Having decided to start your garden, you undoubtedly have many questions. You may need some guidance regarding starting a garden at your home. There are nine solid gardening tips for beginners that will likely prove helpful to you.
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Good Soil And Proper Drainage
Two primary elements of starting and sustaining a healthy garden are good soil and proper drainage. The surest way to create and then maintain appropriate soil in your garden is to compost.
Composting need not be a time-consuming or challenging task. Indeed, you can create compost with everyday things discarded from the kitchen. These include food waste, especially eggshells, coffee grounds, and apple cores.
Proper drainage is also essential. It would help to ensure that water does not pool in your garden and that excess drains away quickly and swiftly. Heavy rain that overwhelms a yard can cause permanent damage to the plants.
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Mind The Location
Vegetables of different types require different exposure to the sun. Therefore, you need to pay attention to the sun exposure where you intend to garden, especially if you are considering the specific requirements of the California Planting Zone. You need to select plants that will thrive in such a location. Some people elect to have more than one garden plot. By taking this course, they can grow vegetables and other plants with differing sun exposure needs.
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Proper Timing
Many people plant all vegetables and other items at the same time. The reality is that different vegetables have different growing terms and thrive under different temperatures. Therefore, you must follow the planting protocols for each vegetable or plant to add to your garden. You need to access zone-specific planting information for everything you want to include in your garden based on where you reside.
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Beginning Plants
Some plants, including vegetables, are more challenging to cultivate than others. Therefore, when you make your first foray into gardening, select plants that are easier to develop. Vegetables that are easier to grow include tomatoes, peppers, onions, chard, basil, and bush beans. Flowers that are easier to maintain include sunflowers, dahlia’s, foxglove, roses, and petunias.
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Appropriately Water
One of the biggest challenges for a new gardener is watering appropriately. Time and again, a new gardener can be found watering too much or not enough. Finding a happy medium can prove to be a challenge for a novice, but it is not impossible.
A relatively decent overall rule of thumb is an inch of water a week — but spread out over a week. Different plants have different water requirements. The amount of water depends significantly on your climate, with more water needed in drier climates due to a faster evaporation rate. You need to keep track of rainfall when determining how much you need to water your garden.
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Go Organic
Organic is an advisable way to go for a home garden. You can utilize organic practices for all aspects of your garden. These include soil preparation (compost!), fertilizing, and pest control. Garden plants fed or treated with chemicals can become weak and prone to disease, which ultimately defeats at least some of the purposes behind using chemicals in the first instance.
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Trimming And Pruning
You do want your garden to grow. However, you want that growth to be orderly and done healthily. This necessitates trimming and pruning for nearly any type of garden plant, vegetable, or flower. In some cases, pruning may require only the regular removal of dead and dying leaves. On the other hand, some plants require more expansive trimming throughout the season.
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Jump Start Your Garden
Plant seeds indoors before the beginning of the actual gardening season. In this way, you can plant healthy seedlings in your garden when the time is right to begin cultivating outdoors. Virtually any type of seed plant can be germinated and initially grown indoors for a later transplant to the garden.
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Just Start
Finally, one of the biggest problems associated with starting a garden is that many people never start. They fret about a myriad of things and never buckle down and begin the process of gardening.
You do not need to cultivate some significant garden as a beginner. Instead, start small. Consider a container garden near your back door. This provides you with an easy-to-manage, readily accessible garden that will not overwhelm you in the process.
