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A home garden gives you beautiful flowers and delicious plants for your dining table. This also helps reduce the number of trips you have to make to the grocery store. Gardening also gives you a sense of accomplishment and teaches kids life skills.
You can start your first garden off right with the proper know-how and tools. In this article, we’ll provide easy-to-follow tips for creating a garden from scratch.
Choose the Best Plants
Selecting the right plants for your home garden is key to creating a garden that will have the best chance of survival. The ideal plants will also require less maintenance and establish themselves faster.
It would help if you chose plants compatible with the soil types in your home and how much room you have. Other factors to consider when selecting the plants are your family size, the reason for gardening, local climate conditions, and personal preferences.
Some of the most common home plants are:
- Vegetable garden: Carrots, green onions or scallions, herbs, hot peppers, leafy salad greens, microgreens, potatoes, radishes, and tomatoes.
- Flower garden: Marigolds, begonias, sunflowers, lavenders, roses, chrysanthemums, coneflowers, and tulips.
Get the Essential Garden Tools
It would be best if you had the right tools to start a garden from scratch.
- Trowel: Used for mixing fertilizer, removing weeds, digging, and moving soil.
- Spade: Used for digging holes, dividing and transplanting plants, removing sod, and turning the soil.
- Hoe: Used to harvest root crops, clear soil, remove weeds, and shape soil.
- Fork: Used for turning, lifting, and loosening sandy or loamy soil.
- Shovel: Used to remove debris or dirt, make shallow trenches, and transplant and dig soil.
- Rake: Used for leveling, gathering, scraping, and scooping leaves, mulch, or soil.
- Gardening gloves: Used for protecting hands from angular or sharp tools, chemicals, thorns, and soil.
Pick the Best Location
A space with some sun is usually the best spot: deck, walkway, driveway, mailbox, fence, and windowsill. You should pick a location where the soil is well-drained, level, rich, and loose. It will also help if the chosen location is not near children’s or pet’s play areas.
A garden doesn’t have to be huge, and a plot of around 16-by-10 feet is ideal for a beginner garden. Moreover, you will water plants more often and pull more weeds if you position the flower garden near your home. Therefore, the spaces in your yard that you frequent often are prime candidates for starting a flower garden.
The ideal location should have access to a consistent and clean water source. It is also good to avoid areas under fences and walls because they tend to be too dry. Similarly, growing plants under overhanging trees is a bad idea since the trees will soak up rain and lower the amount of water that reaches your plants.
Select the Garden Layout
When starting a vegetable garden, you can choose either intensive cropping or row cropping. Intensive cropping refers to spacing crops closely, typically two or three rows of plants in a single bed. On the other hand, row cropping involves planting one row of plants in a single bed.
Intensive cropping is advantageous because it requires less equipment, space, and other requirements. It also makes it easier to control and monitor your home garden’s progress. However, intensive farming can produce contaminated food products since it utilizes numerous agrochemicals.
Row cropping ensures proper spacing and is easier to establish. In addition, it requires less work on the soil and is better at controlling stubble. However, row cropping takes up a lot of space and restricts the number of plantings.
Consider Indoor Farming
You can grow crops or plants stacked one above another, entirely indoors. These gardens are referred to as vertical farms or indoor farms, and their primary goal is to maximize crop output in a limited space. Plants from indoor gardens are cultivated in three dimensions and are independent of external weather conditions.
An indoor garden requires controlling carbon dioxide, water, temperature, and light levels. You also need to get a growing media that promotes good nutrient retention, drainage, and air porosity. Augmenting natural sunlight with metal reflectors and artificial lighting is also something you may consider.
Know the Fertilizer to Use
Your choice of fertilizer will depend on your plant’s nutritional requirements and the type of soil in your garden. The main types of fertilizers are:
- Organic fertilizers include rock phosphate, granite dust, cottonseed meal, fish emulsion, blood meal, and animal and green manure.
- Nitrogen fertilizers include urea, ammonium nitrate, nitric acid, and synthetic ammonia.
- Phosphate fertilizers include Monoammonium Phosphate (MAP) and Diammonium Phosphate (DAP).
- Potassium fertilizers include potassium sulfate, sulfate potash magnesia, potassium nitrate, and potassium sulfate.
Final Thoughts
A home garden can provide beautiful flowers to decorate your home and nutritious plants for your dinner table. Gardening is also an excellent way to exercise and boost your mood. If you don’t want to tackle this project alone, reach out to a professional landscaper for help.