If you’re a new gardener or you’re tired of putting chemicals into the ground, it may be time for you to try organic gardening.
Organic gardening isn’t complicated or complex. It’s pretty simple to do once you understand soil health, plants, watering, beneficial insects, and controlling weeds naturally.
Organic Gardening at Home
After finding a sunny spot on your property and digging an area for your garden, it’s time to get it ready for planting.
You need to know your region’s growing zone, so you know when frost ends in your area, and wait until the soil is ready for planting. You should be able to take a fistful of dirt into your hand to form a ball.
If the ball is water-logged, it’s too wet to plant. If the ball falls apart or can’t form into a ball, you have sandy soil, which you’ll need to add compost to get it ready for seed sowing.
First Line of Business: Getting Your Soil Ready for Planting
There are many definitions for organic gardening, but it all starts from the soil upwards to the plant. If you have healthy dirt, then you’ll have a successful garden.
Also, if you just dug your garden plot, you need to determine if you have clay, loamy, or sandy soil. If you form a ball of earth in your hand and it stays put, it means that you have clay soil.
Another thing to watch out for is if you make a ball of soil that doesn’t hold its shape, it’s sandy soil.
If you take a handful of soil and form it into a ball, it’ll form the shape and then break apart. You have loamy soil. The best type of soil smells like the forest and is black-brown.
You get loamy soil when you add compost, manure, leaf litter, or grass clippings to your soil. You can also buy organic garden compost and mulches to develop suitable ground.
Keep in mind that it takes years to develop loamy soil, and you’ll need to add compost and mulch every growing season.
Know When It’s Time to Plant Vegetables in Your Organic Garden
During the early spring months, you can start cool season crops if you live in the northern U.S. If you live in the southern U.S., you can start planting cool season veggies in January and February.
Cool season means that the plants grow well in cooler temperatures. Here are some easy, cool season crops to consider:
- Carrots
- Lettuce
- Peas
- Potatoes
- Radishes
- Spinach.
After the danger of frost is over in your area, you can plant warm season herbs and vegetables:
- Basil, lavender, oregano, and many other types of herbs
- Cucumbers
- Green beans
- Marigolds
- Sunflowers
- Tomatoes
- Zucchinis.
8 Organic Gardening Tips
Consider your organic garden as a laboratory, and you’re the scientist who needs to experiment with what works and doesn’t work in your plot.
Here are eight organic gardening tips to help you grow into a successful gardener:
- Learn how to identify common weeds. You need to know the enemy—what it looks like and how it grows because weeding is a constant in any garden.
Read more: How to Identify Weeds in Your Garden
- Learn about the plants that grow well in your region. For example, some vegetables do well in southern climates while other vegetables grow best in the northern U.S.
- Do no harm: The key to organic gardening is that you don’t use any synthetic products. Synthetic chemicals hurt the soil, kill beneficial insects, and stay in the vegetables and fruits you grow.
- Know your soil: Buy a soil test kit at your local gardening center. A soil test will tell you what nutrients are missing in the ground. Plants need nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorous to grow into healthy specimens.
If you think back to middle school chemistry, you learned about pH. Your soil’s pH will affect how well your garden plants do as well.
As you know, there’s basic and acidic. A soil test should point to the pH level in the ground, or you can call your county extension office for more information.
- Water deeply and infrequently: For some reason, we think that a daily sprinkle is sufficient for plant growth. However, plants have fewer fungi when they develop deep root systems.
So, water deeply and infrequently. Aim for the roots, not the leaves, when you water your garden. You may want to consider buying soaker hoses or a drip irrigation system for more efficient watering at the ground level.
- Consider complementary plants: Organic gardening includes not using herbicides and pesticides in your garden. There are natural ways to control insects and worms.
Planting plants that discourage disease or repel insects will help your garden fruits and vegetables be plentiful. You also want to plant pollinator-friendly flowers to encourage bees and other beneficial insects to visit your organic garden.
- Learn the cyclical rhythms and seasonal changes in your area: The more you work outside in all kinds of weather, you’ll learn more about your climate and your garden’s needs. For example, the Mid-Atlantic States tends to have cold, rainy springs.
- Don’t stop learning: Your local library has organic gardening books to borrow, get subscriptions to organic gardening magazines, visit local gardens, talk to gardeners, and get involved with your county’s extension to learn more about organic gardening.
Brinly Lawn Care and Gardening Attachments Help You with Your Organic Gardening Needs
Don’t become discouraged if you don’t have a bountiful crop during your first season of organic gardening. It takes patience and time to find your gardening rhythm. Instead, keep learning and experimenting until you find success.
Brinly’s Lawn Care and Gardening Attachments help you with your organic gardening needs, including digging a garden plot and getting it ready for planting. Try our
You can buy your Brinly Garden Attachments online. If you have any questions about your Brinly Garden Attachments, contact our customer service today by dialing 877-728-8224 or filling out our contact form.
Sources:
Gilmour.com, “A Simple Guide to Organic Gardening.”
TheSpruce.com, “The Basics for Gardening Organically.”
