Grow Your Own Organic Vegetables

Eat Home-Grown Vegetables within Weeks.

Apr 24, 2009
Caroline Fisher

Vegetables - Vassil

Some gardening guides can make growing your own vegetables as complicated as the Kama Sutra makes lovemaking. But growing food to eat is innate in us all.

Dig up a piece of your backyard, put in a raised bed, or just pop them in between existing plants – whichever way your choose, you can be eating home-grown organic vegetables from your garden within a few weeks.

Four Basic Steps

If you follow these four basic steps, combined with a willingness to learn what your garden has to teach you about itself, you'll feel the thrill of picking your own home-grown succulent produce within weeks.

Prepare the soil
Plant the vegetables
Nurture with water, sun, and organic fertilizer
Visualise your patch being abundant. Watch them and feel the love for them

Prepare the Soil

Put down some sand if your soil is mostly clay, and make sure you dig in natural manure like aged horse or cow manure. Ensure it's in small pieces, and if it's in large, hard lumps, make it smaller and crumbly. Add some chook manure if you can get some, and then a light layer of straw. Then layer some sheets of newspaper with a layer of sand on top. Water it everday to soften and leave it for a couple of weeks to settle in.

Purchase some seedlings that will grow in the growing season that you're planting. Its best to start in spring to early summer, but in some climates you can grow in autumn and winter. Check a growing guide for your area of the world.

Alternatively, try planting some seeds in small pots, which can take a while to germinate and grow, but they are cheaper than buying seedlings.

Dig the new garden over, making sure the soil looks warm, soft and cosy for the new plants.

Plant the Vegetables

Plant the vegetables you've chosen into a small hole according to the instructions, water and fertilise with a little organic manure if needed.

Water daily in warm weather. You may need to shelter young seedlings like lettuce and spinach from hot sun. Put some shade cloth over the top of them.

You can also plant fruit crops like passion fruit vines, which will grow along a fence or trellis and produce beautiful flowers and fruit.

Nurture With Water, Sun and Fertiliser

When the zucchini, squash or pumpkin plants start producing flowers you know that the baby vegetables are on their way, so lightly fertilise them with the organic manure that you've made. If you don't want to make your own, use a commercial organic liquid or solid fertilizer.

Root vegetables like carrots take a bit longer and may be better if the seed is sown straight into the soil. If you do, make sure the soil is sandy, like fine crumbs, cover the seed with an old piece of carpet underlay or a sack, and keep damp. Take off the sack when the seeds start to germinate and water regularly and gently.

Keep an eye on them all for bugs or birds that may eat them, and use an organic spray like garlic or onion – just cook them up in some water. Or pick the bugs off if they're big enough to see. You may have to simply grow enough to share with the birds.

Visualise Your Patch Being Abundant.

It’s tough being patient when the plants seem to be taking forever to grow even a few centimetres/inches. Instead of just waiting, use some positive visualisation to assist the plants growth, and to empower you.

Here’s a rough guide to the growing times in months, from planting seeds to harvesting for the most common vegetables: