gardening
Vegetable and herb gardening tips for fresh family meals
Tuesday, November 29, 2022
A vegetable garden is a patch or plot of land used to grow vegetables for human consumption. PHOTO | SWIMMING POOL
A vegetable garden is a patch or plot of land used to grow vegetables for human consumption.
In general, it is carried out for household consumption and on a very small scale. Likewise, herb garden is a bed on which herbs are grown in the backyard or small planters used for cooking.
Vegetable gardening is as simple as sticking a few seeds in the soil and holding back to see when they start to germinate. There are a few points that need to be considered before planting a full fledged garden to enjoy freshly cooked meals.
When discussing building a vegetable garden, start with simple plants like tomatoes or ladyfingers to build confidence and practice the basic requirements of the vegetable garden.
When creating a vegetable garden, location is very important. The location must accommodate the amount of sunlight available for the plant to grow. Here we say, for example, tomatoes and peppers or potatoes need a lot of sunlight, so six hours of sunlight is good enough.
Herbs like mint prefer indirect sunlight, while veggies like spinach and lettuce prefer a half-sun spot. In other words, before deciding which vegetable or herb to grow, first look at the characteristics of each vegetable.
When starting a vegetable garden, try planting one in the backyard or near the kitchen area, which makes it easy to pick the veggies at a specific time during cooking. Also, a vegetable garden sometimes gets messy compared to well trimmed and well maintained and trimmed hedges, flowering plants and other plants and shrubs growing in the garden. Another reason vegetable gardens can be a bit messy is that some plants grow underground and others in the form of creepers, so maintenance can be a minor task.
After all this, what to grow in the vegetable garden? The answer is to grow what your family loves to eat, because if those vegetables aren’t used by the grower, it’s a waste of space, time, resources, and effort.
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One of the most important factors is water. It is very important to keep water available for the vegetable garden at all times. Watering can be done with a hose or drip irrigation can be installed to save time. Likewise, the soil on which vegetables are grown should be soft and porous.
Kitchen waste such as onion skins and banana peels, among other things, can be disposed of in the vegetable garden to make the soil healthy and nutritious in a natural way.
The other best option I would suggest is dry neem and bamboo leaves which make a very good fertilizer. Try making manure at home by mixing the above waste with cow manure and letting it decompose. Here the goal is to make the soil organic and healthier, avoiding the use of chemical fertilizers.
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Do not use fresh manure (cow manure), but compost the manure for six to twelve months. This is because, in certain cases, fresh manure will burn the plants. Manure can be mixed with leaf mold and coir to make it spongy and hold water to keep the soil moist.
Another way to get more from a limited space is to use techniques like growing vegetables in two- or three-tier raised beds.
Fill these raised beds with soil and compost mix, then plant the veggies.
The second method is to germinate vegetables in plastic bottles and grow them until they are medium sized. Once ready, they can be transferred to the ground for fresh vegetables.
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