How to Grow Bush Beans in your Home Vegetable Garden

The bush bean family has a lot of options to choose from. They range in different shapes, sizes and yes, even color. They make for a nice addition to the home vegetable garden because they are fairly easy to grow, do not take up that much space and are determinate plants meaning you know exactly how much space each plant will consume. Here are some steps you can follow to add these great tasting vegetables to your home garden.

The first step is to always make sure the site where they will go is at its optimal condition. Since it’s not recommended that you start bush bean seeds indoors, we want to pay extra special care to our soil. Start by making sure the pH level in your soil is in the 6.5 to 7.5 range. This can easily be done by using a home soil test kit available from any home or garden center for just a few bucks. Make adjustments as necessary to get your soil in that range.

Bush bean seeds will germinate best when the soil temperature is 75 to 85 degrees Fahrenheit. You can also pick up a soil thermometer at the local home or garden center for a couple of bucks as well. If the soil needs to be warmed up, just put down a layer of landscaping plastic or cover to bring the temperature up.

Now that your soil is ready, plant your bush bean seeds no closer than 4 inches apart to make sure they have enough room to grow and thrive. Keep your watering low in the early stages and when the beans are at harvest stage water them heavily to help retain their flavor.

Follow the instructions on your seed packet to determine when they are ready to harvest. Because each variety of bush bean can be harvested at different times there is no one technique that fits all.

Bush beans get along with beets, cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, celery, corn, cucumber, eggplant, leek, parsnip, radish and sunflower so make sure you optimize the space in your garden by implementing good companion plantings with any of these.

Also, bush beans get along real well with marigolds. With marigolds planted close by the bush beans, insects are less likely to go after them.

As you can see adding bush beans to your home vegetable garden is not that hard and since they produce a high amount of return, they are a vegetable that will be well worth the time and effort.

About the Author
Mike the Gardener Enterprises, LLC is the exclusive home of the seeds of the month club where you can sign up and receive 4 packs of vegetable, fruit and herb seeds every month.

Preparing Your Home Vegetable Garden to Grow Corn

Although, according to the USDA, corn ranks four spots behind tomatoes as the most popular vegetable to grow in a home vegetable garden, it still is a very popular item because of its taste, texture and availability. You may not have the budget of a commercial corn grower to make your life easier, but you can take some steps to make your corn harvest much more successful. Here are some steps you can follow the next time you decide to grow corn in your home vegetable garden.

Just as if you were building a house it all begins with a great foundation. In this case the foundation is the soil or site where your corn will grow. Preparing the site and laying that foundation begins long before the first corn kernels go in the ground. In the fall mix in plenty of compost and manure and work it in thoroughly with a pitchfork. This will help increase your worm presence in the soil which has a number of varieties from vermicompost to soil aeration.

In the spring as soon as the fear of frost has passed, put down a one inch layer of finished compost. This will supply the nutrients young corn kernels will need to germinate, thrive and survive.

About out a week out from planting, put down over the soil, black or IRT plastic. This will help heat the soil up as well as eliminate some (not all) of any weed seeds they may have found their way into the bed. Monitor the soil temperature with a soil thermometer, and take accurate readings. You want the soil temperature around 70 degrees Fahrenheit.

Now that the soil is ready, remove the plastic and plant the corn kernels about one inch deep and no further than eight inches apart. To increase pollination plant the corn kernels in blocks of four and sow new blocks every ten to twenty days so that you get corn throughout the season.

Corn is great vegetable to grow and with so many varieties to choose from there is sure to be something out there for every home vegetable gardener.

About the Author
Mike the Gardener Enterprises, LLC is the exclusive home of the seeds of the month club where you can sign up and receive 4 packs of vegetable, fruit and herb seeds every month.

How to Control Flea Beetles in your Home Vegetable Garden

When most people hear the word flea they readily think of the small insect that affects their dogs and cats. What a lot of people may not know is that there are a variety of insects labeled fleas for similar characteristics such as jumping. One such insect directly related to and affecting home vegetable gardening is the flea beetle.

The flea beetle, so named because they “jump away” just like a normal flea would, are usually brown or black in color and very small, about the size of a pinhead. Do not let their size fool you though. If left unattended, they can rip through the leaves of your vegetable plants in no time and because they jump around they can easily spread plant disease very quickly.

Here is what you can do to curtail these little pests.

Ensure the environments in which your plants grow are conducive for proper growth. Mix in compost in your soil throughout the year and make sure the soil maintains a neutral pH level by testing it with a home soil test kit which costs just a few bucks at your local home or garden center.

Spray affected plants with a neem oil soap. Don’t let the name fool you, it is an organic, healthy and safe way to treat plants that won’t inhibit their growth or do any damage to the underlying ecosystem that makes it possible for a great garden.

Finally, apply beneficial nematodes to your garden. These small creatures will help with long term control as they will “go after” the flea beetles. Check with your local home or garden center, or call a local co-op in your area to find out what the beneficial nematodes are. It is a low cost solution for what could be a destructive problem for future growing seasons.

