A vegetable garden is a kind of garden where you can grow a lot of different plants, roots, leaves, and other things. A vegetable garden allows you to grow and harvest a wide range of food crops in significant quantities.
Vegetable gardening necessitates a large amount of space as well as a lot of effort. If you want to grow your food crops and have a lot of land space, you can consider starting a vegetable garden.
Vegetable gardens can be a tangle of weeds and native plants. As a result, it should not be considered a hangout spot.
If you want to save yourself from facing different issues related to vegetable gardening, consider the following hacks:
1. Free Plant Labels
Ice cream tubs, yogurt pots, and cream pots make the most impressive free plant labels. Carefully cut pots into strips around 1.5 – 2cm wide. And then use a pen to write on the blank side.
These plant labels can last for many seasons, and it is so easy to collect yogurt pots from neighbors and family. Use a permanent marker for them to be waterproof and suitable to be used indoors and outdoors.
2. Potato Hack
One of the most incredible ways to grow potatoes is by simply placing them on the surface of a raised bed and then covering them thickly with some mulch. This mulch could be something like straw, old hay, or autumn leaves.
Once the potato plants appear through the mulch, cover them again with more mulch, and then let them grow until the plants are ready to harvest, which is around a couple of weeks after flowering.
And simply pull away the mulch and pick out the potatoes. You can also try this method just using a wood chip as a mulch.
3. Instant Fence
Brambles or any other thorny cane offer an excellent instant fence effect to help protect your seedlings from slugs.
Cut the canes into 30 centimeter long sections and lay them like a fence around your prized seedlings.
You can also stack two to three canes on top of each other. It won’t stop every single slug, but it will surely make a huge difference.
Suburban and rural areas are full of wild brambles that need clearing, so instead of just clearing and burning all of the brambles, we have an excellent use for the canes in our gardens and allotments to help keep slugs away.
4. Sow Before It Rains
This won’t be suitable for every kind of climate, but professional gardeners try and garden according to the weather.
They always prioritize sowing seeds and transplanting seedlings during or right before some heavy rain. By doing this, you can save yourself the time of watering afterward and from using up your water storage because the rain will do all of that for you.
5. Seed Trays
Here is an excellent way to repurpose pallets into creating our own seed trays. And if you have spare nails or screws lying about or even repurpose nails from the pallets you break up, this can be a free project.
Pallets can be found for free in many locations. These seed trays have the added benefit of being as large as you want them to be and are also plastic-free.
Create the frame and then nail the planks to the base. Just make sure that the pallets you use have the HT symbol, which stands for heat treated and not chemically treated.
6. Seed Trenches
If you’re struggling to create straight seed trenches in the garden, then look no further. Cut a piece of bamboo just under the width of your raised bed, and lay it over the surface.
Then press firmly down to the desired depth, lift, and you now have a perfectly straight seed trench. This excellent technique can also be done using an old broom handle or a long piece of wood.
Another way to create a perfectly straight line that you can use for creating a seed trench or even for transplanting seedlings is to find two sticks and a bit of string.
Tie one end of the string near the top of one of the sticks, and plant this stick on the side of your widest raised bed. And then roll the string out to the other side and cut it, leaving a bit of overhang.
Now tie this end of the string to the second stick, and then twirl it to the desired length. Both sticks planted at both sides and twirled taut will create a perfectly straight line.
7. Multi- Sowing
The technique of multi-sowing allows you to grow more plants in less space. And it also means that you need less compost to get them growing.
For example, beetroot, radish, and turnips can be sown four to five seeds to a module and then transplanted. And as the clumps of seedlings grow, they will push away from each other. And multi-sowing also means that sowing and transplanting times are significantly reduced.
8. Biodegradable Plant Pots
Cardboard tubes like loo rolls make fantastic biodegradable plant pots to start with your seeds. Peas and beans work exceptionally well. And when it comes to transplanting, you can place the whole cardboard roll directly on the ground, as it will break down, which means that your plant will suffer far less transplant shock.
Fill the tubes with homemade compost and sow your seeds. Then, store these in boxes, such as old ice cream tubs or crates, to prevent the compost from falling out. Alternatively, you can create four cuts at the end of one of the tubes and fold them inwards to make a pot.
9. Pea Hack
Fill an old rain gutter with compost and then sow seeds. This works very well for peas because when it comes to transplanting, create a trench in a raised bed, and then slide the seedlings straight from the rain gutter into the trench, and they have been instantly transplanted. But this also works really well for other things such as lettuce and salads.
Bonus Hack- Pea Support
Use Christmas tree branches to create unique pea supports when you just transplant your seedlings. Collect Christmas tree branches from neighbors and recycling facilities in early January and use them to your heart’s content. This also works well for sweet peas too.
10. Increase the Productivity of your Garden
One of the most effective ways to quickly increase your garden’s productivity is to scrap creating annual planting plans and instead look at monthly planting plans.
There are so many benefits to this because a month-by-month look at the garden means you can plan ahead for when a gap appears. So you can sow seeds ready to transplant as soon as you have harvested a crop.
You can get two or three different harvests from the same space in one growing season. Using a monthly planting plan also really helps in making you feel in control.
Because it is so much simpler to look at what’s happening on a month-to-month basis, and it means that the plan that you have is going to be very close to how the garden is laid out at any one point in time.
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