A gardening guru knows that weeding is effective for growth control. Weeds are your garden’s most persistent and deadly enemy. You need to be able to know how to handle weeds in order to foster growth control for your organic garden. If you let weeds take over, they will completely obliterate your capacity to yield a rich number of vegetables.
They are the number one stealer of nutrients and sunlight, so the earlier you try to eliminate them, the better it will be for your gardening. This can take up a lot of your time during certain seasons, but monitoring weeds and eliminating them is definitely worth it to ensure an effective yield.
Weeds are usually much harder to remove when they have matured. So it is best to keep a keen eye out anrd regularly inspect your garden for the earliest appearances of weeds. Cultivating your soil regularly will help eliminate the younger weeds, which is the best approach as once you let those young weeds take hold and be firmly established in the garden, it will become a more herculean task to try to remove them.
Seasons also affect the appearance of weeds. Different types of weeds proliferate at different times of the year, and it will be your advantage to recognize which weeds are in season so you can more easily expect them in your garden and prepare your anti-weed arsenal more effectively.
Make sure that your ground remains filled up with the good stuff. If you leave any portion idle or bare, the weeds are more likely to invade that area and secure its nutrients for their growth. If you are unable to fill the entire area with plant outgrowths, try to use a good cover to keep the weeds from invading your vegetable patch.
In the case where weeds have already grown, chopping them off from the root is the most efficient way to remove them. The use of herbicides and pesticides is also possible, but it is not entirely necessary when you are able to cultivate your land. The pesticides and herbicides, especially the commercially available ones, may prove to have other harmful effects and pose a threat to other useful organisms living in your garden. If you do need to use herbicides and pesticides, do so sparingly.
Mulching and composting are also good ways to help maintain the soil and ward off the weeds. Ultimately, you will not have to encounter huge problems in weed management if from the start, you are able to keep them from thriving in your garden in the first place.
If you are really consistent in digging up your space, you will have made the most out of your vegetables’ garden and have exercised true growth control against weeds that can steal, kill and destroy your organic garden.
Filed in
Gardening,
Tips by Robin Fisher
If there is one thing that will prevent your organic garden from yielding the best vegetables, it will be the pests that decide your vegetable patch would make a great home. If you are serious about controlling these pests and keeping them out of your garden for good, then read on.
The hardest thing about pest control is the wide variety of pests that can invade your garden. We’ve set out some tips below for the most common forms of invaders, but with more gardening your knowledge will increase and you will learn how to deal with the pests that want to make your vegetable patch home.
One of the tried and tested tactics for pest control is by familiarising yourself with the famous insects and animals. These enemies of the garden will really hamper the growth of your crop only if you let them.
Beetles
You have two options for beetles: manually remove them by hand or spray them with insecticide that is poisonous to them. If left untreated, beetles have the capacity to bore so much holes on your leaves and eat away at your vegetation over time, especially when their population has already burgeoned.
Aphids
You will often find sticky groups of insects that are invading your garden in hues of red if you have aphids in your garden. Fortunately, you can easily remedy this by spraying it with soap insecticide or any similar material. Aphids are common to almost every garden vegetable you can possibly imagine, so if you are growing vegetables, you are most likely to encounter these sticky organisms.
Cabbage Worms
Neem oil is the cabbage worm’s worst enemy, so if you spray them with it, they will be out of your garden in a jiffy. The thing is, you can determine whether cabbage worm are in the garden if you find green caterpillar and holes on the leaves of your plants. You can also pick them by hand if you are more courageous or maybe spray them with insecticide if you don’t have neem oil handy at the time of infestation.
Cut Worms
If you see crawling, dull caterpillars that are brown in color, then you have found cutworms invading your territory! Placing paper collars around plants after digging around the area may help prevent cutworms from taking up your precious soil and nutrients. Some chemicals may also work like insecticides, but this is a general cure. You also need to dig a lot because the cut worms have this tendency to snuggle up on your plants for shade and life.
Maggots
Maggots are extremely disgusting, and they tend to make your landscape ugly if you do not try to get rid of them. Bleaching is one of the best ways to get rid of maggots. If your organic garden is also situated beside a garbage bag, you may choose to transfer your garbage bag elsewhere because leftover meals like meat tend to attract these maggots and they might decide to branch out of the garbage bin and into your garden.
There are many other kinds of pests that you can control in your garden given the right handy tools and knowledge on how to best eliminate them from your organic garden.
Filed in
Gardening,
Tips by Robin Fisher
Organic vegetable gardening is easy. But to help you, here are some tips you should know.
The most important thing to do is to decide what you want to grow. There are so many vegetables to choose from but keep in mind that certain vegetables cannot be grown because of the climate so take that into consideration as well. You should also consider factors such as soil, temperature, sun and shade exposure.
If you live in an area where droughts are frequent, make sure you are planting drought resistant vegetables that do not need a significant amount of watering and can withstand long periods without it.
Space is also an important consideration. We suggest plotting on a sheet of paper the layout of how you want your vegetables to grow.
A lot of normal day-to-day waste can be used to support the growth of your vegetables. You should mulch your vegetables with organic material. This can be made from food waste, dead leaves or grass and manure. This helps conserve water, adds humus and nutrients as well as discourage weeds from growing.
The biggest threat to your vegetables are pests. To get rid of them, you should use other insects, birds and frogs. If your crops though have been infected, spray infected stems and leaves with diluted soapy water and then clear water to clear the soap off.
If you decide to buy vegetables that are grown instead of using seedlings, most of these come in plastic containers. Be careful when you remove them so you avoid tearing the outside roots especially if these have grown solidly inside the container.
When planting vegetables, don’t stick with just one but plant many different kinds because this invites insects to take up resident in your yard. The variety of vegetables will also help each of them grow as they will not all be trying to use the same resources.
Believe it or not, only 2 percent of the insects in the world are harmful. This means the rest are beneficial. Some examples of these include ladybugs, fireflies, green lacewings, praying mantis, spiders and wasps since they eat insects that try to eat your vegetables. Another thing they do is pollinate the plants and decompose organic matter.
Practice crop rotation. This will make sure that the soil is always fertile. When planting the new vegetable, avoid regular deep cultivation as this will damage the roots, dry out the soil, disturb healthy soil organisms and bring weeds to the surface that will soon germinate.
If you follow these tips, you will surely be able to have a successful organic vegetable garden. You can plant and harvest them all year round so you don’t have to buy these goods anymore from the supermarket.
Filed in
Gardening,
Tips by Robin Fisher