How To Start a Vegetable Garden

Growing your own vegetables not only helps cut your grocery bills, but it also provides you with an opportunity to enjoy the outdoors while accomplishing a hobby that you are bound to love. Vegetable gardening is not hard to do, providing you are prepared to invest a little time and energy.

With any vegetable garden, you need to prepare a space. Start small. If you make your garden too large, you may well become overtaxed and quickly lose the desire to continue with the weeding and harvesting. Usually a rectangle that is eight feet by ten feet is a manageable size for a beginner.

Hire someone with a rototiller to clear a portion of land for you. They will use this tool to dig up the soil. This also aerates it so that the rain can properly moisten the loam where you will be planting your seeds. If your soil is of poor quality, add a few bags of fertilizer. Have them on hand and your rototiller person can add them at the same time he or she is doing the rototilling job. If you have the time and energy, dig out the sod from your desired garden area first, this removes the grass and weeds that are already there. This can help cut down the amount of weeding you may need to do in the future.

To make things easier, purchase some weed blocking fabric. This fabric eliminates the need for you to actively weed your garden. You may have to pull a few weeds that slip by, but most of the work of weeding is eliminated. Once your garden has been rototilled, you use bricks or rocks to cover the area with the weed blocking fabric. The rocks or bricks hold the fabric firmly down over the soil to keep weeds from growing. It also helps attract sunlight to the area. Moisture (rain) is allowed in, but weeds cannot grow.

When you are ready to begin planting, you need to use a razor blade to slit open small holes in which you can then plant your seeds or seedlings. You can visit your area greenhouse for week old seedlings that are then easily transplanted to your garden. Keep a diagram of where you have planted everything. Your crops should be rotated every year to prevent disease and insect infestations. Some crops are beneficial when planted next to one another. Never plant crops from the same family next to one another or you may wind up with cross-pollination. Tomatoes and eggplants are two vegetables to separate. Keep your squashes apart as well.

When gardening for the first time, stick to easy to grow crops. A beginner's garden should contain tomatoes (start with seedlings from your greenhouse), cucumbers, zucchini, carrots, and green beans. These vegetables are hard to kill making them perfect for first-timers. Plant your tomatoes on one end of the garden. Cucumbers and zucchini can take up a lot of space. One way to remedy this is by training them to grow up a mesh fence. This can prevent them from rotting on the ground during times of heavy rain, and it keeps insects at bay. Carrots and bush beans can be placed in between the tomatoes row, cucumber row, and zucchini row.

Insects are something that can kill your harvest. Tomatoes are susceptible to Tomato Horn Worms. These caterpillars are obvious because they will devour your tomatoes and leaves quickly. If you spot them, use tweezers to remove them and drop them into a jar of alcohol. Zucchini are commonly attacked by squash bugs. Look for bright orange clusters of egg casings on the back of your leaves. Remove them and drop them into the same jar of alcohol. This prevents them from hatching and returning to your plants. If they develop into the beetles, you will see them start as small gray aphid-type bugs. They quickly grow, however. Check your plants twice a day for these pests and either stomp them or use tweezers to get them into the jar of alcohol. Green beans and carrots are usually pretty safe from infestations.

You will regularly need to look for stray weeds that prevent your plants from gaining water and nutrients from the soil. Pull them as you see them. Water your plants regularly when there is no rain forecasted. In the morning is best because wet plants overnight can become mildewed and rot.

Once you have mastered these simple crops, you can start adding other crops to the mix. Before long, your fridge will be overflowing with fresh vegetables.