A 500-square-foot garden will feed a whole family. The idea is planning, planting and harvesting your garden the right way. below, you’ll find everything you need to know to maximize your garden’s production, everything the experts hide from you!
so here are 19 gardening secrets the experts charge money for…
1. Examine plants carefully before buying
The easiest way to limit disease in your garden is to avoid introducing it in the first place. Getting a disease with a new plant is not the kind of bonus that any of us wants. One of the hardest things to learn is what a healthy plant should look like, making it difficult to know if the one you want is sick.
It is a good idea to collect a few books, magazines, and catalogs that show what a healthy specimen looks like. Don’t take home a plant with dead spots, rotted stems, or insects. These problems can easily spread to your healthy plants and are sometimes hard to get rid of once established.
2. How to Grow …
2. How to Grow From Seeds
I like to start my garden seedlings in natural topsoil. mostly don’t use potting soil because it doesn’t produce the results desired.
I fill a large, deep baking pan with topsoil and bake it for 30 minutes at 350 degrees. This sanitizes the soil and guarantees that no undesired weeds or grass will come up in the soil. I like to start this project in the wintertime, I fill up some big plastic barrels with lids with the sanitized soil.
After I have planted the seeds in the sanitized topsoil, I sprinkle the top with powdered cinnamon. This keeps away fungus that can cause damping.
each seedling I cover with a clear plastic cup that I clean and reuse. This protects the seedling from the cold and wind. and keeps the moisture in.
If your seeds are planted outdoors, sprinkle flavored powdered gelatin with the seeds in the soil. This will help the beneficial bacteria and provide needed nitrogen to your plants as they come up.
3. Starting From a Clipping
If you want to root a plant or cutting in water, add aspirin or two to the container. purchase a cheap bottle of aspirin and grind it up before you join it to the water. This helps in water absorption and will aid the cutting to start roots.
You can simply commence plants from cuttings from roses, geraniums, and saliva. Just dip the cuttings into a rooting hormone, then put them into potting soil. Spray the cuttings multiple times daily with water until you make sure they are rooted. Hibiscus is also easy to root this way.
3. How to Plant or Transplant Tomatoes or Peppers
Try it this way and I promise you that you’ll be rewarded with faster growth and healthier plants:
When you plant any kind of pepper or tomato plant, pinch off all but the top leaves.
Always dig a deep hole and add a cup of water to the deep hole and then set the plant into the hole and put a tablespoon of unflavored powdered gelatin in the hole near to the roots of the plant. A teaspoon of cinnamon also added in. The gelatin will encourage helpful bacteria and the cinnamon will keep away fungus.
For sweeter tomatoes, put two tablespoons of baking soda in the bottom of the hole. Cover the baking soda with two two-inch of dirt before you put the plant in the hole.
accurately fill the hole with dirt and pack it down tight.
Note: I suggest that everyone learn everything they can about heirloom tomatoes, which have a much better flavor than modern ones.
4. How to Keep Deer out of Your Yard
Purchase motion-activated sprinklers. when the deer go near them, the sprinklers activate automatically and run them off quickly. also, most other animals don’t like to be sprayed with water.
occasionally something as simple as hanging up tin pie pans around the garden can keep most animals away. You will want to hang the pans so they swing and make noise. Move them about once a week to be sure the deer don’t become used to them and just walk around them.
Human urine works well as a deterrent. get a container full from the toilet and pour it around the edges of the garden. pour fresh urine as often as you can and the deer will stay away.
Hang up noisy wind chimes. As with the pans, you’ll want to move them every week or so.
5. Use Leftover Fruit and Vegetable Peelings
gather all of those vegetable scraps and run them through the food processor. sprinkle it on the soil to better feed your growing veggies. Peppers love it and will grow and produce bumper crops when you feed them like this.
6. Use Newspaper and the Lint From Your Dryer as a Mulch
Instead of throwing away the lint your dryer filter collects, saves it in a tightly sealed container and till it into your dirt to help hold moisture in your soil.
You can also shred your daily newspaper and add the shredded paper to your compost bin. It will help you to have healthy compost and will help to retain the soil’s moisture.
When planting veggies like tomatoes, peppers, and squash, put a “fist-sized” piece of dryer lint in the bottom of the hole. The dryer lint will hold moisture in and around your just-planted plants, ensuring that the water stays there at the roots where it is needed.
7. Controlling Weeds Naturally
Weed early and often. And once your vegetables start growing, mulch your plants heavily to keep the weeds out. Do not let your garden get invade with weeds or you will lose control.
