Organic gardening is becoming a lot more popular as people become more aware of the chemicals that are used in conventional food production. It can be a little trickier than chemical-based gardening, but it’s worth it in the end.

• If you’re new to growing plants this way, these gardening tips could help you increase your chances of success.

1. Start with the basics.

• Don’t be tempted to spend an enormous amount of money on your first supplies, materials, and tools. There’s no such thing as a magic bullet, and you’ll only end up with very expensive vegetables.
• Organic gardening can actually be done much less expensively than conventional gardening.
• Compost, manure, and other soil additives replace expensive fertilizer, and natural control methods keep pest levels down.

2. Grow your plants in the right spot.

• Take the time to plan which vegetables you’ll be growing and find out what kind of sunlight requirements they have.
• Take the time to find an area of your yard that will provide the amount of light and the soil qualities that these plants need.
• The right conditions can help you avoid many problems before they even begin.

3. Prepare the soil correctly.

• Check the pH, moistness, and type of soil you have available, then add amendments to make it what you need.
• You might need to add in compost, animal manures, grass clippings, ashes, or other substances to improve the condition of your soil. This might seem like a lot of work to start with, but it will help your garden grow, and will keep on working for you down the line. Setup of an organic garden is the hardest part.

4. Start your own compost pile.

• Compost can be purchased cheaply, but you don’t know what goes into it.
• Composting your own kitchen scraps and yard waste can help you dispose of these substances cheaply and in an ecologically friendly way, plus you’ll get great free fertilizer that you know is organic.
• You’ll be amazed at the difference that a good compost pile can make for your garden. Composting might seem like it’s a complicated process, but it really isn’t. Almost anyone can do it.

5. Don’t ignore your garden.

• Once you’ve tilled and planted your organic garden, it can be extremely tempting to ignore it. This isn’t a good idea in conventional gardens, either, but it can be disastrous if you’re growing organic.
• A little daily weeding and pest removal, a careful check over all plants, and some regular attention will do more to help your garden than any product you can buy. If you take the time to love your garden, you’ll be rewarded with wonderful results.

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I don’t know what it is about a garden that has always drawn humans to them. But they’ve always been very fashionable, and an integral part of peoples’ lifestyles. Most religions feature gardens as the settings for a few of the biggest occasions According to Christianity, humanity was started in a garden and the son of God was resurrected in a garden. The Buddhist build gardens to allow nature to permeate their environment. Virtually every major palace and government building has a garden. But what’s so great about them? They’re just a bundle of plants, in the end.

Needless to say, the reasoning is fairly obvious behind why people grow food in gardens. It’s to eat! If you live off the fat of the land and actually survive on stuff from your garden, it’s easy to figure out the reasoning. But I’m looking at those people who plant flower gardens just for the sake of looking nice. There is no immediate benefit that I can see; you just have a bunch of flowers in your yard! However, after thinking extensively about the motivation behind planting decorative gardens, I’ve conceived several feasible theories.

Gardening Advice

I think a good reason people enjoy gardens so much is although we have a natural desire to progress and industrialize, deep within everyone of us is a primal love for nature. While this hope might not be as powerful as the wish for modernism, it is still strong enough to compel us to produce gardens, small outlets of nature, in the course of all our hustle and bustle. Since being in nature is like regressing to an earlier stage of humanity, we too can regress to a time of comfort and utter happiness. This is why gardens are so relaxing and calming to be in. This is the reason why gardens are a respectable place to meditate and do Chinese tai chi workouts. A garden is a means to rapidly escape from the busy world.

I’ve thought occasionally that perhaps we as humans feel a kind of guilt driving us to restore nature and care for it. This guilt could stem from the knowledge that we, not personally but as a race, have destroyed so much of nature to get where we’re today. It’s the least we can do to create a small garden in remembrance of all the trees we kill a day. It’s my theory that this is the underlying cause for the majority of people to need gardening as a hobby.

Gardening is unquestionably a healthy trait though, don’t get me wrong. Any hobby that provides physical exertion, helps the environment, and improves your diet program cannot be a negative thing. So no matter what the underlying psychological cause for gardening is, I believe that everyone should continue to do so. In the USA especially, which is addressing obesity and pollution as its two major problems, I think gardening can only serve to improve the state of the world.

Needless to say I’m no psychologist; I’m just a curious gardener. I often stay up for hours questioning what makes me garden. What is it that makes me go outside for a couple of hours daily with my gardening tools, and facilitate the small-time growth of plants that would grow naturally on their own? I might never know, but in this instance ignorance truly is bliss.

To know more about gardening, please check out Gardening Tips

I remember back to when I was about 10. I remember the plants that my mom had around the house, well mostly in the living room but a few other rooms had plants in the windows. Maybe that’s where I got the urge to grow an indoor garden of my own.

Mom had a huge Boston Fern, I haven’t started one of those yet but I am going to once our outdoor gardening season comes to a close and I have more time to spend indoors. She also had a dozen or so African violets, so each room had one or two. She would just move them around to get the best lighting conditions.

