Organic Gardening Tips

What is Organic Gardening?
Organic horticulture is the gardening and growing of fruits, vegetables, flowers, or ornamental plants by following the essential principles of organic gardening in soil building and conservation, pest management, and variety preservation. Instead of the plough, organic gardening makes use of human labor and gardener’s hand tools, although some small garden machine tools like rotary tillers are commonly employed for organic gardening now.

Organic gardening typically refers to gardening that uses on organic methods. Something is considered “organic” when it comes from the earth. For example, animals and plants are organic. Anything that comes from animals such as fecal matter is also organic. So anything that used in organic gardening needs to be organic and not artificial. Since water is organic, you can use both hydroponics and organic or semi-organic gardening in the same garden.

In addition to nutrients your plants also need oxygen and nitrogen to live and be able. It also has to have a proper pH (potential Hydrogen) balance. When you use hydroponics in addition to organic fertilizer and other organic gardening methods, you can have healthier, better plants.

The Advantages of Having Your Own Organic Vegetable Garden
Today, many people are concerned about the soaring price of food. While a vegetable garden won’t provide everything you need, it can go a good way towards reducing your food bill. Even if you have just a small amount of garden space around the foundation of your home, you can use it for a wrap-around vegetable garden. Depending on the plants that you choose to garden and grow and how you store them, you may even find that you can have fresh garden vegetables on hand all year long.

Saving Money
If you think about the vegetables you use the most often, tomatoes rank at or near the top of your list. Whether you use tomatoes for sauce on spaghetti or cut them up for salad, they tend to be a staple food in everyone’s kitchens. Fortunately, tomatoes are easy to grow in almost any climate. And even if you don’t have room for a full vegetable garden, you can still garden and grow tomatoes in a pot on your patio. In many cases, 10-15 healthy garden plants will provide enough tomatoes for one person for a whole year if you can garden them for preservation purposes.
Your Health and Commercial Farm Pesticides

Many food stores carry what they refer to as “organically garden grown” vegetables. Unfortunately, there’s no way to know if these plants were grown near other crops that were exposed to pesticides. At the same time, it’s equally impossible to determine if the gardens soil was once exposed to pesticide before being converted to an organic garden farm. If you’re serious about avoiding pesticides on your vegetables, the best things you can do is garden and grow them yourself. Because carrots tend to absorb more pesticide from the soil than any other vegetable, it’s especially important to grow them in your own garden instead of buying them.

Organic Gardens are Eco Friendly
As you might expect, if we use less space for commercial farms, we’ll need to cut down fewer endangered rain forests and destroy fewer natural habitats. In addition, if commercial farms need to produce smaller numbers of produce, the less a need there will be for harmful pesticides that pollute rivers and other parts of the environment. Even if you feel that one person can’t make a difference in ending these environmental problems, you’d be surprised at the benefits that would result if even a moderate number of people chose to grow some of their own vegetable gardens. Every year, millions of tons of vegetables rot because no one consumes them. At the same time, exorbitant food prices and the usage of harmful pesticides makes it almost impossible for a person to have a truly healthy diet. Growing your own garden vegetables isn’t as complicated as many people believe. In fact, all you need is a pot, a plant, plus some soil, water, garden space and sunlight. If you make an effort to grow at least part of your vegetables in a home garden, you can help eliminate a wide number of environmental and financial issues.

How difficult is Organic Gardening?
The question is how easy is organic gardening? The answer is that it’s actually easier than conventional gardening! Why? Once you begin practicing organic methods, you will quickly realize that everything has to do with the gardens soil. Once your gardens soil is healthy, the time, maintenance and frustrations of gardening will actually do down.

Soil and the Health of Your Garden
Most people, brought up in a world of chemicals and pesticides, do not realize that adding more garden chemicals to their lawn and garden is like living on a diet of donuts and soda pop. Sure, you’ll get a quick, energetic sugar rush, but soon afterwards you feel even more tired and listless. It’s the same with your garden soil. Adding chemical fertilizer only gives it a quick boost, but does nothing to improve the gardens soil in the long run. Organic gardening is basically organic soil building. 90% of all garden failures are caused by poor soil, so by improving the fertility of the soil, the organic gardener prevents the major cause of poor gardening results.

