Getting The Best Yield From Your Vegetable Patch

Getting The Best Yield From Your Vegetable PatchImage from Flickr

 

Growing vegetables at home is more popular than ever these days. Growing your own food is a fascinating hobby, but also provides a great way to save money on your groceries. If you’ve jumped right into growing your own vegetables, you may have discovered it’s much harder than it looks! If you’re struggling to keep pests away and getting poor yields, here are some tips that may help.

The most important tip I can offer is paying more attention to the soil you’re using. This comes straight from the words of professional gardeners! If the soil in your patch is deep and full of nutrients, it will encourage longer and healthier roots in everything you plant. Make a point to have higher quality soil, and everything be lusher and faster-growing. The most straightforward route to your ideal soil state is to start using raised beds. You won’t believe how much of an impact this has! In some cases, a raised bed can yield four times more than the same space using normal rows. The efficient spacing, combined with loose, fertile soil, can work utter miracles for your veggies.

Perhaps the state of your crops are all fine, but you want to grow more of them. After hearing this tip, you might give yourself a good smack! Try expanding your garden vertically instead of horizontally. By this I mean get some vining crops which grow quickly. Tomatoes, peas, squash and so on are all fairly easy to grow. After you get your hands on the right poles, grids or cages for support, you’ll be able to yield a lot more over the course of the year. Choosing more vertical-growing veggies is also a great time saver. Harvesting and maintaining these plants goes quicker because you can see precisely where the fruits are. Plants that grow upwards are also much less susceptible to fungal infections thanks to the better air circulation.

Finally, make sure to keep pests away. It’s not just aphids and slugs you have to worry about here. Rabbits, foxes, mice and a variety of other animals can all cause serious damage to your crops. Of course it can be very frustrating to wake up and see everything’s been decimated. However, there are many easy and humane solutions you can use to prevent further animal damage. For birds, you can buy cheap, plastic replicas of larger birds which will scare them away. Rabbits can be deterred by scattering your garden with various animal scents. If you live in an area with a high deer population, this can be helped by installing a fence. Make sure to get the right deer fence height though. Buying this in bulk can be a total waste if you’re too hasty.

The next time you’re tending to the garden, apply these tips. Your veggies will be much better protected, and will give you a decent yield much faster. There are many more tips you could use to spruce up your vegetable patch. Keep gardening, and you’ll only get better!

 

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