Helpful Home Vegetable Gardening Tips

Maybe you think home vegetable gardening is a lot of work. The thought of pulling weeds, watering and maintaining a garden, not too mention having to tilling the land is not very appealing to you. But rest assure there steps you can take to eliminate all of those if you are willing to do the upfront work. And for those of you who think you can’ have a garden because you live in a condo, townhome or apartment, read on. There is help in here for you also.

Eliminating Weeds
You can take every step known to man and you will invariably get a weed or two. They are persistent little buggers and if you don’t get them early, they can turn into the “impossible to get rid of buggers”. Lets start with making sure you limit their access to root in the same soil your vegetables are planted in. Using newspaper you can make a great weed barrier. Put down two layers of newspaper over your soil. Once the newspaper is down, put no less than two inches of mulch on top of the newspaper. This helps to keep the newspaper down as well as provide excellent water drainage and root protection. It also takes away your need to till the land. Taking these two steps will eliminate over 95% of the weeds and a lot of other steps in maintaining a vegetable garden. Then every other morning or in the evening go out to your garden and pick the one or two weeds you may have.

Make the Most of the Space you Have
A lot of people live in homes that just do not have a lot of land or any land for the matter. When this occurs there are a couple of ways to overcome space issues. The first way is to utilize raised bed gardening. You simply make a box out of wood, bricks, even hay and fill the box with gardening soil that can be bought at any home center. Just make sure, if the raised sits on top of a patio or concrete and so on, that its depth is no less than 10 inches. This gives the plants roots plenty of room to grow. The second way is to grow your plants in pots. Pots aren’t just for flowers, they make for growing great vegetables. Make sure the pot you choose is at least 10 inches in height, has plenty of drainage holes at the bottom and no less than 6 inches in diameter.

Watering
There is no way around it you have to water. All living things need water and without it life would cease. But you can relax you do not have to spend hours on end everyday watering your garden. Once every 4 days is plenty, every 3 if temperatures are extremely high your area. Use a soaker hose if you have a garden so you can turn on your hose, walk away, and come back in a half hour. This works well for raised beds as well. If you are using pots then you will want to water every other day and give them a good soaking so the soil stays moist. Using a pitcher or watering can will do.

Now that you know you can take some easy steps to make life as a home vegetable gardener easier you have no excuse not to get started. I look forward to seeing pictures of your home grown veggies.

About the Author
Mike is the author of the book Vegetable Gardening for the Average Person: A guide to vegetable gardening for the rest of us. He can be reached at his wesbite: AveragePersonGardening.com where you can sign up for his free newsletter and he will send you a pack of vegetable seeds to get your home vegetable garden started.