4 Helpful Gardening Tips

By Harry Wilson

Harry Wilson is the Head of Digital Marketing Department at Globex Outreach. He helps clients grow their online businesses and occasionally writes blogs to share his experience with other professionals. 

Nature is a great healer, and whenever we feel a bit off from this materialistic world, we find our eternal peace in nature and its charming beauty. 

So, what can be better than turning this pretty gift into a hobby of yours? Didn’t get what I am saying? Well, yes, I am talking about gardening, which is one of the most popular hobbies around the world. 

Gardening helps people to relax and calm their nerves as well as do something useful that helps heal their inner selves and nature as well. 

If you too want to adopt this hobby, but have no idea where to begin, these Over Top Info Gardening 101 tips can help you out a lot. They’ll also guide you on keeping your home garden fresh just like the way you want it to be. 

Identify Your Conditions

Whenever you want to start doing something, you need to begin by getting into its basics and what you would like to do with it. Similarly, when gardening, you would first need to identify what kind of conditions you can offer to the vegetables, fruits or plants you want to grow. 

This is necessary as every plant is adapted to its own particular range of conditions and you need to know what you can offer them to successfully raise them. Is your gardening space sunny (6 hours or more of direct sun per day), partly shady (4 to 6 hours of sun) or shady (less than 4 hours of sun)? Is the soil moist most of the time (touch to tell) or tends towards dryness? For permanent plants, like fruit trees, you also need to know how cold it becomes in winter. (For that, ask your garden center what your “hardiness zone” is.) 

Once you know what you have to offer, you need to look for plants that correspond. This kind of information is found, in the form of symbols, on the plant’s label. Again, ask a garden center employee to help you choose.

It would also help to determine the amount of time a plant takes to grow and start producing its flowers or fruit, as well as what kind of pesticides and fertilizers it needs to grow safely. 

Start Small

Another one of the greatest gardening tips is to start with a limited gardening space and a small range of plants. Although going all in and planting huge numbers of seeds might sound like an exciting idea to you, it’s easy to become overwhelmed as the plants sprout and grow. The whole thing can turn into a failure if the plants are not properly cared for. 

So, always start out with just a few plants and test if you’re able to grow them properly or not. In addition to that, this first experience will also help you to become familiar with the must-dos and don’ts of those plants for future reference. 

Starting with the basics and small numbers will also help guide you in making sure your garden is up to the mark and you are going in the right direction.

Harvest Your Plants When They’re Ready

Once you’re able to plant the seeds and starter plants and they grow up into proper fruits or vegetables, you’ll know that your efforts are finally paying off. 

However, no matter how beautiful they might look on the plant, you have to know when to harvest them. Some change color when they’re ripe (tomatoes, pumpkins, most fruits, etc.), but most vegetables are actually harvested immature: lettuce and other leaf vegetables, beans, peas, cucumbers, etc. The secret is to compare them to what the same vegetable looks like in the grocery store. Harvest beans when they’re thin and about 3 to 6 inches (7 to 15 cm) long, like store-bought beans; cucumbers when they’re green and about 8 inches (20 cm) long, etc. Harvesting at the right time is essential, because if you leave a vegetable in the garden too long, it can become hard, bitter or start to rot. 

So, if you don’t want all your efforts to go to waste, eat your garden-fresh vegetables and fruits as soon as they are proper size and shape and ready to eat. 

Use the Three Second Rule

If you want to make sure that your plants aren’t getting too much moisture, which can lead to rot and disease, you can use the three-second rule. 

This rule is to water your plants abundantly at their base, either with a hose or a watering can, for three seconds. This will moisten give the soil at the base of the plant all the water that it can hold, but not waste water, allowing pour plants to get the water they need, but without excess. 

Apply these 4 gardening tips as you first begin to garden and just watch your thumb turn green!