A Beginner's Guide to Organic Gardening

Gardening is hardly complex when you know what you’re doing, since all of us have planted a seed at one point or another throughout our lives and watched it grow and blossom or die due to lack of care. Creating a garden that produces fresh food and flowers each season may be more complicated than that, especially for those of us who never did any gardening growing up. The following guide will give you more information on the subject of planting and making use of available biomass around the garden so you can make for organic gardening as best as possible. When you are done with this you will have what it takes to take on basic gardening tasks with confidence:

• Making the bed

Roughly about three weeks before you think about planting, you should allow the soil to dry off so it won’t clump when you decide to do the planting itself. Take a fistful and sink a fork into the earth. Loosen it up a bit and add a half inch or so layer of compost. Rake the surface so you can ensure there are no weeds, dirt clumps or stones that could get in the way. Over the following three weeks you should pull off any weeds that show up. Raking and letting the soil settle for a few weeks will bring out weed seeds that lurked right beneath the surface.

• Digging a furrow

Depending on whether you’re looking for symmetry and order you can carve out a shallow trench using a hoe or a hand trowel. You don’t have to necessarily plant in rows, but you can organize the garden in a grid pattern instead, planting at the four corners of each square of the grid. You can of course choose to avoid organizing in patterns, just going for that natural look, but you will still need to dig shallow holes or furrows for the seeds.

• Irrigation

You should moisten but never soak the soil as you work on gardening. Watering before planting the seeds will protect them from getting washed up and out of the soil or drowned in water.

• Sowing the seeds

Spread the seeds in your trench or place two or three of them inside each of the planting holes you made previously. The seed packets will explain how far apart you need to plant each of them. If you plant them far too closely, you may be thinning them and that means you will have to eat the thinning.

• Covering with soil

You should bury the seeds only about as deep as their diameter goes. Sprinkle soil on top of the seeds and press them gently to ensure there is enough contact with the soil. A few seeds such as lettuce and dill will need light to sprout, so you will have to cover them sparingly compared to other seeds you can work with.

• Keeping the soil moist

Sprinkle some water on the seedbed whenever you see the surface get dry until your seeds have sprouted. This will help keep them growing as time goes by.

• Mulching

You should make sure your soil is covered with mulch at all times to prevent weed seeds from reaching the soil. Spread a thick layer of it over the soil, two or more inches deep and made of organic mulch such as dried grass clippings, shredded leaves and straw. This should be done each spring and you can replenish it throughout the growing season as you move forward. For an even better weed protection you can place sheets of newspaper or grocery bags made of craft paper or even cardboard to build armor for your soil. They will eventually decompose and you won’t have worry about weeds in the process. With that your gardening sessions will be much more productive in the long run.