Organic Food Gardening

How to eliminate the use of chemical pesticides - no need to spray anything nasty in your garden again

How to start your own organic food garden with simple, easy to follow steps - great for beginners

How to provide the freshest, nutritious, most delicious foods for your family

The basic tools you'll need to get started.

How easy it is to convert your current gardening practices (if you garden already) to organic gardening practices

Click Here!

Save all your used toilet rolls until Spring. Place them upright in a seed tray so that they support each other. Fill with compost. Plant each roll with an individual seed.
These are great for starting off large seeds such as beans, marrows or courgettes. When it is time for planting out, the toilet rolls can be placed directly into the soil without disturbing the roots.

Whatever else you don't do in your organic food garden, you must compost. For plants to grow well they need nourishment. The best and cheapest way is to add rotted waste, so before you do anything else in the garden you should set aside a compost area.

Unless you are going to buy a compost tumbler,allow plenty of room to be able to turn the compost.
I don't have a very large area and in the winter I often just dig a large hole somewhere in the garden and fill it up. Great for growing runner beans or marrows! One year I noticed that part of a row of peas was a third taller where I had filled a hole the previous winter!

Unless you live in a warm climate and have a large amount of material to compost, the majority of us will cold or cool compost most of the time.
As material breaks down to form compost it gives off heat, and if you have sufficient space and material to generate heat then this will ensure that pernicious weeds will be destroyed. However most of us have to manage with a plastic compost bin or a slatted wooden one.
For a compost bin to work effectively a mixture of material should be added. Too much wet sappy material will turn slimy. Woody material will take longer to rot down and it is worth shredding it first if possible. Try to keep a good balance of materials and adding shredded newspaper and cardboard will help. Turning the compost will speed the rotting process which is why many people choose a compost tumbler.
If you just have a plain plastic bin, every few months lift the bin free of the compost, return the top three-quarters to the bin and either spread the remaining quarter across your beds or bag it up for future use. As a plastic bin will probably not generate enough heat to destroy pernicious weeds, it is probably better to burn these.

To make the best use of available ground and the growing season you need quick crop rotation.

One way I do this is to use a piece of guttering about 3ft in length. I fill this with compost and sow seeds. The young plants are then ready when ground becomes available. Simply dig a shallow trench, slide the plants in and water well.

I find this works well with peas and fast maturing crops such as lettuce.

For fruit and vegetables to grow well they need pollination. I always have patches of wild and garden flowers to encourage not only bees and butterflies but also insects to eat aphids.

Not everyone who wants to grow vegetables has a garden, but if you have some outside space where you can stand a container, it is possible to grow a wide variety of vegetables.

It is possible to buy self watering containers, but they are expensive and many people make their own using Rubbermaid containers. There are a number of websites that give instructions on how to do this, one of the best being josho.com

I have a spring that rises behind my house and trickles down across the concrete beside the building. Although the area receives no sun at all, I know from experience how beneficial the constant supply of water is to container grown plants. I believe that converting an ordinary Rubbermaid container into one that is self watering is well worth the extra effort needed.

However, if you decide just to use an ordinary container, vegetables will still grow very well. Use good quality compost and incorporate some water retaining crystals. If you decide to grow root vegetables select mini varieties and do check to see how often they will need additional fertilizer.

Fast growing salad crops are well suited for growing in Rubbermaid containers and given some protection will extend the growing season.

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