Becoming a Successful Organic Gardener

To wean your home garden off chemicals and become an organic gardener, you have to plan ahead. Realize that it will take a few seasons for your garden to renew itself. Consider that you are embarking on a new gardening adventure – a voyage of discovery into the world of nature’s wonders. You are going to create in your garden a place for healthy plant life that is supremely fertile and natural.
You are going to be gardening and growing plants that are superior in size and in nutritional quality to the average product available in the market place. You will also be creating the cleanliness and spirituality of nature’s design for life on this planet.

In a nutshell, you will follow the patterns set down by nature. With millions of years of refinement, nature definitely knows best!

Garden Soil Fertility
Managing the gardens soil is very important. If your garden is healthy then insects will not attack the gardens plants. Insects only attack plants that are unhealthy. As an example illustrating the relative health of the gardens plants, insects will not feed on plants which have been genetically modified so as to reduce foliar damage thus; genetically modified plants are healthier than unmodified ones. To keep your garden healthy gives it organic matter and humus to survive. The most important thing is to give your garden lots of attention and your gardening energy.

Organic gardening relies heavily on the natural breakdown of organic matter, using techniques like green manure and composting, to replace nutrients taken from the soil by previous crops. This biological process, driven by microorganisms such as mycorrhiza, allows the natural production of nutrients in the soil throughout the growing season, and has been referred to as feeding the soil to feed the plant.

Make Your Garden Soil Healthy Again
An organic gardener uses natural mineral and organic garden fertilizers to build up the soil. Chemical fertilizers and insecticides are not used, because these artificial stimulants and disinfectants compromise the desire for good garden soil and can also be dangerous. Water pollution from fertilizer and spray runoff reflect some of that danger. Compost is by far the best fertilizer for your gardens soil. You can use ordinary household waste such as fruits, vegetables, lawn clippings, coffee grinds and even hair and dryer lint in your compost bin. The more variety of ingredients (so called “green” and “brown” materials), the better the results of you’re composting for your garden. Mix composted manures, bone meal and other organic fertilizers into your garden soil as well. Your lawn, vegetable garden and flowering plants will each need different types of fertilizer, so learning which of your garden plants grow best in which type of soil will allow you to drastically cut down the maintenance of your garden as the years pass.

That’s it! It’s all about the soil. Once you learn all about your gardens soil, organic fertilizers and which plants need what, you will begin to see fabulous results in your garden. It does take a few years, as nature will begin to break down and purge the chemicals from your yard and begin renewing itself, leading to healthier plants and a more vigorous vegetable garden. Secondary maintenance, such as weeds, plant diseases and garden pests will always be a concern, whether you go organic or stay conventional. However, as an organic gardener, you will know that every weed and pest has a natural enemy, and every disease has a cause that you can minimize using natural gardening methods.

For instance, lawn gardening maintenance will consist of more nitrogen-rich organic fertilizer and mulching. Healthier garden soil will mean thicker grass, which in turn crowds out weeds that try to take root in your garden.  Flowering plants, with the proper nutrients and proper amount of sun, will give off bigger and more colorful blooms in your garden. They will resist garden pests and disease better because they are receiving the proper organic minerals and nutrients from your gardening improvements. Garden vegetables will taste better and be much healthier, as what is reflected in the gardens soil is what is in your food.
Most people are now witnessing the direct result of the misuse of our environment, and of the failure of industry and agriculture to understand the importance of the cycle of life.

You no longer have to be a visionary or a prophet to know that the way our world is being abused is leading to trouble. Poison sprays disrupt the balance of nature by killing the insects that are vital to a thriving environment and garden. Other chemicals that remove pests and weeds not only kill other life with unintended results, but actually force weeds and harmful bacteria to become stronger, leading to disastrous consequences in the future.

The organic gardener knows that instead of taking from the soil, they are giving and sharing and constantly restoring it, as part of the cycle of life itself.

Organic Fertilizers
Organic gardeners should focus on two elements with regards to fertilizers for their garden: phosphorous and nitrogen. Potassium is also an important element, though a bit less so than the other two. There is really no single organic gardening fertilizer source that provides ample quantities of both phosphate and nitrogen. As a result of this, it is important to blend multiple fertilizer sources to give your plants everything they need to grow in an organic garden.

