Growing a successful vegetable garden will require a bit of a paradigm shift in your current landscaping mentality. Normal landscaping mentality focuses on things like drought tolerance, deep roots, lush foliage and the like. With vegetables, the focus needs to be on giving the plant what it needs in order to produce food fast! The…
With a lawn, one wants to encourage deep, drought tolerant roots and lush green growth. This can be accomplished through deep, infrequent waterings which forces the roots to follow the water down and feeding the turf a high nitrogen fertilizer to enhance growth. Following that pattern for a vegetable garden, however, will result in dismally…
As part of the Six Laws of Plant Growth, we all know plants have nutritional requirements that need to be met before they will be able to successfully produce food for you. It is well known that there are 16 essential elements (chemicals) required by plants in a balanced ratio in order for them to…
We thought we’d experiment with some of those new fabric grow bags potting up a couple of tomatoes and one of our our Meyer Lemon trees we have growing in the greenhouse to see how they go compared to traditional plastic pots. We’re using 3 gallon gardening bags for the tomatoes (potting up from one…
You can grow a vegetable garden anywhere in any soil (or none) and in almost any climate without the need for adding any soil amendments by simply controlling the following six laws of plant growth as taught in the Mittleider Method Gardening Course: 1. Light is the most important factor to control – and more…
Growing Your Own Veggies? It’s Easier—and More Rewarding—Than You Might Think There’s just something special about plucking a fresh tomato off the vine or spotting that first sprout pushing up through the soil. Vegetable gardening isn’t just about food—it’s about freedom, pride, and getting your hands a little dirty while doing something good for your…
Too much fertilizer, whether that’s in the form of manures, composts, synthetics, naturals or otherwise is just as damaging if not more so than not enough. We often believe incorrectly that just because it’s organic that it’s good for the earth and in our attempt to improve the earth end up ironically and catastrophically causing…
It’s not just vegetables that benefit from proper feeding. The trees in your orchard will respond well to proper feeding as well, rewarding you with healthier plants and more abundant crop. A properly balanced plant food will help provide the nutrients necessary for good growth, flowers and fruit, bud development for next years crop, and…
We just planted some brussels sprouts seeds in our diy seed starting trays and the broccoli will be added just as soon as those seeds arrive. We’ve been receiving our mail order vegetable and annual flower seeds for this season over the past couple of weeks and compiled a seed planting schedule to help us keep…
I built my own seed starting trays for starting seeds inside my greenhouse this weekend out of the leftover scraps of lumber from the salvaged pallets I used to build a potting / seed starting bench in our greenhouse. Building your own seedling trays is relatively easy and inexpensive and they will last for years!…