Gardening TIps

Thank you for checking out the Gardening Tips area of Happy Mothering.

Scroll down and you’ll find gardening ideas, tips, tricks and more. From staking tomatoes to growing onions, cauliflower and lavender in containers... to making your own compost and compost tea... to raising backyard chickens.

How to plan a garden?

Here are some things to take into consideration and you can do right now along with some tips to help make sure you have the perfect spot for your garden:

Two hands holding soil that's full of earthworms from the garden

Tips to Plan a Garden

Good luck on your garden. I hope this area of Happy Mothering helps you.

Print Recipe

Author: Brian Johnson

Instructions

Having good soil or a solid medium you can use to grow your food is the most important part of gardening. Without a good medium, you can't grow anything.
Earthworms in your garden typically mean your soil is healthy. They eat dead plant matter and help to keep the roots of plants fertilized.
We like to utilize organic gardening and make our own compost and compost tea as this tends to give us super healthy soil.
Aeration, or making sure oxygen can get to the roots of your plants, will cause you to get a much larger yield if done properly.
Proper lighting is paramount. Light pollution will affect the plant’s abilities to grow as big and as healthy as they could. Everything is on a Ceridian cycle. That means, everything… including plants… need to sleep.
With adding supplemental lighting, you can sometimes yield a 2nd or even a 3rd annual crop. The reason is, in the fall, winter and early spring you can extend the daylight hours to 18 hours of light and trick the plants into believing they're in a vegetative state. The plants will go into flower with 12 hours or less of light per day.
Good space... Good airflow... One of the worst things for a garden is when the air is stagnant. Poor airflow will often make your plants sad. Contribute to too much humidity and heat stress. Sometimes adding outdoor fans are necessary for smaller areas that have airflow issues.
Protection – Garden pests like ground squirrels, gophers, chipmunks, squirrels, bunnies and raccoons love it when you grow unprotected gardens. Because they’ll fill their bellies with no regard for your feelings. That’s why we have some great container gardening ideas in this area.
Good design. If you create containers or raised beds and can’t reach the center of the gardening area without stepping on plants… or you don’t have proper rows, you might be doing something wrong? There are tips and tricks throughout this area to help you do better.
Irrigation. You need to make sure you have a suitable water source. If you have a 400 square foot garden and are trying to water that with a 2-liter pitcher, you’re going to have some very long and stressful days.
Good mix of both sun and shade depending on the plants. You certainly wouldn't want to have tomatoes in the sun all day or you’ll get ugly tough-skinned fruit. And you certainly don’t want your watermelon to be in the shade all day, or you’ll get tiny things that are sad and aren’t sweet.

Tried this recipe?Let us know how it was!

Vegetable Garden Planner

Do you know what vegetables to plant and when to plant said vegetables?

Our friend Pam Farley of Brown Thumb Mama created THE BEST downloadable vegetable planning schedule for everyone from beginners to experts. Go download Pam’s Vegetable Planning Schedule.