How To Start Your First Garden
Gardening can make a great hobby that can help you save money while feeding your family whole foods and even help endangered pollinators like bees and hummingbirds. Starting my first garden was exciting and it was also… a flop. I will be honest I wasn’t born with a green thumb. It took hard work, lots of reading, and countless dead plants to learn how to garden. The end result was worth the effort.
Decide what to grow in your first garden
Make a list of your favorite foods then do some research on how to grow each one. Start your first garden with just a few plants that are fairly easy to grow. By starting your first garden small with easy to grow plants that you will find rewarding when it is time to harvest you make it easy to stick to gardening and make the learning curve of your first garden a little easier.
Vegetable Gardening for Benningers is a great book to start with when looking for information on growing your favorite foods.
Growing salad greens like baby spinach is easy and can have a quick yet rewarding turnaround when you start harvesting baby spinach in just a few weeks. This cool-weather hardy option can start growing early in the season and handle cooler nights without much fuss. Many salad greens can even be grown in the shade or hidden in your front yard flowerbeds.
Green beans are one of the easiest to grow plants that have a quick and high return for the work. Within a few weeks, you will be harvesting your first green beans and relishing in the rewards for your hard work
Tomatoes and papers are some of the most popular beginner vegetables because they give off such a bountiful harvest for your hard work. Growing tomatoes and papers in your first garden allows you to use your first year’s harvest in your home kitchen and even make your own garden fresh salsa.
If you have the space for vining plans zucchini is one of the easiest to grow and most rewarding plants for your first garden. Zucchini is hard to kill and can make a great pasta substitute or tasty zucchini muffins.
How to plant your first garden
Choose a location for your garden that helps keep it in the sun so your plants can produce the most for your hard work. While some salad greens can thrive in the shade plants like tomatoes and peppers have to have plenty of sun. if growing climbing plants like green beans you will need a trellis or to plant them somewhere they can climb like along a fence.
To help your first garden grow you want to provide plenty of quality soil. Check out these simple tips to build the best garden soil to get started and consider starting composting at home.
Mulch is your friend. When it comes to helping protect your garden from weeds as well as helping to keep your garden well-watered to help your garden survive the hot summer days.
Keeping your garden watered is a must. Some plants like tomatoes need more water than others if they’re going to thrive. Try using deep watering to train your plants into being more drought resistant or setting up an automated watering system so your garden can survive even if you forget to water it. This is pretty much the only way I can have a garden that does well. I tend to forget to water myself as well.
