Growing your own food is healthy, reduces your environmental footprint, and can even reduce stress and improve your mood. But before you jump into buying supplies for a vegetable garden, you’ll want to do some planning. Not only will you have to decide what you want to grow, you’ll need to plot your garden, acquire the right tools and supplies, and protect your seedlings.
Here’s a quick primer to help you start planning your garden for the warm growing season:
Growing your own food has many benefits. Not only does it help you establish a more organic space in your yard, it allows you and your family to eat nutritious foods that are natural and healthy.
But creating a thriving garden for fruits and vegetables requires more than just putting seeds in your soil and waiting for them to mature. In fact, much of the work involved in growing your own food happens upfront. For best results, you should have a plan to follow before planting a single seed.
Here’s what you need to know before you can create a healthy, fruitful garden:
One of the best ways to create an ecological garden is by planting more native plants. Planting native plants enhances and supports your local ecosystem which has more benefits than we can imagine. When selecting plants think about companion planting. Many native plants have evolved along side each other and grow more naturally together. The following are two great examples of companion planting:
Home owners are more aware of the beauty and ecological benefits of an edible garden, and some are hiring professionals solely for their help with adding a variety of edible trees, shrubs, and perennials to their landscape. Edible gardens can be used to perform many functions in the landscape while achieving design and practical goals. For example, to reduce erosion and out-compete weeds, creeping herbs can be used as ground covers.
Many people think to have an edible garden (a garden with fruit and vegetable plants), it has to be in a large, fenced in section of their backyard. This is not only false, but far from the truth.
Six high rise buildings over looking the George Washington Bridge and Manhattan Sky Line are home to former NYC residents who are "escaping city life". Fort Lee, NJ sits on the top of a cliff with a mountain-like climate, high winds and cold winters. My father-in-law was the landscape architect assigned to this community and was faced with the problem of finding a hardy, all season interest plant to put in the garden beds at the main entrance. Being the creative and innovative landscape architect he is, my father-in-law suggested a plant known for its hardiness and extended season. It has yellow, red, and orange foliage in the autumn, yellow-green to reddish stems for winter interest, urn-shaped white flowers in May, and a tasty blue fruit. What has all of that? A blueberry bush, the Vaccinium corymbosum.
His proposal was questioned numerous times-- a blueberry bush in the front of a multi-million dollar high rise complex, home to retired NYC residents who felt they were moving to suburbia by leaving the heart of Manhattan to only be 10 minutes outside the city with a panoramic view of the city skyline?!? Was he crazy? No, he was innovative and persistent. The highbush blueberry shrubs were eventually "okayed" and planted in front of two of the six buildings.
After a year or so, the lifelong city dwellers got to do something they never imagine, dreamed or even thought of possibly doing. Every morning, you would see these elderly urban dwellers go out their front door dressed in their designer robes, and pick fresh blueberries for their breakfast. As these women "foraged" for their food, they got to finally taste the fruits of gardening; something they never thought possible from their NYC life style.