I never saw her do anything else to them but I am sure she was paying close attention to them while we were out playing or at school.

Plants are just as popular as furniture when one is deciding on furniture and soft furnishings. Aside from the aesthetic value plants provide your home with, there are also health benefits – grade school science class tells us that plants cleanse the air through utilizing the carbon dioxide and producing more oxygen. Here is some important information on how to care for your indoor plants to gain the optimum health and aesthetic benefits.

Lighting

Most indoor plants need good lighting. You can provide this through natural lighting in the room of your choice or there must be electric lighting. Darker leaved plants usually don’t need as much light as others.

Here are the varieties of plants (usually those that only require medium to low light) that are known to be suitable for indoor gardening:

a. Philodendrons
b. Boston ferns
c. African violets
d. Cyclamens
e. Creeping Fig

Watering

A common mistake most people make in indoor gardening is they tend to over-water the plants, which may lead to rotting roots.  Make sure to research the type of plant you have, because each kind of plant varies on their watering needs.

Potting

Choose good quality and attractive container for your indoor plants. Make sure that the pot is clean before placing your new plant into it to prevent infection and to encourage healthy growth.

Humidity

In indoor gardening, humidity is a big issue.  The amount of moisture in the air has effect on the growth of the plants. During mornings, you could spray the plants with water for their much-needed moisture. Make sure the leaves don’t get covered in dust.

Fertilization

Just like watering, fertilizing depends on the type of plant.  If you have managed to supply your indoor garden with the right amount of light, water and humidity, fertilization may not need much attention. A good indoor fertilizer can be bought from most home depot or hardware stores. Orchids need the special fertilizer available.

I couldn’t tell you how many times I have bought plants on impulse only to find they don’t really fit my home garden. Now, before I buy plants, I  examine our backyard garden to see what fits in.

What do I pay attention to now?

• I pay attention to things like, how much sun and shade it will get
• Is the soil well drained or waterlogged
• Is the spot I want to plant in sheltered or windswept

The little list above is what I have messed up on in the past so now I know our yard and have done much better choosing the best plants for our home gardening needs.

We didn’t check our soil because it was so obvious that it was all clay and hard as cement, which meant it didn’t drain well at all.We have to add a lot of our soil in order to have it drain but once that was done we had an entirely new home garden that grows more than weeds.

My advice is to test your soil to determine the pH level of your soil and what kind of nutrients you need to add, if any.

Is the soil acid or alkaline?

Some plants prefer soil that is slightly acidic, while others require alkaline soil to grow well.  You can test your soil and then just plant accordingly but we prefer to amend the soil to suit the plants we wish to grow. It’s a little more work but well worth our time and effort as we get a much better looking home garden.

This way we can grow plants, flowers and veggies, that we want. Heck we would be planting mostly water loving plants as our yard just wouldn’t drain for days at a time. Now it drains everywhere and we have all the plants we wanted.

Getting Arrangements You Want

Before you dig in take the time to place the plants you’ve chosen around the garden bed in their pots to see how they will look. Re-arrange them until you are satisfied. It’s so much better than rearranging them after you have them in the ground.

Grouping plants in sets of threes or fives usually looks better than planting in groups of even numbers. Be sure that you have an interesting combination of colors and textures of plants. Tall plants should go to the back, or the centre if your garden will be viewed equally from all sides. Try to keep your plants away from trees. The roots of trees are fiercely competitive and will steal all the nutrients and moisture meant for your flowers.

The right color scheme is one way to maintain the harmony in your garden. Imagine the color of the flowers when they are in bloom. Some colors may clash with others, but can still be planted side-by-side if they have a different blooming season. Foliage color is also important. Many flower plants have silver, grey or purplish foliage that is just as attractive as the flower. This means that they are still attractive well past the blooming season and so have added value.

It’s the end of February once again and the sun seems to be shining just a bit brighter. My little home garden is calling me and I can’t think about much else, other than fishing of course but that’s a different blog topic.

I can almost see the snow disappearing, although this is New Brunswick and I know we will have a snow storm or two yet but that snow usually disappears almost as fast as it piles up.

I keep looking out my home office window but I still can’t see our garden yet. The snow is melting really fast in the raised bed where our strawberry plants hangout.

We have two raised beds that are only a few feet apart but I can instantly tell which is getting more sunlight. I guess that’s why we get strawberrys two weeks earlier than our other strawberry patch.

The second raised bed is still under a thick blanket of snow. It really shows why location is so important.

The first raised bed, still covered with snow, is close to our property fence to the east and doesn’t see much sun in the early part of the day, while the other is facing the north property fence and gets sunlight for most of the day, at least two more hours of sunlight.

Even though our second raised bed doesn’t get as much sunlight each day it’s still a raised bed and heats up sooner than most other areas in our home garden so we still get flowers growing sooner.