How to Maintain a Small Garden

Once you have planted a small garden that is not all you have to do your garden has to be maintained through the growing season this is usually done with a lot of hard work but there are steps that you can take that will make your work a lot easier. Once your seeds of sprouted in your garden has come up in your real work begins.

The first enemies you have to face in the spring are cutworms; these are nasty critters that live in the soil that come up in the night and eat the base of a plant so that when you come out in the morning the plant is lying on its side next to where it grew. Not every plant is affected by these guys the most affected are tomatoes and cabbage. This can be prevented with paper coffee cups by cutting off the end they just become little cylinders that are put over the plant preplanning the cutworms from feeding. This is a simple and highly effective method for dealing with cutworms and it doesn’t require pesticide.

Another battle you’re going to be fighting during the entire growing season is weeds. It is virtually impossible to keep weeds out of your garden as they are wild plants and generally are far hardier than what you have planted. The author can remember as a child hearing this line from his mother, “Go weed the garden.” He still gets the shivers every time he hears that phrase.

Another problem you’re going to have to face from day one is varmints like deer, rabbits, gophers, woodchucks, raccoons, bears, moles, mice, voles and just about any other varmint that has teeth that eats plants. One of the things that will keep these out of your garden is an electric fence that is set about 2 inches above ground level. The trouble with this arrangement however is that if you forgot about it you are apt to be surprised one day with a real nasty shock. A different of set problems is presented by birds; they’ll come into your garden and eat the freshly planted seeds. For the most part birds avoid your crops, but there are some crops in your garden that they will go after.

After years of experiencing this, the author came up with a reasonable solution to the problem that involves making a tea out of habanera peppers and the particular variety he used was the Scotch Bonnet. On a scale of one to ten measuring the hotness of a pepper the habanera Scotch Bonnet came out as a ten. This tea is sprinkled on your garden it works on the principle that most varmints don’t like to taste; it’s just too hot for them. A side benefit of this tea is that it also keeps many of the bugs away from your garden; apparently they don’t like the taste of it either.

The author is always that of two minds concerning the use of pesticides on a garden. One mind says that you shouldn’t use pesticides, and the other mind says some evils are a necessity. So be it on the subject of pesticides. When he was young the author used to be a crop duster, enough said. Most of the pesticides that were used in earlier days were just plain dangerous or deadly. The ones that are on the market today are safe to use if you follow the directions. They should be used on an as needed basis throughout the growing season.

All I you’re weeding problem can be reduced by a mulching between the rows. The simplest way of doing this is one of old newspapers that are laid between the rows as close to the plants as possible. You can weight them down using small stones that you picked out of your garden when you were tilling it. This keeps the weeds out of the rows, but it doesn’t keep them out from between the plants. Here you’re either going to have to go in and pull them out by hand or use a device called a hand cultivator to remove them. Even using a hand cultivator there are apt to be a few weeds growing too close to the plant that you’re going to have to remove them by hand.

Fertilizing your garden is something else you’re going to have to do. The first fertilizing is actually an application of fertilizer at the bottom of your furrows that you place the seeds on top of before you cover them up the furrows. The other time you normally fertilize is one third and two thirds through the growing season. What you fertilize with whether it is chemical fertilizer or natural fertilizer is your choice. The plants don’t know the difference. When the author was a child we normally used natural fertilizer because we had a large supply that didn’t cost us anything. We turned in cow manure as the garden was being plowed and raked. The bottoms of the furrows received a ration of chicken manure that was lightly covered with soil before planting, and covered after planting.

Some plants actually need more fertilizer than others. For these plants we used to keep a tea made out of manure to sprinkle on their roots on an as needed basis. Although we used an old washing machine for this purpose; today you can mix up this tea in a plastic pail with a cover. These plastic pails are often available for a low price at your local donut shop.

As the summer progresses you are apt to run into many different problems than the ones we have covered in this article. You will find that your local garden shop or county extension services will usually have the answer.