There is a difference in the way soil reacts to phosphorous and nitrogen. Excess phosphorous is stored in soil where nitrogen evaporates. For this reason, organic gardeners will always need to supplement their crops with nitrogen, but phosphorous will not always be necessary if enough have built up in the gardens soil. In order to fertilizer your organic garden, you’re going to need to do a little math.
For example, a common organic gardening fertilizer recommendation could is 100 pounds of each nitrogen and phosphorous per acre. Let’s say organic gardener Jim has a quarter of an acre of plants he needs to fertilize. This means Jim needs 25 pounds of nitrogen and 25 pounds of phosphorous to put into his soil. If Jim is using a garden fertilizer blend fish meal, he’ll be putting about 9% nitrogen and 2.5% phosphorous for each pound he puts into his soil. So if Jim puts 250 pounds of fish meal on his crops, he’ll get about 22.5 pounds of nitrogen and 6.25 pounds of phosphorous.

So as you can see, if Jim applies this fish meal garden fertilizer, Jim’s job is not done. He still needs 2.5 pounds of nitrogen and 18.75 pounds of phosphorous. To achieve this, Jim can supplement his fish meal garden fertilizer with bone meal, a garden fertilizer high in phosphorous but fairly low in nitrogen. Bone meal is 22% phosphorous and 3.5% nitrogen. If Jim adds 80 pounds of bone meal to his crops, he’ll add 17.6 pounds of phosphorous and 2.8 pounds of nitrogen. When added to his fish meal fertilizer, this brings his total phosphorous to 23.85 pounds and his total nitrogen to 25.3 pounds. While that’s not exactly 25 and 25 pounds of each, it’s close enough that Jim’s gardening and crops will thrive beautifully.

Bone meal for the garden is really the only organic fertilizer high in phosphorous (it has 22% while most others have no more than 2 or 3%). For this reason, all organic gardeners will need to use bone meal on their crops. Fertilizers high in nitrogen in addition to fish meal include dried blood (13%), and animal hoofs and horns (also 13%).

Dealing With Garden Pests the Organic Way
For many gardeners, a good offense is better than a good defense when it comes to pests in the garden. As soon as some gardeners plant their first seeds, they are already thinking about pest control. The question is, when is it necessary to step in with pest control methods? If you have bugs in your garden, find out what they are. The same is true about plant diseases. There are many books, field guides and garden websites to help you identify your insects, and someone at your local nursery may be able to help with local pests. You may find that the “pests” in your garden are not doing any harm at all!
In fact, over 95% of the insects in your garden are either beneficial or cause no harm. Some, like bees and butterflies, are vital to the fertilization process for plants. Most ant species simply collect weed seeds and insect eggs and are known as “nature’s vacuum cleaners.” Centipedes prey on slugs and snails, dragonflies eat mosquitoes and aphids, and the common ground beetle feeds on cutworms. Lady bugs, spiders, lacewings and even some types of mites are also natural garden “pest control” species that should definitely be welcomed into your garden.

Broad-spectrum gardening insecticides often kill the good insects. For instance, Malathion, a common mosquito-killer, kills the mosquito-eating dragonfly population as well! As an organic gardener, you do have safe, natural options to control your gardens pests. In fact, many of them can be made from common household products.

Methods to Control Pest Insects
The first thing to remember is to spot-treat the problem, rather than trying to spray and treat your entire garden. Second, good old’ water is one of the most effective weapons.
Select a control measure that targets the gardens pest. Use the insect’s own biology against it. An insect cannot become resistant to its own biology, and you will win this gardening battle every time. For instance, use natural garden bait that is poisonous for ants that you know they will carry back to their nest and feed to their queen. This won’t kill them right away, but if you are patient, you will find that the whole mound will be dead in a week or two. One suggestion is to find out what they like (sugar? grease?) Then take the ingredient and mix in some borax – not too much, or they’ll either detect it or die before reaching the colony.

Home-made Insect Garden Sprays
These home-made organic garden pesticides are just as effective as and a lot less toxic to the gardening environment than those are available commercially. In fact, many are completely non-toxic. Many problem insects can’t stand certain garden plants and spices, and will avoid them at all costs. Here are a few examples:

• Garlic and hot spices. All bugs hate strong odors and spices, and garlic and hot pepper is the most effective. Simply take some garlic powder, or hot pepper juice or flakes, mix it with water and spray onto your gardens trouble spots. Careful though, too much will harm your garden and plants.
• Cornmeal in Gardening. Sprinkle corn meal around the base of your garden plants to repel several types of pests, such as cutworms. Cornmeal, worked into the gardens soil, also attracts a type of fungus that kills disease-causing fungi.
• Beer or Yeast. Mix beer or yeast with water and create a pitfall trap such as a shallow cup sunken into the ground to attract and drown garden snails and slugs.

