With the current organic trend, holistic lifestyles are common these days. Those who live this lifestyle grow their own foods for their health benefits and they tend to do this via organic gardening. The following advice below helps to improve organic gardening skills.
If you have an organic garden and children, plant some everbearing strawberries for them. Children love to pick their own fruit right out of the garden, and will be more willing to help with the process if they get something out of it.
When a seed actually sprouts, it doesn’t need to be in as warm an environment. Your seedlings should be moved away from any heat source. If you have plastic films on your containers, remove them. Keep a close watch on your seeds to know when to do this.
Pine Needles
Pine makes a much better mulch than you might think. Some plants are highly acidic, and like soil that is acidic too. For such plants, pine needles function both as a handy mulch and as a soil amendment to lower the pH. Cover the plots with pine needles. As the pine needles decay, they’ll raise the soil’s acidity.
Put used coffee grounds on the soil. Your plants will thrive from the nitrogen contained in the grounds. Generally, nitrogen is the limiting nutrient with any plant and having a good nitrogen source either by coffee grounds, compost, or even diluted urea, will make your plants bloom faster and grow taller.
Be sure your new compost pile contains roughly the same proportion of dried and green plants. Green plant material includes grass clippings, spent flowers, vegetable and fruit waste, weeds and leaves. Dry materials, like sawdust, cut up wood pieces, cardboard, straw and shredded paper are good for your compost pile. Avoid ashes, meat, charcoal and diseased plants in your compost.
You can get rid of slugs with a simple beer trap. Bury a glass jar in your garden so that its open mouth is level with the top of the soil. Pour beer into the jar until it is an inch from the top. Slugs will be attracted to the beer and find themselves trapped.
A raised bed can be built with untreated wood, brick or stone. If using wood, make sure it’s naturally rot resistant and untreated. Some good woods are locust, cedar and cypress. If you use treated wood in your vegetable garden, the chemicals in the wood can make their way into the soil, and in turn, to your crops. If you already have treated lumber in use, line it with some plastic and replace the soil near it.
If you want to sell your crops as organic, you should look into obtaining a certification proving that you are an organic garden. That way, you will realize greater sales volume and demonstrate the value of your produce to potential and returning customers.
Be aware of the location you are in, and the seasonal and climate changes that occur. Make sure that you adjust your watering cycles to match these changes. How much you water depends on the time of day, the quality of your water and the type of soil you have. In some cases, you can’t water because of climate issues. You can’t water the leave of your plants during humid, warm weather–it’ll promote the growth of leaf fungus. Rather, make sure the root system is watered.
Over-watering can essentially drown the roots of plants, making them unable to grow well. Always be sure to check the weather and keep a tight watering schedule. It’s important that your plants do not take on too much water. You may want to skip the watering during a day that will receive significant rainfall.
As in most things, the more you know about organic gardening, the more successful you will be. Don’t forget that this advice is just the beginning.