Vegetable Gardening Tips

Home gardening, whether it is vegetable or flower gardening, is very much in vogue these days. Gardening as a hobby or leisure activity helps in de-stressing. It helps to clear one’s mind after a hectic work schedule. If you have a small backyard or a front yard, you could have a vegetable garden or even a flower garden. In a vegetable garden, you can grow seasonal vegetables and fruits. It would be an excellent idea to harvest your own vegetables when there is inflation and food prices are soaring. When you have your own vegetable garden, your vegetables would be organic because organic manure could be used. Here are a few vegetable gardening tips to beginners as well as for professional vegetable gardeners.

Some Vegetable Gardening Tips

The first and the foremost thing you need to do is to landscape or design your garden to practice crop rotation. Crop rotation would ensure the prevention of infectious disease of a plant from spreading to other plants. You can plan out the vegetables that you would want to plant. If you are an amateur, you could always get the help of a professional.

Once you have decided to have a vegetable garden, till the soil, remove the weeds and add natural manure and till again. Wet the vegetable patch for several weeks and till the patch again before planting the vegetable saplings. This procedure would help reduce the annual weeds.

It is not possible to have a continuous year-round supply of same vegetables due to seasonal variations. However, if you want to harvest the same type of vegetable for a long period, practice interval planting of the vegetable once in a fortnight. The vegetable plants such as peas, sweet corn and beans could be planted as interval crops.

If your backyard is spacious, you can plan for group crops by dividing the garden into blocks. That is you could plant vegetables of similar variety and have almost the same harvest dates. Else you could plant two or more varieties of vegetables that have different harvest dates to prolong the season of any one vegetable.

Remember not to grow too much of the same vegetable that cannot be stored for long and has to been eaten fresh. For instance, radish, carrots and so on.

If you have grown saplings of any vegetable in a different patch, ensure that you transplant only the best saplings. That is, saplings those are disease-free, stocky and strong. Please avoid the saplings that are "leggy" and weak.

If you are buying saplings from a nursery, select the ones that are free of insect damage and are healthy.

Once the saplings are transplanted, ensure to water the saplings with water-soluble "starter fertilizer". You could purchase the fertilizer from a plant nursery. Mix two tablespoons of water-soluble fertilizer with one gallon of water. The transplanted saplings need to be wetted with a cup of this solution on alternate days. Remember to water around the base of the transplants regularly.

Vegetable gardening is a hobby for some, while it is a livelihood for others. Whether it is a hobby or a profession, the gardener has to resist the temptation to plant too many plants. Keep your garden weed free and irrigate it everyday.