Many people see organic gardening as a way to contribute to the safe-keeping of our beautiful planet. For others it presents the opportunity to put nutrient-rich and chemical-free food on the table. Both are laudible reasons. Whatever your reason is, you may find that these suggestions really help.
Eliminate the need for excessive intervention in the health and care of your landscaping and gardening plants by choosing shrubs, grasses, and veggies that require a bare minimum maintenance. These plants are often easily identifiable by their smaller taproots and undersized, silvery colored leaves. Plants that work well with their environment require very little in the way of fertilizers and pesticides.
When designing your organic garden, use a lot of different plants, creating more diversity. With more diversity in the garden, you are inviting diverse populations of insects which could be very beneficial within the garden and around the home. You want to create a habitat that encourages great growth and an eco-friendly manner of maintaining your garden.
Employ crop rotation techniques in your organic garden. Typically thought of for large-scale farms, crop rotation can be useful even in a small garden plot. After a season or two of growing one crop, switch to a dissimilar crop the following year. This will prevent soil depletion and pest build-up caused by growing one plant and result in your gardening success.
Save your seeds. If you save the seeds from your plants, you will have new plants at no cost the next season. Remember to keep them in a cool, dry place as this is essential for germination. Always select the seed from the best individual plant, as this will ensure that you get a good plant next time around. Normally you can simply collect them from a dried flower head, but when saving seeds from something like a tomato, melon, or pumpkin, you will need to dry them thoroughly before storing them for the winter.
Get rid of slugs and snails in the organic garden. As small as they are, slugs and snails can eat entire plants in one night. They thrive in moist conditions below 75 degrees. The best (and possibly most humane way) is to use beer traps to rid your garden of slugs and snails. Simply place stale beer in a shallow pan, the lip of which should be at ground level. The slugs and snails are attracted to the beer and will crawl in. This way they will leave this world happy and inebriated.
While you often just throw your waste organic matter from cooking away, how about composting all of this so you can add it to your garden once it is decomposed into soil with tons of nutrients. This will give your organic garden the boost that it needs to surpass chemical fertilizers!
The above list should have provided you with a some good ideas on becoming an even better organic gardener. It’s great that you have such an interest in the subject. Going organic is ‘green’; it is healthy, and it is enjoyable!