Tips for starting a sustainable garden

By using organic gardening methods, you can make your edible vegetable garden more beautiful, productive and healthier for the environment and your family. By amending your soil with natural fertilizers, you can grow, bigger, more bountiful fruits & veggies and you help keep our waterways clean.

Planting complimentary herbs, veggies, and flowers together add diversity, beauty and they benefit from each other. Certain flowers attract the good insects that eat aphids, and support pollinators. By composting, you are making your soil richer, and you are helping by not adding waste to trash dumps. These five tips will help you get started.

1. Check your soil. It's cheap and easy to buy a soil testing kit. This way you can see if your soil is acidic or has a high alkaline content. Then you can add compost and fertilizer accordingly. Most plants do well with a balanced ph, but some, like blueberries, like really acidic soil and so will benefit from seaweed-based fertilizers. If using manure, make sure it is 100% organic. Manure from animals that have traces of antibiotics or other hormones can damage your crops.

2. Companion plant. Reference what plants do well together. For example, planting basil together with tomatoes improves the flavor of tomatoes and repels flies and mosquitoes. Visit Seeds Of Change for more ideas.

3. Remember flowers. You can add beautiful edible flowers to compliment your vegetable garden, like borage, nasturtium or pink jasmine to your garden. Flowers like yarrow or sweet alyssum will attract good bugs that eat aphids. These also help attract bees to your garden, that will enhance it by cross-pollinating. Edibles that bees love are rosemary and lavender.

4. Compost! Either indoors or out. For outdoors, you can use food scraps, leaf clippings, and other organic matter. For indoor composting you can check out City Dirt.

5. Mulch. Adding mulch to your garden helps keep down on weeds, aids the soil in retaining moisture, and protects your plants' roots.

The weather outside might still be frightful, but you can start preparing a delightful organic garden for planting season. There’s more to do in early spring than just dream about your future garden flowers or bountiful harvest.

Start Seedlings Indoors

Planting seedlings indoor is a great idea for many reasons: you’ll be certain that your plants are organic, save money, there’s a wider variety of seeds to choose from compared to young plants for sale in a nursery or garden center, and well established plants produce fruit earlier and have a longer harvest season.

1. Plan Before You Plant
   Go to the National Climatic Data Center to research the average last frost date in your area. Then read the number of days until germination and harvest on your seed packages to determine which seed varieties to plant each week. You can plant some frost tolerant species such as cabbage, spinach, salad greens and pansies sooner.
   
2. Get Potting Equipment on the Cheap
   Purchase special seed starting flats or use cut down milk cartons, chipped pots, empty plastic containers, etc. that are two to three inches deep. Fill the containers with potting soil, gently firm the surface and water until moist, but not muddy.
   
3. Ready, Set, Grow
   Place seeds on the surface about a half an inch apart (tiny seeds may be spaced closer) and cover them with a thin layer of potting soil. Gently tap the surface to ensure good soil contact with the seeds. Remember to label the row or container with the variety and planting date.
   
4. Keep Them Covered
   Cover the container with plastic and place it in a warm spot in your house. Check the container every day and remove the plastic once the seeds have germinated.
   
5. Let in the Sunlight
   After the seeds have germinated, move the containers to a sunny location. Water when the soil becomes dry, preferably from the bottom, to prevent flooding the seeds.
   
6. Give Them a Taste of the Outdoors
   About a week before you plan on adding your young plants to your garden, harden them off by gradually exposing them to outdoor conditions a few hours a day.
   
7. Take off the Training Wheels
   When your plants are ready to be placed in your garden, dig a small hole for each plant, insert the plant, cover the roots, and water. In a few weeks or months, depending on the variety, you will be ready to harvest vegetables or enjoy looking at beautiful flowers.

It’s not recommended to start root vegetables, peas, beans, or corn indoors since they do not transplant well.