You may love having your own garden, but you might also feel overwhelmed by the responsibilities that come with taking care of it. Do you know how often to water your plants? How much to fertilize them? Here’s a simple gardening maintenance checklist that you can use when tending to your garden, no matter where you live or what time of year it is.
Planning your garden
A large portion of your garden maintenance checklist should be dedicated to planning. If you’re growing fresh produce, it’s important to plan out what you need and when. How many tomato plants will you need? Can you get more from seedlings, or do you have room for only one plant in your garden? Plan according to what you want to grow, how much space you have, and how much time (and money) you want to dedicate.
Maintaining your soil
Before you start planting, make sure your soil is in tip-top shape. One of the best ways to maintain healthy garden soil is by regularly aerating it with a garden fork or digging tool. A general rule of thumb is to do so once per month throughout the growing season, but you can aerate your soil more often if it starts to feel compacted and wet. If you don’t have time for all that manual labor, consider using a tiller instead.
Watering your plants
Water your plants on a regular basis, but not too much. Most of us know that over-watering your plants can be harmful, but that doesn’t mean under-watering them is any better. It’s important to provide enough water for your soil to stay moist but not so much that it sits in excess at the bottom of your planter. To help measure how often you should be watering, place pebbles or marbles in your plant pots.
Fertilizing your plants
Before it’s time to fertilize your plants, do a soil test to see if you need it in the first place. Use a garden tester or soil pH kit (available at home and garden stores). Plants generally won’t need additional fertilizer until they start blooming. A weekly foliar spray of fish emulsion will keep them looking lush. Fertilizing too early will make your plants weak and more susceptible to pests and diseases.
Weeding
Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean your garden isn’t a mess underneath. Weeding may seem like one of those monotonous, painful chores that you have to get through in order to get to all of those fresh herbs and freshly grown veggies. But good gardeners weed frequently so they don’t end up with massive overgrowth and tangled messes of weeds that threaten their carefully tended crops. To prevent such a tragedy, add weeding to your gardening checklist.
Caring for your garden after the winter season
Garden maintenance begins when it’s too cold to work in your garden, but there’s not much to do outside—as a result, many of us tend to put off gardening tasks until warmer weather finally arrives. But you don’t have to wait until spring and summer to start thinking about what needs attention; now is a great time to use a checklist of essential maintenance items. You can run through it each year or tweak it as necessary, depending on your climate and available sunlight.
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