Beginner Gardening Tips

If you’re just venturing into the world of gardening, please feel free to drop all your worries here. I’ve got a couple tips for you that will save yourself some hassle later.

First–Start small. I’ll be the first to confess that our first gardening attempt failed mostly because I had no idea what I was doing. I relied on a popular brand name fertilizer to grow our tomatoes–BIG mistake. I think the best thing you can do the first time around is just use water and soil. Don’t get so confused with fertilizing your plants that you over do it.

Find a set up that works for you. We actually have a pretty large garden area outside. However, we also have a nice sized greenhouse addition that is full enclosed and right off my dining room.We
liked having our plants where we would constantly see them because if they’re always in sight then chances are we will do more to care for them and will notice slight changes before you get to a point of potentially killing the plant.

For those of you who might be interested, in the photo, the two closest plants are zucchini, then two containers of green beans, and two containers of tomatoes.

Something we did was hang a fan from the ceiling and point it at the plants? Why? Well, when you don’t have the natural bugs and bees stimulating the plants and transferring pollen and such you plants can start to suffer. The fan helps stimulate the plant and to some degree spreads pollen. The soft movement of the air will actually result in a stronger plant because it has grown with that constant soft resistance. Our fan is actually just t the top left of the above photos. It hangs right by the corner of the sliding glass door that leads to my dining room and it reaches all the plants this way.

Then we have a table (that most of them were all on at one point when the plants were smaller). We needed to keep the plants out of Natalia’s reach but now that we’ve had to space them out we just store stuff under the table like her little outdoor toys. Up here from the right, we’ve got watermelon, peppermint, cucumbers, basil, green beans, oregano, and cilantro. And the little bowl is my wheat grass seed that I set out there to germinate. I’ll be putting it in soil tomorrow to start growing our next batch of wheat grass. =)

Please don’t use pesticides on your plants. =(

Also, note that when trying to recycle and be frugal, anything can become a container for gardening. If you look on the step you’ll see a little plastic container that my fresh spinach came in. Perfect for planting some new spinach in!