3 Step by Step Tips On How To Grow An Organic Vegetable Garden

I loved our vegetable garden when I was a kid and I ate a lot. I also grew up suffering the agony of migraines. Back then we didn’t have a clue as to the cause and even had doctors tell my parents I was likely faking it to get out of things. I’d love to find them and kick their butts today, but they are all long dead as that was about 50 years ago.

Turned out it was the poisons being sprayed on our food that I was so susceptible to. I was the only one in the family that had that reaction and lived with migraines until I was about 40 before I learned how to stop them.

It took organic gardening for me to really experience the joy of eating fresh produce without the debilitating migraines that came with that enjoyment. Today we have our own home and vegetable garden, an organic vegetable garden.

Step by Step Organic Gardening

Our home gardening is organic all the way, even our flower gardening is organic because we grow flowers we can eat as well. In this article I would like to go over the step by step gardening tips that have helped us go green all the way.

Step by Step Tip #1 – Location, Location, Location

Where you locate your vegetable garden is key to real veggie growing. Just like real estate people say when talking about buying real estate. The three most important things are location, location, location. The key reason for location is to give your vegetable garden 8 to 10 hours of direct sunlight each day.

We love trees but those we have growing along the east side of our property have grown too tall and now block our vegetable garden from getting any sunlight until after 10 in the morning and it’s getting worse by the year. When we bought the place they weren’t much higher than the property fence, so about 5 feet tall.

The sun would rise above our neighbours house at about 9am and as the trees grew it went from about 9am to 10 and now it’s about 11am before they get direct sunlight. Each year, as the trees grew taller, the sun takes longer and longer to shine on our garden.

The garden is already located in the best spot on the property so as much as it saddens me to cut down trees at least four of them have to go if I expect my garden to get that much needed 8 to 10 hours of direct sunlight. Location, Location, Location.

Step by Step Tip #2 – Needs Good Drainage

Drainage problems have been the biggest concern with the location we choose to start our vegetable garden. Our yard is very dense clay that is tough to dig up. When it was dry it took a pickaxe to dig it up and when it’s wet it’s so heavy it wears my out in minutes.

But we had to work with what we had and this was the best location which was the first and most important step in the step by step gardening process.

This same location in spring creates a swimming hole for the local ducks flying over as the water can take days to drain.

When I started the garden I began with a hole about a foot deep and filled it with water and that took a couple of days to drain.

Step by Step #3 – Start Smart, Start Small

You’ve likely heard the phrase ‘go big or stay home’, well that was my thinking before my heart attack. Looking back now I am sure I would have given up long before every planting a single plant. That’s how tough it was to create our vegetable garden with just a shovel and pickaxe.

Today my motto is to ‘start small and grow with it’.

It’s easy to do so much you get completely overwhelmed when starting your first vegetable garden. If my health didn’t hold me back I would have been one of those who would start with a big garden and then regret doing.

There are many things that can go wrong when first learning about vegetable gardening and with a huge garden it’s likely that all problems will appear making it a far less enjoyable experience. So start small and let it be a growing experience.

Our first vegetable garden was only 4 feet by 4 feet but after taking days to dig it and amend the soil, test the drainage again, dig it more, amend it more and test it again I was so glad I had not started with an 8 by 8 veggie garden. I would have run out of steam long before I would ever have drained well enough.