Gardening is indeed one of the most common ways to enjoy spending time outdoors. Many people have a garden and enjoy maintaining it and spending time in it. This is because it truly relaxes them and makes them feel good. And it’s a pleasure when you harvest something you know you’ve done by yourself. It doesn’t matter if you’re growing flowers, vegetables, or something else. It’s a wonderful feeling when you see the results of your work.
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Know What You Want
One of the best ways to start is to know what you want from your garden. What do you want to do and why are you starting in the first place? Do you want a simple garden where you can relax after a long day of work? Or do you want to grow your own food and enjoy organic meals? Whatever it is, there are no wrong answers. Think about what inspired you to start thinking about it in the first place. Think about it for a while, and once you find out, start making a plan.
Make a Plan
Now that you know what you want from your garden, start making a plan. You want to know exactly what you want to do. If you want to plant vegetables, for example, think about everything that you need in that process. What are the things that you might need the most? You’ll need to find the right spot where you can plant your seeds. You also need something to protect your vegetables from animals. If you’re planting a lot of seeds, you want to think about creating a watering system. If you’re planting a lot of seeds on a huge piece of land, you might not want to do everything by yourself. So think about every little detail before you start so you can make the entire process much easier. Even if you’re working on the smallest little garden for fun.
Choose the Seeds
This is probably the most favorite part for many people. Everyone likes to go to the gardening area in the market and take a look at the seeds. They all have beautiful pictures on them and it’s always fun to spend some time around them. But when it comes to choosing the seeds, don’t overthink it. For the beginning phase, you want to choose the seeds that you love the most.
That means, if you’re planting a vegetable garden, you want to pick the seeds of vegetables you love eating the most. Don’t plant something only because someone told you the price is good. If you want to make a business out of this, that is ok, but you should do the research first. But when you’re just starting, you want to focus on a few plants that you love. This will keep you interested enough until you start getting better at it.
Pick the Right Place to Start
You want to pick the right place to start working on your garden. And if you know what you want, you’ll easily decide where you want that to be. If you want to plant some vegetables, you might want to plant them near the kitchen. That applies if your kitchen has an outside door, of course. But even if it doesn’t, planting them around the house is not a bad idea. Especially if you have a ton of space. If you want to plant flowers, that might be different. You might want to plant them in a specific location and create a nice little sanctuary. But you can also plant them all around the house and slowly expand until you have a nice big backyard garden.
Start Removing the Grass
Once you’ve found the right spot, you want to start removing the grass. You can always pay someone to do it for you, as there are a lot of gardeners that do that for money. But again, you don’t have to, because it’s not as hard as it looks like. You can do it manually if you don’t have any tools and do it little by little. You probably won’t start with a huge piece of land if you’re only a beginner. And you’ll figure it out very quickly so you’ll know how to do it the next time and you’ll do it faster.
Prepare the Soil
After you remove the grass, you want to prepare the soil. The best way to start is to clean the ground first. Get some tools and clean up the ground from anything that doesn’t belong there so you can prepare the soil. You never know what things you can find in the ground once you start cleaning up. After you’ve done that, you’ll need to test the soil. If the soil seems to be damaged and doesn’t seem healthy at all, you’ll need to do something about it. You can easily solve this important problem by adding more nutrients to the soil. And that can be done by adding compost which you can make by yourself.
Think About the Garden Design
Before you start planting, you might want to think about the design of your garden. You want to think a few steps ahead before you start anything. It’s very hard to change anything if you’re already in the middle of the process. Not to mention if you’ve already done the work and everything starts to grow. You want to plan a few steps so you don’t end up in that situation. You can get some gardening magazines or simply use social media. Social media apps like Instagram and Pinterest have a ton of gardening ideas you can use. If you don’t know what to do when it comes to design, you can easily find what you like. And when you find something appropriate for your backyard, you’ll know where to start.
Prepare Pots and Beds
When you find the design you like, you can start working on it. The first thing you should do is to prepare some pots and garden beds. You want your garden to look organized, fresh, and tidy. That means that you’ll also have to clean everything up from weeds from time to time. But that will come later on. Start by getting some interesting pots where you can start planting seeds. Or get some nice pieces of wood and make some garden beds so you can organize everything. It might even be something completely different than these. Find what works for you and make it look good.
Start Planting
Once you’re done preparing the soil and beds, you can start planting. Get the seeds that you bought early on and read the description. You want to know exactly how deeply you should do it and what distance should you keep. If they are too close to each other, they might not be able to grow well. So you want to take care of that and find all the information that you can. If you can’t find information in the description, you want to look on the internet. You’ll find everything you need to know about each plant. And you also want to check if there are any plants that you shouldn’t plant next to each other. Once you’ve done your detailed investigation, you can start planting without having to worry. This is the part when the fun starts.
Water it Regularly
This is the most important thing that many people forget. You can’t water your plants once and then forget about them. You need to water your plants regularly, if not every day. The rules are different for all of them, so you should research a little bit so you can know for sure. If you plan to create a business out of it, you’ll need to create a water system to make it easier to maintain. But it’s not hard to create one for smaller gardens as well. You can find a ton of ideas on the internet that will save you a lot of time later on. It all takes a little bit of creativity and it doesn’t only have to be hard work. Once you understand this, you’ll understand why so many people love gardening.
Take Care of Animals
If you plant vegetables, you want to be very careful about this. You don’t want to have unwanted guests that will eat your vegetables. There are a lot of animals that may come around that you’re not aware of. Sometimes you don’t even know that they live in your area until they start eating your vegetables. So make sure you create something so that they can’t get to it. You can add a wired fence around your vegetable garden so that they can approach it. Or if you plant your vegetables in the backyard, you can close the yard from each side. But again, you can never know for sure if it works, so pay attention to it.
Enjoy the Process
Last but not least, you want to enjoy the entire process. Don’t stress too much about it if you don’t know how to do something. You’ll learn everything along the way. If you’re a beginner, of course, you’ll make mistakes, and there’s nothing wrong with it. So enjoy the entire process and learn as you go. The enjoyment you’ll have once you see the results of your work is priceless. Always remember that when you think that things are not going well.