10 Ways to Maintain Your Garden
Watering by hand is one of the best ways to help keep your garden healthy. It allows for you to adequately water each plant individually which helps lower the risk of overwatering, which contributes heavily to fungi and diseases. It also gives you a regular opportunity to inspect your plants for any signs of disease or pests.
While it may seem like a minor issue, cleaning your garden tools regularly is an important step in stopping the spread of bacteria among your plants. Cleaning your garden tools regularly will also help them last longer.
Keeping out unwanted pests like insects, slugs, and even rabbits, can sometimes be one of the more challenging garden maintenance tasks. Luckily there are many different strategies and pest control methods you can use to keep your garden safe! Practicing companion planting, using physical barriers around plants, and using raised garden beds are all great ways to minimize pests in your garden. For more pest control tips and tricks, check out our Pest Prevention 101 blog post.
While often practiced as a way to repel pests from your plants, companion planting also yields many other benefits, such as improving the taste of many different types of vegetables and helping each other fight off various diseases. Carefully planning and arranging what plants you are growing together can greatly minimize the need for extra garden maintenance in the future!
Performing basic plant maintenance is one of the most essential parts of maintaining a healthy garden. For example, pruning, or cutting the branches of your plants to control their growth, is a key component of garden maintenance that will not only improve the aesthetic value of your garden, but also its productivity and overall health. Similarly, deadheading, which is the process of cutting off old flower blooms to make room for new ones, is another method essential in promoting growth in your garden. Even simply removing dead and disease ridden plants from their neighbors is another integral part in promoting your garden’s growth!
Staking your plants is the process of placing upright stakes in the ground and then using plant ties to secure the plant to the stake, forcing it to grow upwards. This can help increase the yield of your plants as well as keep your plants away from their ground where they can be prone to disease and rotting.
Another important step in preparing and maintaining your garden is making sure you are giving your plants enough space between each other to fully grow until it’s time for harvest. Generally, you should space out plants according to their average expected width by the time of harvest. Doing so will help not overcrowd your garden, which can lead to diseased plants spreading bacteria to other plants.
It’s also very important to keep foliage as dry as possible, since overwatered leaves can often lead to rotting and the growth of fungus.
Removing weeds from your garden is key to maintaining good soil and plant health. Not only do they look bad, but weeds actually steal valuable nutrients from plants and the soil, as well as acting as a breeding ground for various insects and diseases.
Using the right kind of fertilizer for your soil is crucial for the health of your garden. Depending on what plants you are growing, there are different kinds of fertilizers that can contain various nutrients that certain plants need more than others. For example, leafy vegetables require more nitrogen than say, potatoes or carrots, which require more potassium. So carefully planning what you want to plant and which nutrients those individual plants need most is key to planning and maintaining a healthy, productive garden.