Put down newspaper around plants before you put down mulch. The newspaper will make sure weeds and grass can’t come up.
Vinegar is a great weed killer than the majority of products, but do not spray it on your vegetable plants because it will ruin them, too. If you have weeds or grass coming up in cracks in cement, this is an ideal place to use vinegar, which will kill the weeds and grass and prevent them from coming back any time soon.
If you’re using a string trimmer to cut weeds, spray the string on the weed-eater with vegetable cooking oil and you won’t have problems with your string getting stuck or tangled.
8.Plant disease-resistant varieties
Disease-resistant plants are those that might get sick with a particular problem but will fight off the disease instead of succumbing to it. For instance, some tomatoes are coded as “VFN resistant,” which means the tomato variety is resistant to the fungi Verticillium and Fusarium and to nematodes.
If you start looking for these codes on flowers, you’ll probably be disappointed because disease resistance is rarely identified on plant tags. This doesn’t mean that numerous flower varieties are not resistant to disease. Many rose companies offer plants that are resistant to diseases like powdery mildew and black spot.
9. Water properly
Watering your garden is a good thing, but since many diseases need water just as much as plants do, how you go about it makes a big difference. Many pathogens in the soil and air need water to move, grow, and reproduce. To avoid giving these diseases an environment they love, choose watering methods that limit moisture on a plant’s foliage.
Soaker hoses and drip irrigation accomplish this. If you are watering by hand, hold the leaves out of the way as you water the roots.
The most common leaf problems are exacerbated when leaves are wet, so overhead sprinkling is the least desirable option. If you choose this method, however, water at a time when the leaves will dry quickly but the roots still have time to absorb the moisture before it evaporates.
10. Choose and site plants appropriately
Successful gardening is based on using plants appropriate for your zone and site. If you set a shade-loving plant, like an azalea, in full sun, it will grow poorly and be easily attacked by diseases and insects. I once had a crape myrtle planted were part of its leaves was in the shade. This was the only part of the plant that had powdery mildew.
Plants have defenses similar to a human’s immune system, which swings into action when plants are under attack from an insect or disease. If plants are under stress, they cannot react with full strength to fight off or recover from diseases. Stressed plants, therefore, are more likely to succumb to these afflictions
11. Prune damaged limbs at the right time
Trimming trees and shrubs in late winter is better than waiting until spring. Wounded limbs can become infected over the winter, allowing the disease to become established when the plant is dormant. Late-winter pruning prevents the disease from spreading to new growth.
Although late-winter storms can cause new damage, it is still better to trim back a broken limb than ignore it until spring is underway. Always use sharp tools to make clean cuts that heal rapidly, and make sure to cut back to healthy, living tissue.
12. Clean up in the fall
It is always best to clean out the garden in the fall, even if you live in a moderate climate. This is not only an effective deterrent to disease but also a good way to control diseases already in your garden.
Diseases can overwinter on dead leaves and debris and attack the new leaves as they emerge in spring. Iris leaf spot, daylily leaf streak, and black spot on roses are examples of diseases that can be dramatically reduced if the dead leaves are cleared away each fall. If you are leaving stems and foliage to create winter interest, be sure to remove them before new growth starts in spring.
13. Keep an eye on your bugs
Insect damage to plants is much more than cosmetic. Viruses and bacteria often can only enter a plant through some sort of opening, and bug damage provides that. Some insects actually act as a transport for viruses, spreading them from one plant to the next.
Aphids are one of the most common carriers, and thrips spread impatiens necrotic spot virus, which has become a serious problem for commercial producers over the past 10 years.
Aster yellows (photo, right) is a disease carried by leafhoppers and has a huge range of host plants. Insect attacks are another way to put a plant under stress, rendering it less likely to fend off disease.
14. Use fully composted yard waste
Not all materials in a compost pile decompose at the same rate. Some materials may have degraded sufficiently to be put in the garden, while others have not. Thorough composting generates high temperatures for extended lengths of time, which actually kill any pathogens in the material. Infected plant debris that has not undergone this process will reintroduce potential diseases into your garden.
If you are not sure of the conditions of your compost pile, you should avoid using yard waste as mulch under sensitive plants and avoid including possibly infected debris in your pile
15. Make a Garden Bed over an Existing Lawn with Cardboard
No funds for a raised garden bed? You can lay down cardboard over the existing lawn to make a garden bed. The cardboard blocks grass and weeds from growing by excluding light and provides an initial carbon layer for the bed. And it would save countless hours of taking sod out and produce healthy soil also! Make sure the cardboard layer has no gaps so that weeds cannot grow up between the cardboard pieces and into your garden.