Organic Gardening Tips

If you'd like to try your hand at organic gardening, you may find the experience quite enjoyable and fulfilling. Whether you choose to grow flowers, herbs, shrubs, trees or vegetables, all of your gardening efforts are well rewarded when you choose to garden organically.

Organic vegetable and fruit gardening is particularly popular, because once you're able to harvest and eat the foods you've grown, you know for sure you're not putting any chemicals or harmful ingredients into your body. And as a bonus, the foods often taste much better too!

A key element in organic gardening is soil preparation. By making sure to enhance your soil before planting anything, then regularly each new spring, you're helping your soil become as fertile as it can be. Additionally, soil preparation helps with proper oxygen flow to your plants, gives them room to grow, and provides the nutrition and vitamins they need to produce outstanding blooms, fruits or foods.

The best organic gardening tip you can find is to use compost. Now, many people think making compost involves having a large smelly pile of rotting food and organic materials in your yard for months. And this is true if you choose to create an actual compost pile from scratch. You can however, buy compost from other organic gardeners or organic supply stores. A better option though, is to simply mix organic materials into your garden beds several weeks before you start planting.

Mixing organic materials into your garden beds is very simple and easy. Just turn the soil of the garden bed first, and pull out any weeds or roots that might be accumulated. Then toss some organic materials into the bed.

Organic materials are everyday items most of us use. If you have a fireplace for instance, it probably needs to be cleaned out from the winter's use, right? So add a healthy dose of fireplace ash to your garden bed. Then add some dry grass and leaf clippings, some shredded newspaper, small bits of tree bark or wood chips, coffee and tea grounds, and chopped vegetable or fruit matter from the kitchen.

Once you've tossed in a variety of organic materials, simply mix them into the turned soil of your garden bed. Then for the next three to four weeks, water and turn the garden bed soil about every three days or so. This will keep the soil moist and help air flow so the organic matter breaks down fairly quickly. Once you're ready, go ahead and place your new plants or seeds into the freshly prepared garden bed.

Now the second best organic gardening tip you can receive is all about weed control. Once you have your new plants in the ground, cover the soil around those plants with a thick layer of mulch. Dried grass or leaf clippings, straw, and tree bark all make wonderful garden mulch. Be sure to make the garden mulch thick, because the more light that's blocked, the more weeds you'll keep from appearing in your garden bed. And if you can keep the weeds under control, you've conquered most of the common potential pest problems that occur with organic gardening.

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