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

Planting a home vegetable garden is a wonderful way to provide your family with fresh healthy produce throughout the year. Even though the vegetables in your garden will be ripe for just a short period of time during the year, you can take the extras and put them into your freezer, or can them up in jars to put into the pantry, and both will be useable by your family throughout most of the entire year.

Planting your own vegetable garden also allows you to know more about how healthy or dangerous the foods you're eating are. Store bought produce for instance, is often grown on farms which use chemical fertilizers and poisonous pest control methods. Plants absorb whatever is put onto them or into their soil as they're growing, so if you're eating produce which has had chemicals and toxins used on it, those chemicals are also in the plant itself, and are being fed to your body.

When you grow your own vegetables in a home garden though, you can choose to use organic growing methods which are much safer for both the environment, you, and your family.

Growing a vegetable garden starts with planning. You'll need to decide first what vegetables you plan to grow in your garden. If this is the first time you're growing a vegetable garden, try to start small so you can get a feel for how much of each thing is needed as you become more experienced. A nice way to get started with your first vegetable garden is to select three to five of your families favorite vegetables, and plant just those the first season.

Next you'll need to decide where you'll place your vegetable garden. You'll need both plenty of space and plenty of sunlight to grow vegetables. Vegetables need at least five to six hours of full sunlight each day, so figure out where in your yard that much sun is available, then see if there is enough room there for the number of vegetables you intend to grow. If your vegetable garden will be small, you can probably choose a planting location which is only about three to four feet square.

Once you have your location chosen, it's now time to prepare the soil for your vegetable garden. You can create raised garden beds to plant your vegetables in if you'd like, and this will make preparation and care easier. If you're planting in the ground though, you'll need to turn the soil, remove all weeds, roots and large rocks, then mix some healthy compost into the soil so your vegetables will have the nutrition they need while growing.

After preparing the soil, you'll need to make planting rows, or long mounds of soil, to plant your vegetables in. These rows should run east to west so they'll get the best sun and water exposure. When you start planting seeds or starter plants, be sure to put those that will grow the tallest at the north side of your lot, so they won't shade the smaller plants too much during the day. The smallest plants should go on the south side of your vegetable garden plot, and progressively taller ones should be planted across.

Tags: Peppers, Tomatoes, Vegetable Gardening

When you decide to try your hand at organic gardening, one of the most frustrating parts of the entire process is trying to control pests, disesases, and other miscellaneous problems that come up with any form of gardening. Thankfully though, there are natural techniques which can be used to solve many of these common gardening problems, and one of those techniques is known as companion planting.

Companion planting is the process of planting specific flowers, herbs, and vegetables together in a way that either enhances the taste of the vegetables, and/or serves to help naturally control common pest and bug related problems in the garden.

Companion planting is important and useful for natural garden pest control, but it's also very important in vegetable gardening too. When you decide to plant two or more vegetable plants close together in your garden, you could end up with either a very bad tasting vegetable, or an extremely good one. And how your vegetables taste is dependant upon which companion plants you chose to plant together.

If for instance, you plant basil close to your tomatoes, or put them together into the same container garden, you can enhance the flavor of the tomatoes - particularly when using them to make home made sauces such as spaghetti sauce.

Chives is another excellent companion plant for tomatoes as well as carrots. Not only will the flavor improve, the growth of these plants will too. Chives also helps to keep aphids away from tomatoes, and they're thought to help keep carrot rust flys away too.

Chives can even help prevent black spot on roses. They need to be planted near the roses for two or three years before they begin to help prevent this common disease though.

Planting cabbage with celery, dill, onions or potatoes will benefit all these plants, but trying to plant cabbage too close to tomatoes or strawberries may cause problems with both growth and production.

Marigolds, also known as Calendula, are a very common flower to use for repelling pests around your home and garden. These little flowers have been used for this very purpose for centuries. You can scatter them throughout your yard and garden to help repel a variety of common bugs and pests. You need to plant marigolds which have a scent though, or else they won't work to repel the bugs. Some people don't like the scent of marigold flowers either though, so if you've never smelled them yourself, you may want to before planting too many.

Tags: Marigolds, Organic Gardening, Companion Plants