Just What Is Organic Veggie Gardening?

Are you thinking of starting your own organic vegetable garden? Have you raised a few vegetables before, but not by using organic techniques? Perhaps you’ve decided that if you’re going to the effort of growing your own food, you want to make it as healthy and tasty as possible for you and your family.
There’s also the environmental advantages of growing organically from home. Such as providing habitat for beneficial insects, zero food miles, and biodiversity.
And of course, there are the financial advantages. Imagine your own veggie patch, providing you with some, or most, of your fruit and veggie needs. This might save you between $30 and perhaps $100 per week. That could mean an extra $5000 in your pocket each and every year. It can be an even larger saving if you save your own seed!

What is the definition of organic gardening? Lots of organic gardeners will say it’s to grow in harmony with nature - the environment. To use simple methods, systems and techniques that give you the results you want, without using any chemical fertilizers, insecticides or herbicides. This doesn’t mean just in your vegetable plot or orchard, it means all the soil you are responsible for. You can’t really consider yourself an organic gardener if you use organic methods in your veggie garden, but cover your pathways with round-up or any other poisons.

Organic gardening starts with the basics – your soil. There are many ways to improve your soil. You can add compost, broken down manure from poultry, cows and other farm animals, and other bulky organic materials, like mulches. Getting to know what sort of soil you have is a good place to begin. Buy yourself a pH testing kit (available at hardware stores and good plant nurseries) and see what you’re starting with. The great news is that over time practically all soils can become nutrient rich and build great structure by regular additions of a variety of organic materials.

Making your own compost is a established way of providing organic nutrients to add to your soil on a regular basis. You use waste from your garden, kitchen left-overs, chicken manure and many other items you would have to get rid of in some other way – again serving the environment. If space is at a premium in your garden, here are some other alternatives – try the Bokashi bucket system or how about a worm tub? Returning valuable nutrients back into your garden is such a great way to start organic gardening.

Another easy way to make organic food for your plants is by making liquid fertilizers. They are cheap to make and you’ll use it as foliar sprays, feeding your vegetables directly through their leaves, or you can apply it to the soil around your plants.

If you want to start growing your own organic vegetables, consider beginning with a no-dig vegetable bed. This is my favorite way to start establishing any area. You can even make one on top of cement, so it doesn’t really matter what type of soil you’re starting with. Plus there’s no back-breaking digging. You can even raise the beds high enough that you don’t have to bend over to do your gardening.

Another method used by many organic gardeners is companion planting. Companion planting benefits your garden in many ways, including pest and disease prevention and you’ll end up with healthier, vigorous plants and a much more diverse garden. To do this you raise many different plants together that benefit each other in some way.

To eliminate the use of dangerous insecticides you can grow plants that attract beneficial insects. Beneficial insects are the ones that eat pest insects. Beneficial insects can also do great gardening jobs, like pollinating insects, such as bees or butterflies.
If you grow plants that appeal to insect-eating birds, and supply water for them, birds and other animals will be attracted to your garden.

These are some simple methods of organic gardening, but you’ll find them quite simple and cost effective to implement when you get started. By copying nature, you’ll be rewarded with high yields of mouth-watering foods that are crammed with health benefits.

One of the main reasons some people fail in their gardening efforts is that they don’t design with their plants in mind. Some things you need to ponder before preparing your vegetable beds include:

* The amount of sunlight the area gets
* Is it close enough to the kitchen?
* Is water available?
* Will tree roots become a problem?

Another thing I really urge you to do is to keep a diary of what you do (and when) in your vegetable garden. Keep records of the dates you plant things, how good the yield was, if you had too much or too little of certain vegetables. You can keep notes of many other details too. Like what kinds of pest you had a problem with, weather information – that kind of thing.

Organic gardening may seem quite complex at first, but like lots of things it’s just a matter of deciding to start somewhere and then taking the next step. You don’t have to know it all at once, or even one season. In fact I don’t know anyone who knows it all when it comes to organic gardening (except perhaps Mother Nature – she seems to know exactly what she’s doing). When you’ve tasted your first organically cultivated tomato and can say “I grew this myself”, you’ll know that all that work paid off!