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: Tomatoes, Vegetable Gardening, Peppers

Creating a container garden is a wonderful way to make use of spare patio, deck or balcony space. It's also an excellent way to have a beautiful garden even when you live in a home which has no outdoor yard or garden space too. Many people who live in an apartment in the city for instance, create container gardens on their balcony or patio area, and some even create them using window boxes which are attached to the outside of the building just under their windows.

Container gardens are fun to create for indoor areas too, using a wide variety of plants and flowers that will spruce up your home. In fact, almost any plant or flower can be grown in a container. Plants which grow quite large will need larger containers of course though, and if you start bushes, shrubs or trees in a container you'll eventually need to transplant them outside in the ground unless they are miniature varieties.

Some of the most popular types of container gardens include: Herb gardens in the kitchen or morning room; Annual or perennial gardens on the patio or inside the home; Vegetable gardens on the patio, balcony or deck; And even specialty gardens such as container salad gardens.

Most people have their first experience with container gardens when they buy a beautiful, lush arrangement of flowers or greenery at the store. These containers are usually filled to the brim with new flower blooms, or trailing vines that cascade over the side of the container.

Unfortunately a lot of people find themselves with dead plants just a few weeks after having bought the beautiful arrangement, and they're at a loss as to why the plants didn't live. The answer is simple though. When you buy a ready made container garden at the store which is packed full of blooms and greenery, the container is usually too full for the plants to have the room they need to grow, live, and thrive.

To keep container garden plants alive for long periods of time, you must make sure they have enough room for their roots. Some plants have much larger or longer root balls than others too, so those plants will require larger containers in order to continue growing successfully.

If you really like the way a ready made container garden looks, you can take steps to keep it alive and beautiful in your home. When you buy the garden, simply buy a new, larger container to transfer the garden to. When you get home, just remove the plants from their original container and place them into the new one with additional soil. You may have to separate the plants a bit if they're all tangled together, but generally you can keep the arrangement looking very similar to the way it was when you bought it.

The larger container will give the plants more room for their roots to spread and grow, so your new garden will continue looking lovely for a very long time. As the plants continue growing though of course, you may need to ocassionally transfer them to another, even larger pot. Alternatively you can separate out some of the plants into smaller containers, and you'll have multiple container gardens instead of just one.

Tags: Container 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