How To Grow Vegetables
Posted: Tuesday, September 07, 2010
by Mark Bartley
What kind of vegetables you grow will depend largely on the type of soil you have. It's important to know the pH of your soil (its acidity) as different vegetables thrive in certain conditions while others may struggle. A soil testing kit from any good garden centre will give you a quick and accurate reading of your soil's pH.
Like most tasks, good preparation is one of the primary foundations of success. If your soil is heavy clay, a mulch of well-rotted manure with plenty of organic matter will help to prevent soil clumping in wet weather. It will also break up the soil, giving you that fine till that you always see in gardening books or television programmes. The perfect soil should be crumbly in texture, rich in nutrients and will even smell healthy. Controlling weeds is also essential, as you don't want your tender plants fighting for both nutrients and space with more robust weeds. For a true organic garden with no use of sprays and pesticides, hand weeding will be needed regularly and can be remarkably therapeutic as well.
If you don't like sweetcorn, then there's little point in growing it. It also makes sense to stagger the crops so that you have things to eat on an ongoing basis without everything arriving at once. For example, spring and summer should be a selection of salad crops such as lettuce (which can be sowed weekly to provide a continual crop), new potatoes and mange tout peas. During the later part of spring, you should be preparing your summer/autumn crops such as beets, courgettes and second crop potatoes. Winter crops such as Brussel sprouts, cabbage and late crop potatoes take the place of your spring crops, giving you a vegetable plot that, no matter how small, can be made to work hard for you.
Even if your garden is tiny, a compact plot can still yield great results. You don't need an allotment or acres of vegetable garden space to learn how to grow vegetables. You can even use hanging baskets, for tomatoes say or window boxes and containers. Tomatoes and soft fruit are perfect for growing in pots, as are herbs. Not only do you benefit from a continuous supply of fresh products, but they also look great on your patio as an alternative to decorative plants.
A greenhouse is obviously the perfect environment for starting your crops early, bringing on small plants and growing tender, frost-prone crops. However if you're growing outdoors, using simple cloches can protect young plants during periods of frost or cold weather and are easy to incorporate into any vegetable plot. Simple grow-bags are also an ideal way of utilising space in a greenhouse to get good crops of more tender plants such as chillies or peppers. So really things are not quite as difficult as they first seem and with a few simple steps plus a little enthusiasm you could be on the way to starting your own vegetable garden at home.
Mark's help about how to grow your own vegetables is aimed at those who want to save money by growing vegetables at home.
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Top-level comments on this article: (1 total)Summer is coming where I live, so I'm looking forward to planting vegetables. Thanks for your article, it was interesting.
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