Home Vegetable Garden

Growing a Home Vegetable Garden is Done by Many People for Many Reasons

The love of growing plants - A home vegetable garden is a good way to get your plant love going. There is a simple joy that comes from planting a seed and caring for it as it sprouts and grows. Feeding, watering, weeding, and generally meeting the needs of a living thing is necessary for some people.

Saving Money by Gardening – Seeds are cheaper than the final vegetable you get, you can grow a whole packet of seed for the cost of a large tomato, so why not. Actually if you save your own seeds you can even cut out the cost of purchasing seed.

Educational Gardening – Teachers have known forever that kids love to start seeds and see what happens. Who doesn’t remember that Dixie cup or eggshell carton of Marigolds that was brought home from school and probably died soon after. But it was fun for awhile.

Gardening for Recreation – Some nursing homes now have gardens for the elderly people who live there. Older people who are normally bored with their confinement love getting their hands in some garden dirt. A few beds raised high enough for someone in a wheelchair to reach comfortably and you have a new pastime for the old timers.

No matter what your reason is for gardening there is a method that will suit you. From the large city window sill or balcony garden to a large acreage there is no reason not to get your hands dirty.

When gardening on a balcony it is important to use light weight water retentive soil, regular garden soil weighs too much to put onto a balcony, you wouldn’t want to use regular garden soil in a pot anyway. It just is not a good idea.

Once you have chosen the right type of garden for you, you need to design it. Design is possibly the best way to avoid actually doing something productive and my favorite stage of the garden. Who doesn’t like reading and looking at pictures of gardens that other people have to take care of. That’s the life.

After design comes construction, building any beds, borders, and paths, you need to do this first so you do not have to tear up your garden when you realize that you are always walking through the strawberry patch to get to the shed.

Are you ready to till? My second favorite task in the garden is anything that requires me to play in the dirt. I normally just use a shovel but you can do it however you want.

Plant my friend plant. Get those seeds planted and watered and mulched and growing so we can have dinner in 2 months.

The bountiful harvest, tomatoes, corn, cucumbers, oh MY. Get all your veggies harvested and have a nice big salad for dinner. Who said all we eat is junk food? Not me or my garden.

And then it was fall, and cleanup. Rake, cut back, dig under and take a nap until next spring. Where did the season go, just a few short sentences ago it was spring and I was getting ready to start. On the bright side we can start again NEXT spring. So go back to the first step and start designing more gardens.

You want to know something? I really wish I could figure out why MS Word hates my sentence structure. Apparently I’m a fragmented, verbaly confused, not using enough semi colons kind of person. You ever get the feeling that your word-processing program is laughing at you and feeling superior? Personally I do not see anything wrong with the word verbally, it conveys exactly what I mean and so that’s why I typed it.

That’s exactly why I like my home vegetable garden it doesn’t expect me to do any sentence structure, just soil structure. Later.