Garden Decors

Planting a home vegetable garden is a wonderful way to provide your family with fresh healthy produce throughout the year. Even though the vegetables in your garden will be ripe for just a short period of time during the year, you can take the extras and put them into your freezer, or can them up in jars to put into the pantry, and both will be useable by your family throughout most of the entire year.

Planting your own vegetable garden also allows you to know more about how healthy or dangerous the foods you’re eating are. Store bought produce for instance, is often grown on farms which use chemical fertilizers and poisonous pest control methods. Plants absorb whatever is put onto them or into their soil as they’re growing, so if you’re eating produce which has had chemicals and toxins used on it, those chemicals are also in the plant itself, and are being fed to your body. When you grow your own vegetables in a home garden though, you can choose to use organic growing methods which are much safer for both the environment, you, and your family.

Growing a vegetable garden starts with planning. You’ll need to decide first what vegetables you plan to grow in your garden. If this is the first time you’re growing a vegetable garden, try to start small so you can get a feel for how much of each thing is needed as you become more experienced. A nice way to get started with your first vegetable garden is to select three to five of your families favorite vegetables, and plant just those the first season.

Next you’ll need to decide where you’ll place your vegetable garden. You’ll need both plenty of space and plenty of sunlight to grow vegetables. Vegetables need at least five to six hours of full sunlight each day, so figure out where in your yard that much sun is available, then see if there is enough room there for the number of vegetables you intend to grow. If your vegetable garden will be small, you can probably choose a planting location which is only about three to four feet square.

Once you have your location chosen, it’s now time to prepare the soil for your vegetable garden. You can create raised garden beds to plant your vegetables in if you’d like, and this will make preparation and care easier. If you’re planting in the ground though, you’ll need to turn the soil, remove all weeds, roots and large rocks, then mix some healthy compost into the soil so your vegetables will have the nutrition they need while growing.

After preparing the soil, you’ll need to make planting rows or long mounds of soil, to plant your vegetables in. These rows should run east to west so they’ll get the best sun and water exposure. When you start planting seeds or starter plants, be sure to put those that will grow the tallest at the north side of your lot, so they won’t shade the smaller plants too much during the day. The smallest plants should go on the south side of your vegetable garden plot, and progressively taller ones should be planted across.

Cactus gardens are something many gardener’s feel are only used in the desert southwestern part of the United States. And many people who are unfamiliar with cactus plants, assume they’re just an ugly, prickly, almost alien looking thing that crops up in the hottest and driest parts of the world.

Cactus plants do grow wild in the desert southwest, and they do thrive in extreme heat and drought conditions. But this is one of the things that makes them so wonderful to use in a home garden. You see, anyone unfamiliar with cactus plants doesn’t usually know that they produce some beautiful flowers too. In fact, most cactus plants produce flowers, and most of the plants also put on a wonderful color display throughout the year too.

Most flower blooms on cactus plants resemble more cultured and cultivated plants too. Not only are the flower buds themselves similar in shape to other types of plant flowers, but you’ll find a wide variety of colors available for the cactus flowers too.

A prickly pear cactus for instance, can create flower blooms which look a bit like tulips or roses. You might see some that are peach and white, or some that are solid red. And these cactus plants are beautiful with large flowers sticking up on each sharp spine. Not only do these cactus plants create flower blooms though, the Prickly Pear cactus also changes color throughout the year. Sometimes it’s a pale green color, and sometimes it will turn pink. Still other times you’ll see the cactus pads turn a deep purple color too.

Prickly pear cactus are also edible, much like most cactus plants are actually, and it produces fruit pods in addition to flowers throughout the year. Both the fruit and the cactus pads can be eaten. Some people fry them with butter, while others will make cactus jelly and jam from the pads.

There are many cactus plants which grow quite tall – over 15 feet in some cases – and there are plenty which grow small as well. Most will spread themselves out over time though too, so you have to be careful not to plant them too closely when creating a cactus garden.

Cactus plants usually only need about an inch of water every one to three months, so watering – or not watering rather – a cactus garden is one of the most difficult things for gardeners to accept. If you water a cactus garden too much though, the plants will actually die off. Instead, you have to make sure the cactus stay quite dry. If you live in an area that gets regular rain, you may even have to create a container based cactus garden so that you can move them to a dry spot while it’s raining outside.