Start Organic gardening in your backyard
Learn how to pick the right spot to grow your garden and how to add nutrients to your soil naturally
How to Start you Vegetable Garden – How to Organic Garden
If you are ready and want to dig up that earth, start organic gardening and plant your first garden. You can! It can be a lot of work, but it is also very rewarding and worth every hours spent.
I was so lucky when I decided on organic gardening and planted my first vegetable garden. I picked a spot in the corner of the yard and started digging…and hit a gold mine! Rich black soil and everything grew so well. I found out that the gardening spot I choose once stored a pile of compost and soil mix for the vegetable gardens that used to grow in the area….Lucky Me!
Well my next gardening experience was not near as successful. The next garden was just a small one and the dirt was rock hard clay. Not knowing much about soil back then I tried to plant a garden and it didn’t do so well and I gave up on gardening….until
Soon we were missing the fresh vegetables, so after lots of groundwork, learning about organic gardening and good compost the garden was growing again.
Now I’m about to rekindle a garden on an old homestead…..another challenge or not? I guess we will find out.
So are you ready to start gardening?
First you need to find that perfect location for your vegetable garden. A spot that gets the sun for the better part of the day is best an of course soil that will retain moisture but also drain well. A level or gently slopping area is best.
Here is a picture of my old homestead garden looks to have some very nice soil and the garden gets a perfect amount of sun and is gently slopping.
I will see how it does this year, collect more compost materials and hope to extend it next year. I’ll keep you all posted.
I’ll be using my instructions as well.
When your site has lots of grass the best thing to do is dig it up, remove it and any rocks and roots rocks. Now what is the soil like? It’s probably going to take a couple years to build up a really good soil.
The soil, as mentioned before the soil needs to retain moisture, but also drain at the same time. It should be crumbly, but not clump together.
Depending on how big a garden you want to grow, you can turn the soil over several times with a shovel or use a rototiller.
Once the garden area has been tilled several times mix some compost into the first six inches of the garden.
If you don’t have your own compost yet, you should be able to get some from your local garden center.
The best thing you can do for your garden is to continually add compost each year and build a rich, organic soil.
Testing the Soil
You can test your soils ph level if you like, I have never done this, but maybe I should.
I have always gone by what I learned from my grandparents and that was, if you have lots of dandelions coming up in the garden, most likely you have alkaline soil and it will need some compost material added to it..
If there is moss growing in the garden then generally it is to acidic and you will need to add some lime.
Test kits are available to test your soil.
Amazon.com has a variety of soil testers and many of them are very good and reasonably priced ones.
Now it’s time to plant the garden.
Just remember with organic gardening you will want to pay close attention to Crop Rotation and Companion Planting to get the best out of your garden.
I like to plant my garden in rows running north to south or as close as I can to that.
This helps the plants get the best sun without being shadowed by the taller plants, but if you can’t do that then try and plant them the best you can so they all get the most sun they can during the day keeping in mind that the taller plants can shade the smaller ones so to plant accordingly.
With every year you will learn more about your soil and will learn if organic gardening is for you. The richer the soil the stronger and better your vegetables will grow in your garden.
Happy Gardening!
Great article on organic gardening, I also have been a garden lover most of my life. My past home was clay soil and never really did very well, wish I had known to add good compost to improve the soil back then.
I am wanting to add a garden at my new place, I don’t know what the soil is going to be like yet but i am holding my breath?
How much compost would you recommend adding to a brand new garden, can I add compost in the spring when planting or should I wait until fall?
I’m in the process of year two with a brand new garden. I mixed in well aged compost into my soil last year and had some pretty nice crops. This year I will do the same. I put about 6 inches on the top of the soil and mixed it in real good. If you have clay you may want to add some sand to help break the clay up as well. Happy Gardening!
I have had a garden all but a few years of my life when it was not possible. In recent years we have been moving to more organic, but there has been one persistent problem that makes me fall back to using a pesticide once in a while. The squash bugs are such a huge problem. I love all of your information about improving soil quality. I thought I knew a lot, but I still picked up a few tips.
Those squash bugs and others can be a pain. I find companion planting and crop rotating seem to help with that. Here are a couple links that you may want to have a look at. Squash Bugs control, Crop Rotation Organic Farming, Companion Planting Chart