Organic Garden Preps
June 14th, 2010
When you are trying to do your gardening in a more organic manner , this project plan won’t only begin with buying heirloom plants or doing things like avoiding pesticides. Organic gardening actually originates several steps prior to those processes with preparing the growing medium .
It is truly that , apart from allowing moisture and sun to power the process, this is where the plants will obtain most of the nutrients they must have to grow well . If they are denied nutritious soil, you won’t get very healthy plants, and this will surely defeat your purpose in trying to garden “organically” at all .
So what is absolutely needed for nutritious, healthy soil, as a growing media for the organic garden?
You’ll need to do some research to refine the details , and it can be best if you speak with an organic gardening expert if you’re really serious about this. But here are a few basic tips to begin with.
According to the Tanger Green website, there are four primary ingredients that your soil must contain: lime, phosphate , humus and marl .
Lime, in the form of ground limestone, helps maintain effective pH balance, and must also contain magnesium and calcium for the best plant growth. Phosphate offers the phosphorus that all plants need , and should be given once every four years. Marl is powdered rock that contains potassium, and it works in conjunction with the phosphorus.
These three things should be applied with the help of a consultant . And it would probably be a good idea to begin have soil testing in your garden first to make sure what the existing levels are . This will determine exactly how much of each element you should add .
Humus, really , is just compost. You can obtain this at an organic gardening supply center , and it can be made of animal manures or vegetable base. In fact, you can generate your own compost at home, starting with a base like straw, and then adding vegetative matter like the leaves you raked up from your landscape as well as some of the remains of last year’s garden. And one of the best sources of matter for organic compost will be vegetable parings from your kitchen.
You can buy compost containers , with instructions providing lits of other materials to add as a rich source of organic matter to amend into the soil of your garden . If you would like to develop a compost pile yourself, without a lot of extra cost, you would still be wise to do some online research or speak with organic gardening experts for advice on how-to’s . There are pitfalls you’ll need to avoid, that you might not even think of . For example, while the compost pile should be moist , it shouldn’t be too wet. And while you can use remains of the previous year’s garden, if you had plants that with any insect problem, those leaves and branches should be discarded and not incorporated into your compost pile.
Garden Tool Sites
Posted in Garden Tool Organizer Information