Vegetable gardening offers a variety of benefits that will enrich your life in so many ways! In addition to enhancing mealtime with fresh homegrown vegetables that you grew yourself, tending the garden is great for the body. It gets you outside in the fresh air and sunshine where you can get a little closer to nature while enjoying the simple things in life.
It’s important to grow food, not lawns!
Growing a vegetable garden is also great exercise. Tending to and harvesting the plants require a considerable amount of bending and stooping that can help you stay in shape. It’s a great way to clear your head, which enhances mental clarity while improving your self-esteem. After all, sitting down and enjoying the delicious foods you grew yourself is very rewarding.
However, growing a vegetable garden is a lot of work. It takes planning and preparation to ensure your garden thrives but don’t let that deter you from getting started.
All you need is a little guidance and a few great ideas to help you get started and that is exactly what we have to offer.
The first step in growing a garden involves choosing a location for your plants. Your garden should be close to a water source and have good drainage to prevent standing water from rotting your plants. The location should also allow your plants to receive several hours of direct sunlight to help keep them healthy.
Here, you’ll find some great garden layout ideas and raised gardening plans to help you choose the perfect spot and options for your garden.
You’ll also discover some great tips on which vegetables grow best in the spring, along with tips on how to grow vegetables such as cucumbers, beets, basil, broccoli, and spinach. You can even find information on what to do if you end up with too many tomatoes to eat, so nothing goes to waste.
This is an excellent place to learn about composting and how it benefits your garden. Discover how trench composting works or learn how to compost with worms to help your vegetables grow healthy and thrive.
Pests are a common problem that all gardeners small and large dread. They can do a lot of damage to the vegetables you worked so hard to grow but don’t worry. Here, you can get some great tips on how to get pests such as slugs, snails, caterpillars and hornworms out of your garden without using harsh chemicals.
You can also learn how to protect your garden from animals such as deer, cats, dogs, moles, squirrels and birds that can destroy it in a few short days.
Not having enough space is another problem that keeps many people from enjoying the benefits of vegetable gardening. If you’re dealing with limited space, this is a great place to gather tips and ideas for small space gardening. Learn how vertical gardening works or how to grow a living wall. You can also discover which vegetables grow best in small gardens or learn how and where to grow vegetables indoors for the best results.
Squirrels may look cute and cuddly, but they make for a very annoying garden pest. If you want to know how to keep squirrels out of the garden for good, you’re going to want to read some of the very helpful tips we have here. There are some natural predators to squirrels, such as hawks,…
Although a staple in the produce section of the supermarket, cauliflower is less often seen in home vegetable gardens, due to how difficult it can be to grow (or so I’ve noticed among my own community). Like other brassicas, cauliflower is a cool-season vegetable that is a heavy feeder and susceptible to significant damage from…
Cool, crunchy cucumbers are great in salads, pickled, or even eaten plain with a little salt (or is that just me?). These wonderful summer veggies can grow well in all sizes of vegetable gardens, since proper trellising means they take up very little horizontal space. In addition to providing the proper growing conditions, choose some…
You may have heard that planting basil near your tomatoes can boost flavor or that marigolds help keep pests at bay. That’s no garden myth—it’s part of a time-tested practice called companion planting. And when done right, it can make a huge difference in your harvest. So, what exactly should you plant next to your…
Few things are more satisfying than walking through the garden on a hot summer day and biting into a juicy sun-ripened tomato plucked straight from the vine. Or harvesting fresh veggies and herbs for a homegrown meal, you can be proud of because you produced the ingredients yourself. There is an unparalleled joy in growing…
If you’ve joined the urban farming movement but your garden gets more shadows than sunlight, don’t worry—you’re not out of luck. It turns out that plenty of vegetables actually prefer a little shade, and with the right choices, your low-light garden can still be productive and delicious. Leafy greens like lettuce, spinach, and kale thrive…
There’s nothing more disappointing than going to pick a yummy squash and instead finding your squash plants in distress, destroyed by some unwelcome bug. But don’t worry: we’re looking at ways to prevent. Plus, how to get rid of these nasty little creatures if they’ve already invaded. See which of these 5 suggestions might make…
If you have a garden, even a small one, you’re probably growing a couple of tomato plants. When you get it right, they’re such a rewarding fruit (yes, fruit!) to pick and enjoy. Unfortunately, growing tomatoes isn’t always easy. Some are self-inflicted and easily fixable, but others might need a bit more attention. Let’s look…
Picking ripe tomatoes straight off the vine is one of my favorite pastimes. Nothing compares to the flavors, whether I pop them straight into my mouth or make them into a yummy salsa or fresh bruschetta. But getting to that point in the season requires getting one thing right first: good soil. Whether you are…