Every spring, the garden center doors swing open and in-walk a herd of new gardeners, looking to start a garden for themselves. With increasing food costs, many people use gardens in all shapes and sizes to offset their monthly grocery bill. Not only is gardening a great way to beautify porches and yards, but you can grow better-quality produce than you’d find in the grocery store!
When some folks think about ‘organic gardening’, they think it might be difficult or overly expensive to implement in their growing space. This couldn’t be further from the truth!
Simple Swaps
Organic amendments and growing mixes are an easy way to transform your garden’s landscape, while preserving your goal of healthier plants and healthier soil.
What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think of organic gardening? Compost!
Compost is a great way to add organic matter and microbes to your soil, both of which are main focuses in organic gardening. Creating your own compost pile is fun and easy to do, especially with a plethora of rotating bucket/bins that can be used to break garden waste into compost. This not only gives back to your garden but reduces your waste! There are many high-quality compost options for gardeners that don’t have their own pile, such as our Activated Compost. Adding nutrients to your soil can be as easy as adding compost and letting your plants do the work.
For some gardeners, granular fertilizer is a better option. When looking at fertilizers, you will see a breakdown concentration of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium (NPK). While these are important nutrients for plants, they need a broad-spectrum of nutrients in order to achieve balanced growth. Synthetic and chemical amendments typically contain a concentrated dose of NPK, but they are lacking in secondary and micronutrients. These non-organic fertilizers do not feed or support the naturally occurring microbes in your soil, and can increase soil salinity (salt content), making the environment more harmful for plants and microbes over time.
Swapping to an organic granular fertilizer is an easy way to apply essential macro and micronutrients, while also improving overall soil health. Organic fertilizers are naturally derived, and work alongside the nutrient cycling process in your soil. This supports microbial health in your soil, while delivering the nutrients your plants need. Our All-Purpose Fertilizer is a 4-6-4 granular fertilizer that's supplemented with calcium, and inoculated with mycorrhizal fungi. It can improve nutrient absorption by plants, while supplying essential nutrients at the same time!
Plant Care Changes
Organic gardening isn’t only about the types of things you put in your garden, but also how you treat what’s growing there. Different gardening techniques will improve or reduce your soil’s natural biological cycle, and you can make a huge impact on your garden just by treating it differently.
Many conventional gardens are planted in the late spring, grow in the summer, and are harvested in the middle of fall. In the colder sides of the season, this means that your soil sits bare and is not productive. This can be harmful for a number of reasons.
First, bare soil has nothing to hold it together, making it more susceptible to erosion via wind and water. Plant roots create a substance called root exudates, which is the main food source for the microbes in your soil. When your soil sits bare for an extended period of time, these microbes will lose out on key nutrition. Though much of the microbial life in your soil can survive through the winter, and will flourish again in the springtime, the long-term impact of this pattern leads to soil sterilization which can cause yield reduction and even crop death.
The solution for this is to utilize cover crops! Cover crops are easy-to-care-for crops that you plant very early in the season and very late in the season, for the purpose of maintaining soil activity. A cover crop can be any plant that is cold-hardy and will ideally be nitrogen-fixing to add nutrients back to the soil. Clover and peas are common nitrogen-fixing cover crops, along with carrots, radishes, turnips, and beets. Grow healthier soil AND get an extra harvest from your garden with a single crop.
Many of us have a favorite place to plant different crops in the garden. Whether it’s the patch that gets the best sunlight for peppers, or it’s the lowest point so it gets the most water to tomatoes, or maybe it’s just the most aesthetically pleasing way to plant. But planting the same produce in the same soil year-after-year, especially when planting heavy feeders, can strip these soil patches of their nutrients, and lead to smaller harvests and struggling plants. You can solve this problem by rotating your crops! Crop rotation is the practice of planting different crops in the same garden spaces every year to give your soil time to recover from heavy-feeding plants.
Garden-Friendly Pest Management
Pest management is often regarded as the trickiest component of organic gardening. It’s incredibly easy to spray a chemical on your plants and suddenly bugs and weeds are gone forever! But the studies about the potential harm that chemical pesticides can cause are too prominent to ignore, and many gardeners are rightfully concerned about using this pest management on their produce. So, what can you do?
Organic pest management is not nearly so totalitarian as chemical biocides, but they are still effective. Combine multiple pest control methods for the best management.
Some organic spray pest control methods, including neem oil, diatomaceous earth, pyrethrins, or horticultural oils, can be used to control harmful bugs and insects. Though these components are often less toxic than synthetic pesticides, they can still have environmental impacts and should be used with caution and consideration.
For those that want to rely on plants to do the work in your garden, trap crops might be an excellent pest control method! Trap crops are plants that are strategically placed in order to draw pests away from the crops you’re trying to protect. This will protect higher-value crops and can lure pests to a central location for easier management.
You can use a similar principle to attract certain predator species for the insects you’re having issues with. Attracting predator species is fairly simple and is a natural method of pest management that can also make your garden more beautiful! For example: if you struggle with squash bugs, try attracting their natural foe the damsel bug by planting a small crop of alfalfa or clover. These don’t need to be planted directly in your garden bed but can easily be grown in a container and placed next to your problem areas.
Organic gardening may sound tough to achieve from the outside. In practice, everyone can find ways to incorporate organic techniques and products into their gardens. With a few easy changes you can ditch the chemicals to create a cleaner garden, and planet, for years to come.
Do you have questions on how to grow an organic garden in your backyard? Contact our team of experts!