Spring is here in the northern hemisphere and I know many of you are getting your gardens going and wanting to grow more food. Some of you may be fairly new to
gardening and unsure what to do to grow more food.
This week’s blog post —
11 Tips for the Beginner Gardener – How to Grow More Food — covers 11 tips aimed to help someone just getting started with their garden to have a successful and productive growing season.
Some of these tips won’t help a more experienced gardener but some of these really could help someone wanting to move their garden in a direction that works with nature.
Let’s dive into some of the tips that even an experienced gardener might find useful.
Add Flowers to Your Garden
It might seem odd on first pass to see adding flowers to your garden as a tip to grow more food. But it turns out that flowers can provide a number of great benefits to your garden.
They add more diversity to your garden which will in turn support a greater diversity of soil life and other critters like beneficial insects (pollinators, predators, etc.).
By supporting beneficial insects you can decrease your issues with pests. Beneficial insects such as parasitoid wasps, ladybugs and lacewings are fantastic at helping to control garden pests. Lacewing larvae are great predators of aphids!
This is really a great way to control garden pests and grow more food!
You Can Grow Vegetables Outside Your Garden
This may seem obvious but I think people often forget about this—you don’t have to just grow vegetables in your garden!
For a couple years after my wife and I bought our
land we didn’t have a formal garden area—but we still grew vegetables.
As I built new hedgerows that were planted up with shrubs and
trees I also tossed in a large amount of vegetables and flowers. This helped to fill in the hedgerows and it also gave us a bunch of vegetables despite not having a “garden”.
Even now that I have built several gardens that we are growing food in I’m still planting vegetables in other areas.
Especially vegetables that will overwinter here like kale, or self-seed, or
perennial vegetables. All of these are great additions to my food forests and other growing areas.
You don’t have to keep the vegetables just to your garden! Just mix them in around your ornamental plants. Greens like kale and chard are especially easy to add to these areas but you can try other vegetables too.
But Really Just Get Started!
But really the key is just to get started—you don’t have to follow all these 11 tips and there are many other great tips that I left out.
The key is to start and do what you can this year to grow more food.
My main garden has fairly poor soils but each year it gets better and the plants do better. But if I hadn’t started then I would have had no harvests—instead every year I get more and more as my soils improve.
So let me know what tips you’re going to start with and what you’re growing this year! And if you have any tips to share please leave those in the comments.
And don’t forget to
check out the blog post which covers 11 tips for the beginner gardener!
While you are over on the blog most make sure to leave a comment! If you are the first to do so you will get a piece of pie!
The pie will get you access to some special features on perimes, discounts at some vendors, and you can use it to purchase some products on the permies digital marketplace.
If you leave a comment on the
blog post make sure to leave a post here on permies too so I can easily give you the slice of pie.
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