My Raised Bed Gardening » Starting Vegetable Gardens

The Secret to Organic Gardening – Composting

Tony — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 04:42:50 +0000

: Image by arimoore via Flickr

Compost is a great tool for any gardener. It helps your garden hold just the right amount of water, makes it the right texture for plant growth, and provides it with beneficial natural organisms. While you can buy this type of product at the store, it’s cheaper to make it yourself. You also get the added benefit of knowing that you’re not just throwing your yard waste away; it’s actually doing something beneficial.

Before getting started on your compost pile, you should know what to put in it. To get good compost you need carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and water. Grass clippings from your yard provide carbon, and nitrogen comes from leaves in the fall. To make sure your pile gets water, build it somewhere where it will be rained on; just be sure it’s not completely soaked with water. Lastly, you can add oxygen simply by mixing the pile. If you can’t provide enough nitrogen or carbon to your compost pile, you can always add a little fertilizer. The type will depend on what nutrient you’re lacking.

There are two different types of compost piles you can make; the first is a cool pile. To make a cool pile, simply throw your clippings and leaves in the bin as they come and stir the ingredients occasionally. This is a good option if you don’t have a lot of time to devote to composting, but it takes about a year to get useable compost. You shouldn’t add diseased plants or weeds to this mixture because they can be harmful.

If you need your compost sooner than a year, you should try making a hot compost pile. Unlike cool piles, you need to have a significant amount of yard waste available to start a hot pile; at least 3 feet by 3 feet. This mixture will require mixing much more often. You can mix it anywhere from once every two weeks to once every couple of days. The more you mix, the faster you get compost. This type of pile will kill weed seeds and diseases because it reaches much higher temperatures (about 160°), but may also kill beneficial bacteria.

When you compost pile no longer resembles what you put into it, it’s ready to be used. Just mix into your soil for strong, healthy plants.

The Secret to Organic Gardening – Composting is a post from: My Raised Bed Gardening

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Starting Vegetable Gardens

Tony — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 09:10:00 +0000

Starting your own vegetable garden is a brilliant way to save your pocket money and do your bit for the environment in one go. It is also a wonderful way to keep the kids entertained, involved and part of something from start to finish. It will give them more respect about where food comes from as they see from a handful and even in some cases a single seed can grow into a fully fledged vegetable that adorns their dinner plate. Food that is grown by yourself always seems to taste so much better than any other type of organically grown produce! Not all home grown vegetables look exactly like you see them in your local store and are often misshapen to a degree but don’t worry this is completely normal and they taste exactly the same if not better than the store bought ones! Sometimes they do come out looking exactly like the store bought ones but who cares you have grown it and the sense of accomplishment you feel is better than any other feeling!

There is not as much to do as you think when you starting vegetable gardens; turning up the soil and making compost, planting the seeds, watering and then just sit back and watch your work grow!!!!

Making your own compost is so easy even your children can do it alone. All you have to do is dig a shallow hole, place all of your kitchen scraps, newspapers and garden debris into it and then place the soil back over again. Leave for about a week and you will find that you will have perfect compost! Use this compost to really give your soil a good boost of vitamins and conditioning before you plant. There is a golden rule that states you should do this and then leave the soil alone for a week or two before you plant your seeds as it does take time for everything to really get into the soil.

After planting make sure that you keep your vegetable garden weeded and watered. Let Mother Nature do the rest. Some people say that starting vegetable gardens are hard and complicated but why make it harder than it is? It’s easy peasy really!!

Starting Vegetable Gardens is a post from: My Raised Bed Gardening

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