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Getting Your Garden Started Right

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It’s one of my favorite times of year, gardening season!

I haven’t always been a good gardener, and I still don’t consider myself an expert, but gardening is one of my favorite hobbies that I continue to grow into.

Until I moved to Missouri in 2010, I never had the opportunity to have my own garden. It was one of the things I was most excited about when we moved. Everything grows there, so I knew if I was ever going to have the opportunity to learn how to grow a garden, that would be my best chance.

I bought the book Square Foot Gardening, and I set to work building my own garden beds. In my first year, I grew a variety of vegetables, herbs, and berries. I had a beautiful garden that was very difficult to leave behind four years later when I moved to Colorado.

Last year was the first time I was able to have a garden here. Growing things in Colorado is very different than growing them in Missouri. It took several months before I got the watering right, and my garden started to take off, but with continued work and dedication, I was able to have a very productive garden…for the most part.

This year will be even better!

I invested in a gardening bundle for only $24.95 with various e-courses, downloadables, e-books, planning and sustainability guides, and workbooks. I wasn’t sure if it would be worth the money, but to my great surprise, all of the material in the bundle is exactly as promised. It is packed with information in easy-to-use formats. Even better, it is broken down into four categories: Getting Started, Growing Food, Planning, and Sustainability. This makes it easy to find the information you are looking for.

Before you hop on over and grab this great bundle of gardening information, I want to give you some pointers that will get your garden started right this year!

  1. Make a Plan– This is the number one key to getting started. You need a plan! Depending on your experience and how familiar you are with gardening in your area, this may mean starting from the very beginning and planning where you want your garden and building grow boxes, or it can mean planning when to get seedlings started or just deciding what you are going to grow this year.

Making a plan will help you think ahead and develop an intentional garden, rather than just throwing money away by planting the wrong things at the wrong time. (Totally guilty of this!) Nothing is more disappointing than investing time and money into growing things only to have them quickly die or never be productive.

Some plants need a lot more attention and pampering than others, so if this is your first year attempting to garden, pick some easy-to-grow plants that have a high success rate, like tomatoes.

If you have had a garden before, this year might be a great season to try something more difficult, like broccoli. I have yet to grow broccoli successfully, but I will include this in my garden this year, fingers crossed!

2. Grow what you like– Green beans are really easy to grow, but no one in my house likes fresh green beans. I love how they look; I love watching them bloom and turn into beautiful beans…but then they never get eaten. So it is a waste of garden space and a waste of time and money for me to grow them. After throwing away an entire harvest of beans for the second year in a row, I had to have a little chat with myself about my gardening goals.

Am I putting time and money into my garden just for the sake of growing things? Or am I working to provide fresh and healthy food for my family? I get a lot of satisfaction from growing things, but I am gardening to grow food at the end of the day. So I have reevaluated what I grow, and I have limited some of the things I love to grow to avoid being wasteful.

If no one in your life likes butternut squash, it is wasteful to spend all of that space, time, and money growing them.

Asking your family for input on what they love to eat from the garden is a great way to get everyone excited about the garden, and it also ensures that you are growing things that will get eaten.

3. Get educated– If you would love to grow something but have never been successful at growing it, spend some time reading up on how to do it. Chances are, there are some helpful tips and tricks out there that you need to learn. Finding gardening groups online can be invaluable.

When I lived in Missouri, several of my neighbors were gardeners. I learned a ton from them that I have never seen in a book. For instance, I learned that the only branches on a tomato plant that will produce tomatoes are the ones with ‘hair’. So snapping off the branches with no ‘hair’ will help your tomatoes grow larger by preserving the energy from the tomato plant for the tomatoes rather than the greenery.

My tomato harvest last year was UNREAL! I spent some time every week pruning my tomato plants to remove all of the non-productive branches, and it paid off big-time.

This year, I am learning about broccoli!

4. Learn how to preserve what you grow– This is crucial to making gardening worth your time and effort. If you are only growing for the fun of growing, and you don’t mind throwing your hard work away at the end of the season, then that’s fine. But, if you’re like me, and you can’t stand to waste the food, then learn how to preserve it! This makes it so you can enjoy the fruits of your harvest all year.

Learning how to dry, can, and freeze your harvest is really fun. I have a canner and a dehydrator that I put to good use in the fall.

The first year I had a garden, I got enough strawberries to make two full batches of strawberry jam. The first batch didn’t turn out because I tried to wing it. After I had to dump it, I decided to read up on making jam, and I was very grateful for the huge amount of strawberries I harvested so I could try again.

Purchasing berries to make jam is costly, so being able to grow your own berries and make your own jam is amazing! Homemade jam is a happy little reminder of spring sitting in your pantry all year round.

I do the same with my herbs by dehydrating them. Using my dried herbs to make soups and season homemade spaghetti sauce all winter is well worth the effort to preserve them in the fall.

5. Have fun! This is by far the most important part of gardening. Having a garden is something that takes time and effort, so make it fun! Watering is my least favorite part of gardening, so last year, I put in a drip system in the garden that took care of that for me. Instead of spending twenty minutes just watering, I spent that time pruning the plants and working on things that would help them grow more successfully without it feeling like a chore.

I also built a garden bed that is high enough off the ground that I am not bent over my garden to work on it. If you have the space to build grow beds, I highly recommend putting the extra money into building beds that are a couple of feet off the ground to save your knees and back. This makes taking care of your garden a lot more pleasant.

Gardening is a great way to get outside in the sunshine, and it is very therapeutic to get your hands in the dirt and make things grow. It is gratifying to go through the process of weeding, pruning, watering, and harvesting…it really is a magical process that lets you get out of your own head and enjoy the fruits of your labors.

If you are starting in the gardening world, find a good book or an online resource. Or do what I did, and go check out the Gardening Bundle! It is chalked full of resources and is a really inexpensive way to get started on what will likely become a lifelong passion for growing things.

I want to hear all about your garden this year, so post your pictures and hit me up in the comments to let me know what has been most helpful for you as you were getting started!

Happy gardening!

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