These are just a few of many natural solutions to control your gardens pest problem. With a healthy organic garden, you’ll have a lot of beneficial insects and birds helping you out, and rich, natural garden soil will mean healthy, strong garden plants that can better resist insects and disease. Sometimes you will need to intervene with extra gardening skills to control an escalating problem. Just make sure that the garden insects that you are killing are not the beneficial ones!

Organic Hydroponic Gardening
Well, first you need to know what hydroponics is before you can understand how it is used organically. Hydroponics is the process of gardening and growing plants in water and nutrients as opposed to growing in garden soil. Many people feel that this is better for the plants. Many people use organic hydroponic gardening when growing food items like garden vegetables for eating.
When it comes to hydroponics, many people have mistakenly thought that it was non-organic but this is not true. Water is organic, as is the nutrients that are used and the fertilizer can also be adapted to be organic so you can easily have organic hydroponic gardening.

What is Hydroponics?
Hydroponics is a Latin word that when translated basically means “working-water”. Hydroponics refers to a method of gardening that is safer for the environment. Using indoor gardening methods, water and lighting, etc. plants are grown. This method of gardening and growing plants without soil has been dated back as far as the 1600s but has become more popular recently. People have been gardening and growing in water since before they began planting in soil.

You know that your plant needs nutrients to survive. The key to hydroponics is how you feed the nutrients to the plant. In addition to water and oxygen your garden plant needs large amounts of nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus, calcium, magnesium and sulfur. Some other nutrients that are needed in smaller amounts are iron, manganese, boron, copper and zinc. Your garden plants can also use molybdenum and chlorine but in such small supplies that they usually get it from the water or from the other minerals so you don’t really have to worry about adding these.

Mediums and Anchorage
Since the plants are not grown in traditional garden soil, water and nutrients need to be absorbed somehow. The medium is used for anchorage to let the plant soak up the nutrients. The most common types of mediums are Heydite and Rockwool. They are both made of rock but there are some differences in the two. Which is better really depends on who you ask and what types of plants you are gardening and planting.

Your growing media can also be vermiculite, perlite (pearlite), peat, coco-husk (coir), straw as well as other organic materials. You can use organic fertilizer from many different sources including cow, chicken, pig, and sheep manure, seaweed, bat guano, fish emulsion and entrails, urine, bone and blood, as well as many other natural sources. The problem with organic fertilizer is the obvious; that you must consider any possible health concerns.

Transplanting
You will be happy to know that it’s easy to take plants from gardens soil and transplant them to a hydroponic system. You can pull the garden plants out gently and then rinse the roots in cold water. Next you just spread the roots in the bottom of the hydroponic pot and fill it with your growing garden product.

It is never too late to begin organic hydroponic gardening. You can transplant your soil based garden to hydroponics today. Or you can begin your own hydroponic garden without much trouble at all. If you are looking for a safer and more environment friendly method of gardening, then you should try hydroponics. It can also be a lot of fun for you to study this ancient method of gardening. It is fairly simple to begin but at the same time you can spend a lot of time learning more about it and perfecting it in your own garden.

Organic gardening is based on knowledge and gardening techniques gathered over thousands of years. In general terms, organic gardening involves natural processes, often taking place over extended periods of time, and a sustainable, holistic approach - while chemical-based gardening focuses on immediate, isolated effects and reductionist gardening strategies.
Organic gardening systems

There are a number of formal organic gardening and farming systems that prescribe specific techniques. They tend to be more specific than, and fit within, general organic standards.
A garden is more than just a means of providing food, it is a model of what is possible in a community - everyone could have a garden of some kind (container, growing box, raised bed) and produce healthy, nutritious organic food, a farmers market, a place to pass on gardening experience, and a sharing of bounty, promoting a more sustainable way of living that would encourage their local economy.
A simple 32 square feet raised bed garden based on the principles of bio-intensive gardening planting and square foot gardening uses fewer nutrients and less water, and could keep a family, or community, supplied with an abundance of healthy, nutritious organic garden greens, while promoting a more sustainable way of living.

Other methods can also be used to supplement an existing garden. Methods such as composting are ways of recycling organic matter into some of the best organic fertilizers and garden soil conditioner. Vermicomposting is especially easy. The byproduct is also an excellent source of nutrients for an organic garden.