Getting Started: Five Organic Garden Tips for Beginners

If you are a beginner in organic gardening, you could get confused with so much information available. Go slow and try to make it simple. Organic gardening too has a rhythm, just like all living processes. Start out slowly and learn as you go on, you don’t have to do everything at once, and you will be successful. Here are five simple organic garden tips that will help you to get started.

Organic Garden Tip #1: Start with the Soil

For the organic gardener, soil is the source of life. The main problem with chemical gardening is it sterilizes the soil. That is it takes life out of soil. Organic soil is living; it has lot of living substances in it. Here is an organic garden tip specific to soil: The most impotent resource in organic gardening is compost. You buy it until you learn how to make it yourself.

Compost is usually formed out of living vegetable substances. To make it, you just collect all your vegetable scrap, lawn clipping, and any other fresh vegetable matter and mix it with dead grass and leaves and let it decompose. Heap the mix into 3’x3’x3’ to generate heat and it will decompose faster. A hot heap of lively matter that is turn frequently, to get air in to it, will make compost in a mater of weeks. Even If your pile of organic matter is not big enough or it does not get warm enough, it will still make good compost, it’ll just take bit more time.

To have rich, dark, productive soil, even if you have started with sterile, gray, chemically treated dirt, within couple of years, add compost to the soil at least twice a year and dig it into the top six inches of soil.

Organic Garden Tip #2: Biodiversity

When the same crop is grown on the same soil over and over again, it depletes the soil of specific nutrients. Much of America’s farmland has been badly affected as a result of Monoculture farming, which has caused serious damage to its soil. Further it tends to gather bugs and weed that pray on that particular crop.

Growing lots of different things together, which means biodiversity, helps to protect the soil and the crop. Especially companion plants provide nutrients and pest protection for each other. Further, rotation of crops will keep the soil rich and in the process the threat from insects will reduce, and of course you will have a greater variety of produce for your table and or for sale.

Organic Garden Tip #3: Water Carefully

Unplanned and indiscriminate watering may wash the soil components away and also it’s a waste of water. Using water carefully discourages weeds. Use a soaker hose to keep water on the plant and nowhere else, and it is recommended to water the garden early in the mornings.

Organic Garden Tip #4: Control Weeds

You could easily control weeds by following few simple practices. Decomposing organic mater around your plants is important to keep the weeds out, and by watering in would give the plant extra nutrients. As you know compost is great mulch. During growing season, you could use plastic barriers to keep weeds out of your crop. Covering the entire area with plastic during the winter could destroy weed seeds. Weed the garden often so that it will prevent weeds to develop root systems or propagate by seeds.

Organic Garden Tip #5: Control Pests

Pest control in organic garden is a step by step process. It begins with a least toxic substance and proceeds from there on.

Step one is to use companion planting and or crop rotation to discourage pest before they could arrive. Step two is to remove them by hand. Larger insects such as tomato hornworm, potato bugs can be removed by hand. Further, barriers like diatomaceous earth, coffee cans or netting can be used to prevent them. Use insect controls such as releasing ladybugs, lacewings or praying mantises in to your garden. If the problem is still persisting, use an organic insecticide, such as soap.

With these five simple organic garden tips, you can be a successful organic gardener in the first year itself. Next year, you will be an expert and you may perhaps try different methods. However, these organic garden tips will get you started and will ensure that your first organic garden is quite productive.

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