Gardening can be frustrating for beginners. It’s easy to make mistakes and ruin your garden after all the hard work you’ve put into it. We sure did when my wife & I began gardening years ago. Here are some mistakes we made, and the solutions to avoid them.
1) START SMALL
Make sure you like gardening! Rather than digging up your yard, a perfect way to learn and practice gardening is with a Vegepod, a raised garden bed where you have a controlled environment; you can move it around, and have both self-watering pods and spray mister to ensure you always have the right ingredients; water & sun! These covers ensure you get the sun without all the pests that can also destroy a garden.
Vegepod does it all – stops the animals, protects from the weather, self-waters and provides growth rates that need to be seen to be believed.
· Durable & food-safe
· Container garden
· Self-watering
· Protective cover
· Mist-spray watering system
· Accelerated growth rates
· Easily raised to waist height
· Extended growing seasons
Available in 3 sizes – Small, Medium & Large
2) GOOD SOIL
Nothing will grow to it’s maximum potential unless you have the proper planting medium. Soil in vegetable gardens, flower gardens, and even potted plants often gets VERY hard and compacted. Hard soil prevents air, water, and fertilizer from getting to the roots and, when that happens, your plants start to wilt. Here’s another great soil amendment product by Jonathan Green called Love Your Soil. Love Your Soil is an all-natural SOIL FOOD for Lawns in Hard Soil, but it’s also IDEAL for vegetable gardens, flower gardens, potted plants, and window boxes. Love Your Soil is a SUPER-CONCENTRATED GYPSUM that loosens hard soils quickly. When soil is loose and porous, then air, water, and nutrients are more available to plant roots. Love Your Soil also has granular humus, which acts as a “pro-biotic” for the soil, so the “good” bacteria in the soil can breakdown nutrients for the plants to easily absorb.
3) POTENTIAL SIZE
What looks cute today may be way too big for it’s spot in your garden in just a couple of years. In particular you should be careful with trees and bushes. READ THE LABEL, and BELIEVE IT when it tells you how big something will get!
4) SPACE OUT YOUR SEEDS!
Packages always tell you how far apart to plant seeds. It’s important to follow this guideline, or else you will have an over-crowded garden. Overcrowding leads to poor growth and smaller plants because too m any things can’t take up the same space, and will fight for the sun and the nutrients, leaving less for all the others. A great tool to help you do that is the SEEDING SQUARE.
5) THIN YOUR SEEDLINGS
Planting edibles too close to each other will overcrowd and yield small fruits and veggies. I always feel bad pulling the cute little sprouts that I worked so hard to get, but you have to! If you don’t, you’ll grow fruit that is small because it has nowhere to go, and will never get a chance to grow as big as they should, and may even get deformed from not having enough space. Check out these white sweet turnip seeds from Burpee! You can eat them like an apple!