It might be you live in the city but have always had green fingers. Perhaps you have a little patch of ground in your back yard that you want to change into a productive garden. Perhaps you even have read a post or two about organically grown vegetables and fruits and want to try growing them yourself.
Regardless of the reason why for growing your own vegetables, you’re at the point where you are about to jump into horticulture in some way. Before you can do so, there are a number of factors to consider that is recommended you take into account to ensure that your experience is enjoyable and worthwhile.
The initial, and possibly most straightforward, subject that you should ask yourself is what kind of garden do you want to have? Still writing purely about veg gardens, there are a number of forms of them depending on the space available to you and also your lifestyle.
Perhaps you are interested just in herbs or smaller plants? They can easily be kept in a container garden using flower pots. And container gardens have the extra advantage of being able to be brought into the house when the weather gets too cold outdoors. There’s no need even for transplanting!
If you are considering more of a ‘regular’ style of garden, the ground will have to be prepared and reguraly hoed before you could plant. The earth will need to be tested as well to create the most beneficial marriage of soil variety to what’s being cultivated. With a big enough garden, you have the potential of harvesting enough vegetables to eat throughout the growing season and store/pickle/can what’s left for the off-season.
Finally, an enhancement to the idea of the ‘regular’ garden is a raised garden. At its most basic, raised garden beds resemble sandboxes with vegetables growing out of them. These enclosures have a great number of benefits over ‘regular’ bed gardening. The soil itself warms more quickly early in the growing season and the construction of the enclosure itself assists with drainage. There’s also the added return of not having to bend or stoop quite as much when working in your garden, which anybody with back pain can easily identify with.
After research into the kind of garden, another question to ask yourself is why. Why do you want to get into growing plants? Is it for one of the reasons that was stated at the start of the article, or possibly another more personal one.
Gardens can provide a variety of fruit and vegetables that are unique to individual preferences. For those who really enjoy pumpkins, for example, turn part of your back yard into a pumpkin patch. And honestly, the texture and flavour of home grown produce picked at almost the minute that they ripen cannot be surpassed.
Once bitten by the gardening bug – no pun intended – you may find that you lean towards organic gardening to produce vegetables and fruits that are free of pesticides. Or you might find that your soil is particularly suited for one kind of vegetation or another; for example, blueberries tend to thrive in soil that has an acid pH level.
When you make the choice that this is a hobby that you’d like to pursue, the possibilities are endless, subject only to your imagination. Each year brings a new blank slate of choices that you could work with. If something doesn’t work particularly effectively, don’t try it again next year. If you love something and you don’t mind the extra work involved with care and upkeep, you can plant twice.
The choice is up to you.
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