One of my favorite ways to spend a Saturday morning is to go out and tend to my garden. It’s a pretty big project, but it can be rewarding over a whole year. There are a lot of steps that go into creating a garden, but I’ll try to sum them up as best I can.
The first thing you have to do is pick your location. A nice sunny spot with decent soil is preferable, although you can make do with less. If possible, it’s good to avoid having trees overhead because they will shade out some of your plants, especially if those plants need lots of sunlight like tomatoes or corn. Ideally, you want straight rows for maximum efficiency when planting, but if you’re pressed for space and have to cram your rows in, it’s not the end of the world.
Once you’ve chosen your plot, figure out what size garden bed will work best for you. It’s good to lay everything out on the ground first so there is no confusion as to where everything will go later on. Use stakes and string or other markers to indicate an area about 4 feet by 16 feet. Once you’ve got one plot done, just do another right next to it and repeat until all of your plots are finished!
The next thing I would suggest is getting all of your supplies together ahead of time before planting day. Gardening gloves, trowel, watering can, and seeds for each different plant you need to get. A marking tool like a stake or string is also helpful. It’s also good to have some newspaper and mulch on hand if you need to cover up bare dirt patches left by new plants that haven’t grown yet.
After the plots are all laid out and prepped, it’s finally time to plant! This part is very easy: open your seed packets and separate them into piles of the same variety of plants (for example, one pile for all of your bell peppers). Then make a hole big enough for the plant but not too deep (you don’t want to disturb their roots!) and drop in a seed. Pack some soil back in around it and pat it down so that there will be no chance the seed might get washed away by water. Then use your marking tool to label each plot with what’s planted in it.
After everything is planted, don’t forget to water your garden! I like to add a little Miracle Grow fertilizer because my soil here doesn’t have much nutrition in it naturally. Depending on how hot or cool your climate gets, you should probably check up on your plants daily for about a month until they settle into their new environment. Just make sure not to overwater them!
Once all of this preparation work is out of the way, keeping a garden going isn’t too difficult since the vast majority of the work is done. It’s probably a good idea to check up on your garden once or twice a week for about half an hour to make sure no problems have popped up and that everything is going well.
The first time you go out and harvest from your garden can be a lot of fun too! You’ll get all kinds of vegetables ranging from tomatoes, bell peppers, lettuce, cucumbers, squash, corn, etc. If you do it right, then it should feel like Christmas every day when you head out there to tend to your garden…I love it!