Start Your Own Organic Garden This Year - And Feed Your Family Some Produce From Mother Nature

Keep the element of surprise against your disease foes and try to plant your crops in different parts of the garden each year. Because many closely related plants are affected by the same diseases, avoid planting them where their relatives were the year or two before. Two of the biggest families to watch out for are the tomato family tomatoes , peppers , potatoes , eggplant and the squash family squash, pumpkin , cucumber , watermelon.

Organic soil is a crucial element in maintaining a healthy vegetable garden. The main component of organic soil is organic matter, such as compost, manure, or peat moss. Properly made compost is the best option for organic soil; it contains microorganisms of previous plant life, which will feed your plants the nutrients they need. No artificial ingredients necessary!

A layer of mulch over organic soil not only helps reduce weeds, but it creates a barrier that can prevent fungal disease spores from splashing up onto plant leaves.

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In most cases, a layer of mulch 1 to 2 inches thick is best. Use a mulch made from an organic material that will decompose such as cocoa hulls or weed-free straw. As it breaks down, it adds organic matter to the soil for you. By keeping weeds under control , you have the potential to save a large number of vegetables.

Healthy Enhancements

Weeds not only compete with your plants for water and nutrients, but they may also attract insect pests. And many insects spread disease as they feed from one plant to the next. The most organic and easiest way to control weeds in your garden is to pull them out by hand. Use a trowel to lever the entire weed's root out of the ground to nip it in the bud.

Many diseases spread rapidly in dead, fallen foliage. Regularly—once a week or more if you have time—walk through your garden and pick up shed foliage. In addition, you can sometimes prevent a disease from spreading through an entire plant just by picking off an infected leaf. Throw dead or diseased leaves in the trash, not in your compost pile. Wet leaves, especially in the afternoon or evening hours, can attract disease.

Avoid watering your plants with a sprinkler.

Easy Kitchen Garden, Step by Step

Instead, use a water-saving soaker hose to deliver water directly to the roots. While jamming plants in is a great way to get the most from your plot, it can also cause problems. Avoid planting your vegetables too close together. Good air flow between the plants can help prevent many types of fungal diseases. If you raise dairy animals, you can turn the cream into flavorful sweet or cultured butters. Read How to Make Butter and Buttermilk. You can grow sunflowers, pumpkins, peanuts, hazelnuts and other plants to make cooking oil from their seeds. Some nuts and seeds contain more oil than others — for example, almonds, hazelnuts filberts , peanuts, sesame seeds and walnuts have an oil content of more than 50 percent.

For best results, be sure to use oilseed varieties of sunflowers and pumpkins, which have an oil content of about 45 percent. Find a chart detailing the yields you can expect from growing various nuts and oilseeds, including their oil content, in Growing Nuts and Seed Crops for Homegrown Cooking Oils. To obtain oil from your nut or oilseed crop, you will need to invest in an oil press. Keeping bees to produce your own honey is easy, plus having these pollinators active in your garden will help increase your yields. Bees forage over several square miles, so encouraging the enhancement of the ecosystem in your community will be to your advantage.

32 inspirational gardening quotes | MNN - Mother Nature Network

A single hive may produce up to 50 pounds of honey per year. Read Keep Bees, Naturally! If you live in an area with sugar maple trees, you can make your own maple syrup from the sap. One to three tapholes per tree are typical, and each taphole yields 5 to 15 gallons of sap. Ten gallons of sap boils down to about 1 quart of syrup. Check out Enjoy Real Maple Syrup for more details. You could also grow sorghum to satisfy your sweet tooth.

According to Gene Logsdon in his book Small-Scale Grain Raising , an acre of sorghum can produce about gallons of syrup. From a square-foot planting, you might expect close to 10 gallons of juice, which will boil down to a gallon of syrup. Backyard chickens are a relatively simple starter livestock. After they begin laying, expect about eggs a year from each hen.

After they have outgrown their usefulness as layers, they can become stewing hens. Goats or cows can provide your dairy products. A family cow can produce 3 or more gallons of milk per day. Its calf would yield about pounds of meat at 18 months. Learn more in Keep a Family Cow.

Use an Organic Garden Fertilizer

Goats and sheep need less space and feed, making them ideal for small acreages and even some urban lots. One dairy goat can provide about a gallon of milk per day and offspring for meat. Raising a kid to 6 months yields about 30 pounds of meat, including bones. For other meat options, a feeder pig raised to 7 months about pounds can yield about pounds of meat. You can use a pen, but adding pasture is ideal.

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If you only have a small space, rabbits may be your meat animal of choice. Litters from one pound doe can produce 80 pounds of meat per year. Learn more in Rabbit: Self-Reliant Living in the City has a plan for a rabbit-chicken integrated housing system. Remember that the road to food self-sufficiency should be a community effort.

Decide what you can do, share the surplus with others, and find like-minded people to embark on this journey with you. Gardening educator Cindy Conner is using her decades of gardening and food preservation experience to detail how to grow a complete diet in a small space and get the food to the table using the smallest amount of fossil fuels. I would also like to mention that volunteering a few hours a week at a community food bank garden is very helpful too. I volunteer just 4 hours per week at the local organic community food bank garden.

The garden produced and delivered more than pounds of fresh produce for the local food banks. The volunteers are able to take fresh produce home year round. I am able to grow a greater variety in my mid-sized garden and bring home crops that require greater space from the community garden.

I no longer grow or purchase huge quantities of peppers, tomatoes or squash for canning and winter storage. I know exactly how these crops were grown, because I helped grow them. Please consider this another way to become self sufficient and help the community at the same time. Should mention, though, that keeping just one dairy goat isn't an option, unless you have other hooved animals around to keep her company. They're WAY too social to be by themselves! But hey, two gallons a day during peak production would suit my family just fine!

How to Start an Organic Vegetable Garden

We need to get people off that stupid Square Foot Gardening fad. Biointensive gardening is much more practical, easy, and inexpensive. Practical advice, great information! This was a great article! Exactly what I was looking for on my goal to be more self-sufficient. It breaks it down better then I have seen. It is just sad that I wish I could do chickens in my town, but I will have chickens eventfully Whether you want to learn how to grow and raise your own food, build your own root cellar, or create a green dream home, come out and learn everything you need to know — and then some!