When you first plant your new vegetable garden, it almost looks bare. The vegetable plants may be tiny still, or not even sprouted yet, and since you recently turned the soil and made the planting rows, there are also no weeds growing either.

For some people, just the fact that weeds create green in their garden is enough for them to allow the weeds to continue growing. Some weeds are even beautiful in their own rights too, and many gardeners are hard pressed to pull something out that looks pretty.

When you're growing vegetables in a garden though, particularly if you're growing the vegetables organically, letting weeds grow can create a large variety of problems.

The first problems weeds will create for you is watering. Since most weeds consume large amounts of water, they'll often steal the water from your vegetables, and this will stunt the growth of your vegetable plants and sometimes even make them not bear anything for harvesting as well.

Another big problem weeds create in a vegetable garden is nutrients. Like the water, weeds will steal essential nutrients, vitamins, and minerals from the soil that your vegetables need to grow healthy and strong. And if the weeds are stealing it all, there may not be enough left for your vegetables to grow well, if at all.

Last but not least, weeds also create massive pest control problems. When weeds crop up in the vegetable garden - especially if there are lots of them growing - they will attract a wide variety of pests and bugs into your vegetable garden. And those bugs and pests will start munching happily away on the stalks, leaves, and stems of your vegetable plants. Some of them will even start eating into the growing vegetables themselves, ruining them for your family's eating enjoyment.

Now, the reasons above are the exact reasons you create a vegetable garden with rows of mounded soil.

By creating mounds of soil which the vegetables grow on, you're able to let the water reach their roots much faster. Because when you start watering your vegetable garden, the water will naturally flow into and fill up the lower lying areas first. If you watch this process while watering your garden, you'll see that the water starts seeping into the mounded soil at the sides, underneath the top of your vegetable plants. In other words: Where the roots are.

The other benefit of planting your vegetables in rows of this sort though, is easy weed control. If you space your vegetable growing mounds far enough apart, you're able to walk through every few days with a simple garden hoe, and scrape out any weeds which might be starting to crop up in the lower lying areas.

This makes weeding the vegetable garden a fairly quick and simple process, as long as you make sure to pull or hoe the weeds regularly. Once a week minimum, but if you have a few minutes, do a quick pass with your hoe a few times each week to keep the weeds from invading your garden.

Tags: Vegetable Garden

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: Natural Fertilizers, Alfalfa, Plant Foods, Organic Gardening

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