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Your Own Veg Patch
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Maybe you live inside the city but have always had green fingers. Maybe you have a smallish patch of land in your back yard that you want to make into a productive garden. You may even have read a short article or two about organically produced veg and wish to try growing them on your own.
No matter what the reasons for growing your own vegetables, you are at the stage where you are intending to jump into gardening in some manner. Before you can do so, there are a number of factors to consider that you ought to look at to ensure your experience is enjoyable and rewarding.
The initial, and possibly most basic, subject you need to consider is exactly what kind of garden do you need to have? Still writing purely about vegetable gardens, there are a number of forms of them depending on the space you have available as well as your lifestyle.
Perhaps you are interested just in herbs or smaller plants? They can easily be held in a container garden using flower pots. And container gardens have the additional benefit of being able to be brought into the house when the weather gets too cold outside. There’s no need even for transplanting!
If you are contemplating more of a ‘regular’ style of garden, the ground will need to be prepared and reguraly hoed before you can plant. The soil will need to be tested as well to create the best marriage of soil type to what’s being grown. With a big enough garden, there is the potential of harvesting enough fruit and vegetables to eat throughout the growing season and store/pickle/can the remainder for the off-season.
Finally, an improvement 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 large number of benefits over ‘regular’ bed gardening. The earth itself heats up more quickly at the start of the growing season and the construction of the enclosure itself is great for drainage. There is also the added return of not having to bend over or stoop quite as much when working in your garden, which anybody with back pain can easily identify with.
After study into the kind of garden, another question to ask yourself is why. Exactly why do you want to get into gardening? Is it for one of the reasons that has been mentioned at the beginning of the article, or possibly another more personal one.
Gardens can provide a wide variety of fresh fruit and vegetables that are unique to individual preferences. Should you adore 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 instant that they ripen cannot be surpassed.
Once bitten by the gardening bug – no pun intended – you will probably find that you lean towards organic gardening to produce fruit and vegetables that are free from pesticides. Or you might find that your garden soil is especially suited to one sort 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 follow, the possibilities are almost endless, subject only to your creative thinking. Each year gives a new blank slate of options that you can work with. If one thing doesn’t work particularly well, don’t do it again next year. If you love something and you don’t mind the extra work involved with care and maintenance, you can plant double.
The choice is up to you.
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