Early Spring Gardening Tips

There may be no greater satisfaction to a home owner with a green thumb than watching your spring garden bloom. Sitting back on your lawn and watching your garden shine with a natural and beautiful array of planet life can be a relaxing and stress-relieving process. There is a certain skill behind creating and caring for the perfect spring garden that requires patience, love, and attention to detail. That hard work is what makes the finished product so rewarding and fulfilling.

Whether you are planning your first garden or have been watching tomatoes ripen every spring for as long as you can remember, getting your garden off to a solid start is one of the most important things you can do to ensure success.

Here is a quick list of tips for great spring gardening.

1) Get your soil ready:

Preparing your soil for a spring garden should be done as early as possible. The main process is tilling your garden area around 8 to 12 inches beneath the surface and removing any rocks or debris. The next major step is to add organic matter and fertilizer. One thing you want to avoid is tilling when your soil is too wet. The extra water will hinder plant growth.

2) Weeding your yard:

Weeds can be a pesky thorn in your side—especially if you let them run wild for most of the winter. Wedding is the boring and tedious work of caring for a garden, but it must be done. Start early, and do a little at a time so you won’t tire yourself out.

3) Fertilize your garden with coffee grounds:

During the winter, you may have moved some of your shrubs to indoor planters – now’s the time to move them back out again! Using coffee grounds to prep your soil is a great way to save a little money and be a bit more ‘green’ in the process. The grounds are filled with nitrogen, a mineral that aids in vegetable and plant growth. Simply add them to your compost pile or directly into the soil itself.

4) Use cooking water on your plants:

Watering your plants using left over cooking water is another great way to add a nutrient boost with the vitamins and minerals left behind after you have boiled some pasta, vegetables, or potatoes. Just be sure to let the water cool down before you feed it to your plants.

5) Use chamomile tea to ward off plant infections:

Watering your plants with chamomile tea is a great way to help ward off bacterial and fungal infections that come with springtime. Spraying your plants with a chamomile tea mix a few times a week will help stop your seedling from damping off.

6) Plant egg shells along with your vegetables:

Throwing some eggshells in the same hole that you will be planting your vegetables in help your plants avoid “blossom end rot” which is often cause by a calcium deficiency. Just be sure to grind up the egg shells as much as possible.

7) Garden at night:

Many gardening experts believe that planting at night will help your garden grow faster and stronger than by planting during the day. Planting at night also maximized your water usage. Just be sure that you have the proper lighting to see what you are doing. Since the cold of the winter months might not have completely passed, you should probably wear a sweater, too!