Essential Guide to Organic Gardening

By gardening organically, the dependence on chemicals is removed. By eliminating chemicals used in regular gardening, your vegetables will be healthier because they will get the nutrients by natural means. Unlike traditional gardening; organic gardening will help to prevent potentially harmful toxins from entering your body. Lastly, it is much more environmentally friendly.
The biggest problems, with using modern gardening products, are the man-made chemicals. The modern gardening products such as fertilizers, pesticides, etc. contaminate the health of humans and the health of the environment. The reason behind this is because the chemicals do not just stay on the soil. These chemicals seep into the ground and poison water supplies, gardens, your home, and as mentioned, your health. The use of modern gardening products containing man-made chemicals are responsible for the reduction of the Earth's ozone layer; and they also have been linked to serious health problems, including cancer, in humans.
When you decide to garden organically, you can eliminate the concern for destroying the environment, but more importantly, you can eliminate the concern for you and your family's health and well-being. When you use modern gardening products; the toxic chemicals are transferred to you and your clothing. Obviously, these toxic chemicals could then be transferred to your children or significant other. Not to mention, if you plant vegetables non-organically, toxic chemicals will be absorbed by your vegetables; and in turn, will be ingested by you and your family. In fact, one common ailment which affects avid gardeners is dermatitis. By gardening organically, you can eliminate getting dermatitis of the hands.
By deciding to garden organically, you'll help prevent the poisoning of groundwater and prevent adding further toxins to the soil. When man-made chemicals are used for gardening, it poisons other plants. Because these man-made chemicals poison the water and other plants, it can be dangerous, or even deadly, to little creatures that rely on the water to drink or plants to eat. Lastly, the chemicals used will evaporate into the atmosphere and return in the form of contaminated rain and/or snow.
Planning Your Organic Vegetable Garden
By deciding to grow your vegetable garden organically, you're ensuring your vegetables are in their purest form, as nature intended. Modern gardening products, with chemicals, actually change the taste of vegetables. Fertilizer with man-made chemicals can also ultimately lead to severe health problems.
The first step to growing an organic vegetable garden; is to find an excellent location and adequately allocate the proper space to your organic vegetable garden. The amount of space you decide to use for your organic vegetable garden must be sufficient, but not in excess; you do not want wasted space or wasted vegetables, because you grew too many.
Another important factor to consider, when planning your organic vegetable garden, is to ensure the soil has enough drainage. You should also try to keep it in as close proximity to a water source that you possibly can.
A useful tip, when planning your organic vegetable garden, is to literally map out your garden; before you plant any seeds. After you measure the space you plan on allocating to your organic vegetable garden, you can draw your garden on a piece of graph paper. If you are so inclined, you can draw your garden to scale; on the graph paper. Either way, it will make your planting much easier, if you have a well-designed and drawn out plan to work from, while planting.
Growing Your Organic Vegetable Garden
You must start with clean soil. You should test the soil before you plant a single seed. After all, if your soil is contaminated; all the benefits of having an organic garden are nullified. The seeds you plant must also be derived from plants grown organically. If your seeds do not come from organically grown plants; the plants you grow will already be contaminated. The seeds would be carrying traces of the chemicals used to grow the non-organic plants.
A critical step, when it comes to growing an organic vegetable garden is soil preparation. Organic soil preparation is much slower than if you would use fertilizers with man-made chemicals. The fertilizer you use must be completely chemical free. Your best bet, to ensure your fertilizer is chemical free, is to purchase it at an organic garden center. You can even use items you would normally throw away; to help enrich your soil. This will be covered more in-depth in a later section.
You should make sure organic fertilizer is mixed into your soil at least three weeks prior to planting any organic seeds. As mentioned, the organic fertilization process takes a little more time, but is well worth the effort. You must be sure all chunks of the organic fertilizer are properly broken down and blended 100% into the soil.
Irrigation of your