Growing plants for food may require much more skill and knowledge as compared to that of regular gardening.
After all, when you are growing vegetables, you are trying to nourish your plants to be able to produce nutritious and healthy products.
When pursuing this goal, you'll surely want to avoid compromising quality when it comes to food you plan to use.
If you are new to this whole concept, here are the most basic things that you have to know.
Soil Preparation Preparing your soil for planting is very vital because this provides the foundation of where your plants will grow.
Take note that your soil is responsible for providing proper irrigation as well as nutrients to your plants, and choosing a healthy type of soil is very important.
Apart from choosing the right soil, it would also be helpful for you to add on some improvements to make it even healthier.
By adding natural fertilizers, like aged manure, peat moss and even compost, you can make your soil richer and healthier with nutrients for your plants to absorb.
The soil pH is another thing that you must control.
The ideal pH level where vegetables tend to grow the best is around 7.
0.
If your soil doesn't have the right pH, then your plants may whither.
Add lime if your soil is too acidic and gypsum if it is too alkaline.
Irrigation And Fertilization Watering and fertilizing are also very essential steps to growing healthy vegetables.
It is important that you take note of the right ways to do these things, or else you might not get the results that you want.
Make sure that you water your plants to a depth of at least an inch every week.
This allows proper irrigation and will help prevent vegetables from drying up.
And as for fertilizing, it is best to do this once every two weeks, with a balanced fertilizer.
Monitoring For Pests Do not forget how important it is to monitor your plants for pests.
After all, you certainly would not want your vegetables to be destroyed by worms or insects, as this could place a grave risk for you when you try to eat this food.
You could end up with rotten food and acquire any number of diseases.
You can make use of row covers for young seedlings in order to protect them from insects as well as harsh elements.
But make sure that you remove these covers once your vegetables start to blossom so that you may allow pollination to occur.
However, if your problems with pests have gone out of control, then you may need to use pesticides.
As much as possible, organic controls like pyrethrum and rotenone are best and safest to use.
Harvesting Lastly, you may not realize this at first, but harvesting is very crucial in growing vegetables because this can affect the quality of the products that you collect and how your next batch grows.
Remember not to wait too long when harvesting because your vegetables might turn bitter and tough.
Harvest while the produce is still young.
In this way, you can allow them to ripen beautifully while in storage and the chances for spoilage is greatly decreased.
Growing vegetables can certainly be very different from just merely taking care of regular flowering plants.
After all, you are not only after the aesthetic or environmental value of these particular plants, but you are after their nutritional advantages.
Gardening for food requires a lot of skill and knowledge, but just remember that all you have to do to succeed is follow the right and healthy way of gardening in order to collect healthy food as well.