receives at least 6 to 8 hours of sunlight. Most vegetables need at least 6 hours of sunlight every day. Sometimes, you will need some shadow to protect your plants from hot summer sunlight. Besides, plant your garden near a water supply if possible. In many areas a garden can grow without watering, but it’s more likely to be successful if it ‘s irrigated. Water is needed especially during long dry periods or when planting seeds.
Choose A Raised Bed
For a beginner, starting with a raised bed is a shortcut to a plentiful harvest. Raised bed gardening improves drainage, uses space more efficiently, increases yield and simplifies the control of weeds and pests. Raised garden beds has proven to be an effective way to get going on raised beds without a whole lot of work, and to quickly produce a more attractive, more productive and more easily cared for garden. Comparing to wood and other materials easy to root out , metal elevated garden beds would be better due to its strong corrosion resistance, powerful heat reflection, incredibly high-strength, 100% green and recycle material. If you just start your garden, i would suggest you start our small 17'' Tall 4-In-1 Modular Metal Raised Garden Bed, easy to assemble and operate.
Fill Your Garden Bed
Get your raised beds off to a great start and keep them healthy with premium quality potting soils. To ensure a higher yield, it is important to fill your raised garden bed with high quality soil. You should refrain from using the native soil from your yard, as it can be contaminated or be of poor composition. The ideal soil type is sandy loam, which is essentially soil that is loose, well-draining, and rich in organic matter. You can purchase a specialty bag of raised garden bed soil designed specifically for raised garden beds, or you can experiment on your own using a mix of potting soil and garden soil.
If you want to save money, I suggest you take advantage o rotting wood, newspaper and organic material in order to replicate an ideal natural environment for your crops. You can repurpose existing logs and branches lying around your property for this method. Avoid fertilizers that are not specifically labelled for fruits and vegetables, as they can contain the wrong nutrients and shrink the size of your harvest.
Label Everything
Fruit and vegetable plants have high nutrient needs and thrive in raised garden beds, which will boost your confidence in your continual planting.
Tomatoes are one of the most common crops to grow in a home vegetable garden, pretty easy to grow even when the growing conditions are not very ideal. Tomatoes and salads, sandwiches, and salsas are good matches when they’re together. They also can be simmered into sauces, soups, stews, and chilies.
Legumes are very easy to grow. They can fix nitrogen back into the soil as they grow, which has a positive impact on the raised garden bed. They not only improve the nutrient content of the soil but also produce bumper harvests. Chickpeas, pole bean varieties, peas and Lentils are recommended.
If you have no idea what to plant, eggplant and fun peppers will be a good choice. As heavy feeders of nutrients, they flourish in warm soils. Growing in a metal raised bed make it easier for you to catch up with these plentiful producers’ nutrient and the need of watering.
Beet plants and carrots (known as root vegetables ) thrive in the loose soil of raised beds. They grow particularly well when unblocked by weeds or rocky soil. They are optimal succession-planted crops thanks to their fast mature period.
As a summer vegetable, cucumbers is a great success if you grow them in a raised bed. Allow them to outpour over the sides of raised beds or up trellises to extend space for these abounding fruiting plants.
Potatoes are easily thrive in your raised bed. Your raised beds should be at least 12 inches deep and filled to about 6 inches with a good planter mix and some compost. At least 4 to 6 hours per day of unobstructed sun.
Kale requires about a square foot of space per plant. Considering they loves cool weather, you may put them in a place where it will get a little afternoon shade. You can spin off the weaker seedlings that are growing more slowly as the kale begins to grow.
Label Everything
Don’t forget to label your crops at first. I forgot not labeling everything when i started my planting, so i didn’t know what kind of they are until they came up the ground. When you are growing a great variety of plants, flowers, vegetables, and herbs in your garden, it’s not very easy to name and remember all details of every plant. Plant tags can simplify things and help you identify your plants.
Pest Control
Bugs and pest are always annoying stuff when you plant your garden. They will ruin our plants and affect the crop yield. It’s a safe and effective way to remove some insects and caterpillars by hand. For bigger quantities of insects, try insecticidal soap sprays that you can find at most garden centers. Whichever pest-control chemicals you use, carefully follow the manufacturers’ directions.
Enjoy Your Harvest
As crops and vegetables ripen, make sure the best time to harvest your garden for best flavor.
Early morning harvesting is best for most vegetable crops. If harvesting greens for salads or cooking, the best picking time is before 9 a.m when the sun is just rising from the eastern horizon. Pick greens while they are still cool and dew-covered from the night. Harvest tomatoes and peppers green, or allow them to ripen to full sweetness and flavor.
Gardening is a hobby good for both body and mind, and this is especially true during a quarantine year. Caring growing plants is a meditative, contemplative process that provides something beautiful to focus on when the world is hard to process. Now go start your first garden.
