Organic gardening is the process of growing plants, flowers, vines, trees, bushes, shrubs, fruits, vegetables and anything else you can think of in a completely natural way. In other words: No pesticides, chemicals or harmful substances are used in the entire gardening process. Organic gardening is most used for fruit, vegetable, and herb gardening, because people don't want to have pesticides and chemicals on the foods they eat.

Organic gardening starts with the preparation of your soil. Since you won't be using chemical fertilizers in an organic garden, you'll need to make sure you're soil is as healthy as it can be, so that it can provide all the nutrition your garden plants will need as they grow. Preparing organic garden soil takes a little time and effort, but it's really worth it in the end.

You can create organic garden soil by mixing in healthy rich compost material. Some organic gardeners prefer to create their own compost using special bins or containers. In some places though, you're able to buy organic compost material from other gardeners or garden centers. It's fairly easy to get a start on creating compost though, even without using a special composting bin.

All you need to do is add a few things to your garden bed soil, and let those additives sit for several weeks before you plant. Everything you add to the garden soil should be natural though, because the nutrients are created as these organic items decompose.

First you need to loosen and turn the soil in your garden bed. Then add some organic materials to the bed such as used coffee or tea grounds, sawdust, shredded newspaper, fireplace ashes, or fruit and vegetable matter from your kitchen. You can add one or more of these items at once, but you don't have to add all of them if you don't have them. The smaller you make the material before adding it to the garden bed though, the faster it will turn to compost for you. So if you're using kitchen scraps for instance, try chopping or grating them into smaller bits before tossing them into the garden bed.

After adding the organic material to your garden bed, turn the soil some more so those new items are mixed in and covered decently. Then about two to three times each week, go outside and water the bed, then stir it around a bit again. After about three to four weeks, your bed should be ready to start putting plants or seeds in.

If you prepare your organic garden area in the fall though, before the first hard frost or freeze hits, the soil will be much richer and more ready for planting in the spring.

Tags: Organic Gardening

Fertilizing an organic garden is easier than most people think. Just as you can improve the flavor of vegetables by planting certain plants together, and you can help repel common pests, insects and diseases by planting certain plants together, you can also fertilize your garden naturally using specific plants too.

One of the best fertilizers you can use in a garden of course, is compost. And compost is made with all natural, organic materials such as grass clippings, shredded leaves, sawdust, fireplace ash, and even shredded newspapers. You can also toss in fruit and vegetable matter from the kitchen to help your compost become even more rich and fertile for use in any area of your garden.

Besides compost though, you can actually just put certain plants into your garden area to help fertilize the soil, and provide additional nutrients your plants need.

Alfalfa for instance, is a wonderful hardy plant which can survive in almost any conditions, yet it's very high in a large number of vitamins and minerals that are beneficial to your soil in general. Alfalfa will provide your soil with nitrogen, iron, magnesium, phosphorous, and potassium for instance, plus it's long strong roots will help break up hard, rocky, clay like soil too.

German Chamomile is an annual growing herb which will reseed itself each year if you leave some of the flowers unpicked each season. This herb helps contribute calcium, potassium, and sulfer to your soil. It's also excellent for improving the taste of cucumbers, cabbage, and onions. A perennial version is the Roman chamomile, and it will grow in almost any kind of soil with full sunlight.

Clover is an excellent addition to any garden. It has long been considered a source of "green manure" and can be a companion plant to almost anything. In fact, it's particularly useful for increasing the soil fertility of grapes. Clover will attract many beneficial insects to your garden too.

Comfrey is another herb which has wonderful medicinal healing properties, plus it provides your garden soil with calcium, potassium, and phosphorous. This herb likes to grow in moist areas.

Kelp is a natural seaweed which works wonderfully both as a fertilizer and a pest repellant. You can put a natural kelp supplement pill into the soil near any plants to help them grow more beautifully, and you can even drop one into a flower vase to help your cut flowers live longer. Put kelp into a tea mixture for spraying, and it feeds the plants through their leaves while also repelling a variety of common garden pests and bugs too.

Tags: Alfalfa, Organic Gardening, Natural Fertilizers, Plant Foods

Many new gardeners don't often understand how important it is to use mulch around the base of their flowers, plants, shrubs and trees. It doesn't matter what kind of gardening you're doing though: flower garden, vegetable gardening, container gardening, or planting bushes and trees, putting mulch around your garden beds will help you in a number of ways.

1. Mulching your garden plants and flowers will help you conserve water. By covering the ground around your bushes, flowers, trees and other garden spots, you're able to help protect your plants from the strong, hot sunlight of summertime, and this helps keep the soil around them moist for longer periods of time.

2. Weed control. Putting mulch around your plants and flower beds also helps prevent weeds from growing and invading your flower beds. Since mulch serves to keep the sun from reaching the soil around the base of your flowers, weeds will have a much more difficult time growing there. And the few hardy ones that do sprout up will be much easier to see and remove.

3. Cold protection. Mulch is extremly important and useful in areas which freeze each winter season. It's particularly important to place a thick layer of mulch around the base of tropical plants when you live in an area that freezes each winter. If you have a thick enough layer of mulch, you can often prevent your tropical plants from freezing and dying due to the cold weather.

Many types of mulch also just add another layer of beauty and sophistication to your garden beds too.

There are a wide variety of materials which can be used for mulching your garden. An excellent organic material is wood chips, shavings, or bark. Since wood is an organic material, it will slowly break down and be mixed into your garden soil, providing more vitamins and nutrients for future years.

Grass clippings or dried leaves which fall from your trees each fall are also excellent natural materials to use for mulching your plants and flowers, as is straw and hay. Since these are also organic materials, they will contribute to the overall richness and fertility of your soil as they breakdown too.

Some people prefer to use mulch materials which will last for many more years at a time though, and some popular ones include plastic, and rubber material made from recycled tires. These often come in the form of circular rings for placing under trees and bushes easily.

Rocks and pebbles can act as a mulch too though, because covering the bare soil around your flowers and plants with pebbles or rocks serves the same purpose: Retaining moisture and preventing weed growth. Traditionally though, most mulch was designed to both protect the plants and flowers while feeding and enriching the soil too.

Tags: Garden mulch, Gardening