Are you thinking of starting a home garden? Well, starting a home garden is one of the most satisfying things one can do. Though it is difficult to understand how to start a home garden, one can always start a home garden from scratch. In case if one is new to gardening, there are many starting a home garden videos, starting a home garden on YouTube, or books for starting a home garden ideas available to help people with the genuine intention of developing the hobby of gardening.
Essential Steps For Starting A Home Garden
To start a home gardening from scratch, one must think whether you want to start a vegetable garden or plant only flowers or other floral plants, or you want to have a combination of both. In the era of organic food, many people are now interested to start a vegetable garden along with the floral one so that they can have organic vegetables and fruits from their gardens.
Steps to Starting a Home Garden for Beginners
In all the cases, there are some simple steps to start a vegetable garden to reap the rich rewards of your efforts with colorful blooms, exotic fragrances and beautiful views which you can click for a pic to flaunt it around. Here is a step by step guide to starting a home garden for starting a vegetable garden for beginners:
- Pick your plants: Decide whether you want to plant a vegetable garden or a herb garden or a flower garden? Accordingly, pick your plants so that they can contribute towards the flower vases and your dinner table and thereby fill your home with bounties from nature. In case if you are going for a flower garden, then decide the flowers that you would like to plant according to the color, size of the plant, fragrance, the time of planting, and whether they are perennial or shorter short bloom or a yearly bloom. In the case of vegetables, you can go by choice of your family’s favorites. In both cases, please start with a smaller number of plants so that it’s easy to maintain. Gradually you can come to try out combinations of the plants to give your garden a stunning look.
- Choose the right spot: A detailed observation of your garden throughout the day to figure out the sunlight’s pattern on various garden spots is especially essential. Once you know that, you can plant the vegetables and flowers according to their need for sunlight. Individual plants need sunlight for six to eight hours while the others grow well in the shade. So, do not skip this step because your plants need the light’s precise requirements to develop. While buying plants or their seeds, check their tags, or ask the staff at the nursery or seed center.
- Cleaning and clearing the ground: The land on which you plan to plant a garden needs to be cleaned of all the weeds and cleared for the plantation. After cleaning the land, it has to be turned inside out and let the sunlight cure it for two to three days. Once the ground is dry, you can then make sections into the ground for the different types of plants you want.
- Prepare the soil: To start a home garden, one needs to prepare and work the soil thoroughly. It means that proper tilling and digging has to be done in the soil. The soil should be layered with proper compost mixture, old manure or grass clippings, and then leaving it for the organic matter to surface and doits work. After around two to three weeks, shift the soil again, and leave it fora week with enough water and sunlight for the organic matter to work itself out. Eventually, the soil will get the time to become rich, moist, and ready for vegetables to grow.
- Planting begins: Choose your plant according to the current season, and also, as per the time of the bloom of the plant, either it can be perennial or a small bloom or an annual bloom. You can also plant mid-spring and mid-autumn seasonal varieties of plants, which are perennials. Some plants can grow better from seeds directly, and for some, plant a sapling must. You can also use containers or your balcony to plant a garden. Always try to follow the seed packet instructions and get the seeds and seedlings moist but not wet.
- Water at the Right Time: Seedlings are the little plants that should never be allowed to dry out. They require frequent watering until their roots are established in the ground. Also, the frequency of watering your garden depends on the soil, humidity, and rainfall. Also, it depends on the weather conditions, how sunny or windy, or how quickly the soil dries up or cools. Water the plants slowly and deeply and let the water soak in the soil instead of letting it runoff. Early morning watering a garden is the best way to minimize evaporation.
- Use mulch for protection: Covering the soil with a couple of inches of mulch will keep the weeds and keep the soil moist. This mulch layer will prevent direct sunlight on the seeds and will not let the soil dry quickly. The soil won’t require frequent watering, and it will help the seeds to germinate better. A wide variety of mulch with their benefits are now available, including Riverrock, straw, and shredded bark. You can also use organic mulch like cocoa bean shells, compost, or bark.
- Maintain Your Garden: Once your garden starts developing and begins to grow, the difficult task of maintaining a garden begins. Follow a regular gardening a routine like water the plants pull out the weeds before they are rampant throughout the garden, get rid of the dead, dying or the deceased vegetation, stop any destructive insects from picking off the plant, spray insecticides on the plants as well as in the soil, give proper support to the tall plants and finally, harvest the vegetables as soon as they are ready.
Just one more thing stop and smell and appreciate everything that is growing in your garden