Organic Vegetable Gardening For the Best You've Ever Tasted

Organic vegetable gardening nourishes both body and soul with mouth-watering taste and the highest possible nutrition. It satisfies a deeply ingrained desire to provide well for my family and friends.

I love growing vegetables in my garden. Give me humus rich dirt to stick my hands into and I am a child again. The smell and touch never fails to give me peace and relieve stress.

It feels good!

Co-operating with nature by growing a vegetable garden without chemical pesticides or eco-system-destroying fertilizers makes sense.

After preserving all we can possibly use, there is almost always an abundance to share with friends or take to the local food pantry.

Planning and Growing Vegetables

• Location
• Size
• Time

Where are you going to plant those luscious organic vegetables?

Almost every vegetable needs at least six hours of direct sunlight. There are exceptions. Lettuce and parsley like dappled shade. But six hours is the absolute minimum. Full exposure all day is the best for your organic vegetable garden.

I carefully prepared the soil, tilling in cow compost from a local dairy, treating it with liquid horticulture molasses and beneficial nematodes.

It was such a delight and satisfying experience, I didn't want the fun to end. I planted a fall garden of salad greens and cool weather root plants.

A picture, four to six weeks later, of my first attempt at organic vegetable gardening is pictured on our home page.

Plant away from tree roots, especially shallow rooted trees like elms, maples, poplars, and willows. Often you can grow vegetables under or near fruit trees. In fact planting cucumbers or squash under fruit trees discourages raccoons and deer. Discourages is the operative word. It doesn’t eliminate the problem.

I will never again plant under pecans. Their leaves and droppings give off a chemical that inhibits growth of other plants. Even though they put down a deep tap root, their massive roots occupy any ground where water is available. I’ve made that mistake!

With all things considered, it is best to avoid any place with tree roots likely to sap the nutrients and water supply. When it can’t be avoided, just know you will need to supply more compost and water when growing vegetables.

Or create a beautiful container garden in that space.

If your available space slopes slightly, celebrate!

Plant your rows with the slope, but only if the slope is mild. Water by digging trenches beside your plants, letting the water flow slowly and naturally. Create an earth berm or dam at the end of the row.

Common wisdom says, when growing vegetables, plant the taller ones, such as corn, on the northern side of your garden to prevent shading the other plants. Research shows that vegetables given more light have higher vitamin C content.

It just doesn’t always work. Year by year as you are growing vegetables organically, you need to rotate your crops to ensure less pest problems and better health for your soil A three-year crop rotation plan is best. I’ve tried several plans.

For instance, you will often read that planting beans beside or even interspersed between corn helps give nitrogen to the corn. In reality, the beans don't release all the nitrogen they fix in those little nodes on their roots until they die and are turned under to decay in the soil of your organic vegetable garden.

The plants grown the next season after the beans or peas really benefit from the nitrogen-fixing of the legumes.

I like thinking my Plants ‘like’ each other. Organic vegetable gardening is almost like assigning seats at a dinner party. There are a lot of factors to consider.

In the southwest, where the summers are sunny, hot and dry, I often plant mammoth sunflowers on the western side of the cucumbers and squash to give them some relief from the harsh afternoon sun.

Squash are worth growing just for the beauty of their leaves. It’s disheartening to walk out into the garden around four in the afternoon and see them wilting sadly.

A little shade is welcome.

Squash are beautiful and lush. In the afternoon sun in the southwest region, they wilt easily without some shade. By planting them east of fruit trees, they benefit from shade during the most brutal part of the day.

Growing Vegetables - How many is Enough?

Seed catalogs started arriving in December last year. The more I look through them, the more I want, and the more I plan. In the cool of winter, insanity takes over. I believe I’m super human and I can manage a huge organic vegetable garden.

The better plan for growing vegetables is, estimate how much of each your family can use. Then plant accordingly. See the planting chart that tells spacing and expected plant yield.

If you want to plant more than you have room to grow by traditional means, you might look at square foot gardening, companion gardening, inter-cropping or succession planting. Which vegetables have a short growing season? Can you plant a later variety in the same space?

How Much Time Can You Spend?

• Growing vegetables in a small garden
• Container garden
• Square-foot garden
• Raised bed garden with automatic watering system

Both the square foot and container garden require almost no weeding.

The other real consideration is time to process the bountiful harvest. Summer is full of activities. Do you only want what you can eat fresh? Do you have the time to freeze, or can, or dry your beautiful vegetables?

Home-grown vegetables taste so good because they are rich with just-picked nutrition. Organic vegetable gardening does give you more vitamins, minerals, and all kinds of trace nutrients. But the reality is even vegetables grown in optimum conditions lose vitamins quickly. Others, like corn, lose sweetness. The sooner you eat or process your vegetables the more nutrients you keep.

I know from experience, if you plant a larger organic vegetable garden than you can manage, there has to be some compromise.

• You may not keep your garden as picture-perfect weed-free as you’d like. Mulching helps.

• Or you may not have time to respond to the problems you see and you will lose plants or vegetables. Double-Ouch!!

Organic vegetable gardening should relieve the stress in your life, not add to it.

Here is a great Website I invite you to visit to learn more about growing vegetables especially if you are a beginner gardener.

Enjoy!

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