The NON-professional beginners guide to starting your own organic vegetable garden

I've gotten a lot of questions on how we went about the process of growing our own organic vegetables, after having mentioned our garden in a post called 'Why healthy and conscious eating is so important to us'. People seemed to be especially interested in how to start a garden, how to maintain it and whether or not it would be a lot of work to do so. First off, I'd like to say that neither Adrian nor myself have a lot of experience when it comes to gardening and growing stuff. Last year was our first attempt at growing our own food and, surprisingly, it went better than expected. Despite having had a very short and wet season, we managed to harvest quite a bit of produce and were more than happy with the overall experience. If you're looking for tips and information from seasoned and professional organic farmers, then this post is probably not for you. If you're like us - busy with day jobs and work around the homestead and exhausted, trying to raise two children under 3 - and want to grow your own organic vegetables with very little to no effort at all, I'll happily share what we - new and inexperienced homesteaders and hobby backyard farmers - did to get started and some of the mistakes we've made:

• Order or buy organic heirloom seeds: Don't just buy regular seeds at the store and think it will give you healthy veggies because you're not using pesticides. If the seeds you've purchased are not organic to begin with, the pesticides are already in them and will also be in your veggies, once they're ready to harvest.   

• Start your seeds indoors: We have started our seeds indoors last winter, but I have to admit that it was a major pain for us. We live in a tiny cottage with two little ones that love to dig in the dirt whenever you're not looking and simply don't know where to keep the plants, until they're big enough to be transplanted. We were constantly moving them from one place to the next. We also lost quite a few plants, due to little fingers and during the transplanting process and had to start from scratch outside anyways. We're just going to plant straight into the outside garden (until we find a place indoors to start the seedlings properly) and see what happens. As I said, we did manage to harvest quite a lot of veggies, despite having started straight in the outside garden; However, If you do have the space and want to harvest more and earlier in the season, I do recommend starting indoors. Here's a link that tells you exactly how to go about it: http://www.reneesgarden.com/articles/start_seeds.html

 

• Choose the right spot: Our property is very wet, since it is located right next to a creek and a big part of it is marsh land. So we really had to pick the right spot for our garden. Pick a spot that gets sun and lots of it (minimum of 6 hours a day) and make sure it is not exposed to high winds. Don't pick a spot that doesn't have proper drainage. You don't want puddles just sitting in your garden for days on end. Just watch your land after a heavy rainfall to find out which areas dry faster and which areas are always kind of muddy and wet. If your soil can't get rid of excess water, it will damage and eventually kill your plants. 

• Build a raised bed: This is really not hard to do, and your veggies will grow a lot better than in a yard-level garden, because it gives the roots more room to grow. We basically just screwed four boards together and filled it with soil.  

• Enrich your soil: Instead of buying soil and fertilizers at the store, we simply made our own. A friend of ours provided us with a lot of horse manure, which we then mixed with leaves, grass clippings and soil from our yard. Our plants did really well, so I guess they liked it. You can, of course, use your own compost as well. We don't really have that option, since we pretty well feed all our kitchen scraps to our chickens. This year we'll get another load of horse manure and mix it with our own chicken manure, plus leaves and grass clippings. Hopefully it will give us even better results.

• Start small and pick only a few easy to grow veggies for your first year: Don't start with two or three gardens and plant more veggies than you'll ever be able to eat. Start with one garden and plant only as much as you need to provide for your family. See how you'll do and how much you're harvesting and get a feel for it before expanding. You don't want to overdue it and ruin your backyard farm experience, simply because you took off more than you could chew. Here's a list of easy to grow veggies: Beets, Garlic, Carrots, Kale, Beans, Broccoli, Peas, Potatoes, Lettuce, Peppers, Radishes, Summer squash, Zucchini, Tomatoes, Winter squash and Herbs. I plant my herbs in separate planters because I like to have them close to the house. 

• Plan you're layout: Since we didn't really know what we were doing when we planted our first garden and didn't do a lot of research either (again, because we have two little ones and after they're in bed, we're usually too tired to do research and we don't really want to either. Learning by doing is what works best for us) we kind of planted everything and just stood back and watched the magic happen, and magical things did happen in some areas of our garden. In others... not so much. Since we hadn't grown veggies before, we didn't really know what some of the plants would look like and how big the plants would grow. The tomato plants, snap peas, cucumbers, beans and zucchini grew like crazy and quickly took away the space and sunlight other plants - like lettuce and beets - needed to grow and survive. We planted our veggies too close together and didn't think about the layout enough before planting. We also didn't know that these plants would grow a lot better vertically. Here's a link with some tips on how to best grow these types of vegetables: http://www.vegetable-gardening-with-lorraine.com/vertical-vegetable-gardening.html

• Fence it: When our plants first started growing and they were only tiny, fragile little things, we kept discovering uprooted plants just lying in the dirt. I was quick to blame it on the coons around here, since they're usually the ones getting into our garbage and make a huge mess. Turns out it was our own chickens getting in there and pecking at the plants. We bought a few poles and some chicken wire, fenced it in and haven't had any problems since. 

• Control those bugs and hungry insects: There is nothing more frustrating than watching your plants and vegetables grow and thrive, just to discover that bugs and insects are feasting on them and ruin your crop. But the last thing you want to do is use chemicals on your organic garden. Here's a link for some organic pesticides that won't harm your plants or produce: http://homeguides.sfgate.com/homemade-organic-pesticide-vegetables-45069.html 

• Care and maintenance: All we really did to our garden was water it every evening (unless it rained that day), weed it occasionally, harvest the produce as soon as it was ready, and planted new seeds to replace the ones we pulled out and don't regrow on their own - like carrots, beets and radishes. It was really rather easy. I'm sure we could've had a better crop and more produce with some more intense care but for now, this is what we did and it works for us. We are planning on expanding this year and build a second garden bed. I'll let you know how this years crop turns out.  

I'll finish this post with this neat link about 16 kitchen scraps you can regrow time and time again. Definitely going to try some of those this year:   

http://www.goodshomedesign.com/16-kitchen-scraps-that-you-can-re-grow/

Happy growing everyone. May this season turn out better than the last. I hope this post was helpful, answered some of your questions and maybe even inspired one or two people to start growing their own vegetables. If this year is going to be your first attempt at gardening, let me know how it went. If you've got further questions or even tips or helpful information on the subject, don't hesitate to comment or email me. If you liked this post, then don't forget to subscribe so you won't miss the next one. Good luck!