Flea beetles can be a problem to your home vegetable garden, especially your tomatoes. If you are like me and treat your tomatoes like they are gold, then you want to make sure you are doing everything you possibly can to prohibit and deter flea beetles from being a problem. Follow the steps above, and you will be well on your way to a flea beetle-“less” home vegetable garden.

About the Author
Mike is the owner of Mike the Gardener Enterprises, LLC where you can sign up for their Seeds of the Month Club and receive 4 packs of vegetable, fruit and herb seeds every month.

The Least Favorite Vegetables to Grow in the Garden

Vegetable gardening, just like anything else in life, is comprised of people from all walks of life and culture and because it is so vast, we wanted to get a better handle on what people grow and more importantly what they don’t grow. So we went ahead and asked our thousands of subscribers on our vegetable gardening fan page on Facebook this specific question. What is your least favorite vegetable to grow? One that you avoid like the plague and can't understand why anyone else would want to grow it in the first place

We received a tremendous amount of responses, some of which were a surprise to us since we grow that vegetable ourselves and some we never heard of. Here is a portion of that list.

The biggest surprise on the list to us was zucchini. We absolutely love zucchini. You can make breads with it, soups, steam it, you name it. But apparently as one Facebook member put it, “it grows like a weed”, it is not as popular with others.

This next vegetable we agree with and that is brussel sprouts. We do not grow them ourselves and as one Facebook member put it, “lots of plant for little return…takes up space that could be better used for something {else}”. But dot not fret sprouts fans, there were plenty of defenders of the veggie, we just weren’t one of them.

Another shocker to us was eggplant. Many wrote not liking it more for the texture of the vegetable when you eat it rather than growing it. We shared some recipes for eggplant parmesan in hopes that those members that are against it would change their minds. We shall see.

Cabbage, hot peppers, chicory and mustard, were about a tie but mostly because some didn’t like the taste of cabbage, others did not know what to do with cabbage once harvested, many do not like the heat from hot peppers and one person was allergic to mustard, which we found unique.

With all that said, the number one crop that people “avoid like plague”, drum roll please, is okra. One person wrote in saying it gave him nightmares from his childhood when the school lunch cafeteria person would put it in everything and tasted horrible, to another person that says growing okra made her “itch like crazy”. The bad results for okra came in like wildfire that we started feeling sorry for it.

The poll, albeit unscientific of course, was a fun question to ask and gave us real insight into the vegetable gardening world of what vegetable gardeners won’t grow.

About the Author
Mike is the owner of Mike the Gardener Enterprises, LLC where you can sign up for their Seeds of the Month Club and receive 4 packs of vegetable, fruit and herb seeds every month.

Hydroponics Gardening

Hydroponics gardening is a new wave and revolution in a dirt free gardening. As the population has grown and the available space on the earth to grow plants has shrunk and in such a situation, hydroponics gardening has come as a new technique of plant cultivation.

Hydroponics is the art of growing of plants through a mixture of water and nutrients. It is an easy and an efficient way of plant cultivation. Plants grown hydroponically are much healthier as compared to soil based plants, as all the required nutrients are fed directly from the roots, without the need for big bags of gardening soil.

Do you remember your childhood summer holiday assignment in which you had to grow a sweet potato tubers in a water jars. By just providing essential nutrients through water, you could see it grow in a water jar. The hydroponics gardening also works the same way.

Steps that you need to follow to grow plants correctly in a hydroponically garden are given below.

Step 1# Choose right containers to plant crops for your hydroponic garden. You can consider using plastic containers, if you wish to use a hydroponic system with plants in water only.

Step 2 # Select appropriate plants according to the size of your containers. You can choose from almost any of the vegetable or fruits such as lettuce, tomatoes and cucumbers to grow.

Step 3 # Allocate a sunny location for hydroponic crops. Crops grown hydroponically need the same amount of sun light as plants grown in soil need.

Step 4 # To construct your hydroponics garden, you need to order hydroponic kits from any garden suppliers. You would require a simple hydroponic system, a plastic mesh tray, an air pump, and a soilless growing medium to support the roots of the plant. You can choose from sand, gravel, coconut husks as your growing medium.

Step 5# To prepare the container for planting the crop, add one to two inches of sand or coconut husks at the bottom of the container.

Step 6# Place the air pump and add plant nutrient solution is sufficient quantity to fill the container to a reasonable level and then place the mesh tray to cover the container top.

Step 7# Place your plants in the tray, allowing the roots to hang down from the top.

Step 8# Start the air pump when you have finished inserting the plants on the tray. The air pump will provide the required oxygen to the plant from its roots.

Step 9# Monitor the level of nutrient solution in your container.

Prashant T Verma is working as a Technical writer in one of the reputed I.T. companies. He has total 3 years of an experience in writing and has written articles on many different topics. Please visit http://www.prashant-t-verma.blogspot.com and http://www.articlefeeder.blogspot.com/ to find articles on different topics.