Now that you’ve decided to start a vegetable garden to reap the rewards of growing your own food supply, it’s important to know a few basic tips for maintaining a vegetable garden. While vegetables don’t require a lot of effort to maintain, they do have some needs. Today I’m going to show you how to maintain a vegetable garden so that you can harvest a large number of veggies this gardening season.
Use Organic Matter
Vegetables thrive best in a highly food rich soil. You can use your natural compost or other organic matter in the soil prior to planting the vegetable seeds or transplanting your vegetables from indoors to outside. This organic matter will ensure your vegetables grow to their maximum potential and are healthier for the entire family to consume.
Adequate Water
Provide adequate soil moisture every day for proper vegetable growth. The most crucial times when you’ll need to supply more water via a watering can or garden hose is after your initial planting of the vegetables and during times of low rain. Vegetables need to have wet soil to sustain a high growth potential.
Weed the Garden
You’ll need to make sure that you keep weeds down in your vegetable garden. Weeds will sneak in, no matter how hard you try to keep them away. Be sure to check on your vegetable garden daily for any weeds, insects or creatures that may have tried to steal your harvest. Grab your garden tool kit to get a jump on all of those pesky weeds. Add 2-4” of organic mulch to your soil as a toper to help keep weeds to a minimum as well.
Harvest When Ready
Be sure to harvest your vegetables as they get large enough to pick. This will allow room for new vegetables to grow and you’ll reap a large harvest if you maintain your vegetable garden by harvesting the ripe veggies as they appear. You will need need a garden harvester tote when you gather your goodies! This is also something fun to have the kids do if you have kids. Hand the kids a basket and have them harvest vegetables daily.
Prune and Thin
Be sure that the vegetable plants like tomatoes are pruned on a regular basis. This means to remove the extra growth, bad vegetables that simply didn’t ripen fully and thin out the crop if you find that the vegetables are growing too closely together or getting a little out of control. You’ll need to make sure all vegetable plants have their own space for full growth.
Maintaining a vegetable garden may sound intimidating at first, but in all honesty, it’s much easier to maintain than a flower or fruit garden. Vegetables do rather well simply by following the few maintenance tips I shared with you all today.
In His Grace,
Callie
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