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Finding The Right Organic Gardening Book For You

By Alison Wood on Wednesday, February 24th, 2010 | No Comments

Organic gardening books can be very useful for anybody who wants to begin gardening in the organic way. This means, of course, avoiding use of any harmful chemical pesticides or fertilizers. In addition, if you want a truly organic garden, you will need to begin from seeds or bedding plants that have been raised the organic way.

When you are choosing organic gardening books there are certain things that you should look out for. Keep in mind that there is no need to choose a book that gives a lot of information about different plants. You can get that information from any gardening book. What you need from a book about organic gardening is the information that is specific to working in your garden in the natural way.

Pest Control

Organic gardening books will normally contain some information on pest control. This is an important subject because the green gardener will not use most of the common pesticides and sprays that can be found in plant nurseries. Instead, you will want to know about pest control methods that are less harmful to the environment.

There are some natural methods of killing certain pests that you can learn about from books about organic gardening. In addition, there are many methods of keeping pests out of your garden without actually killing them. These include adding certain plants to your garden that pests do not like, constructing your beds in a way that deters others, and encouraging predators that will feed on the pests, including birds, ladybugs and other plant-friendly insects.

Which method of pest control should you use? It depends on the range of plants that you are growing. Therefore, a good organic gardening book will have a large section on the different types of pest control that are suitable for different plants.

Planting Plan

How you plant your organic garden is very important to the health of the plants. Many organic gardeners like to follow a system of ‘companion planting’ where plants that will support each other are planted close together. Organic gardening books often carry a list of companion plants.

It is also useful to think about which plants should be close to the house. Organic gardeners will think not only about the appearance of their garden when laying it out, but also about practical aspects such as keeping plants that need a lot of care close to the house, and also those that you will be harvesting often, such as herbs.

Fertilizer

Finally, your chosen volume should include information on how to put goodness back into the soil. Methods can include plant rotation and composting as well as using store bought fertilizer or manure. You can expect to learn how to get the absolute best from your garden and its soil in organic gardening books.

Why Buy Organic Seeds?

By Alison Wood on Sunday, February 14th, 2010 | No Comments

If you want to have a truly organic garden, you will need to buy organic seeds. Plants raised from any other type of seed are not truly organic, even if you have never used pesticide or weed killer in your garden. Standard seeds may have been subject to all kinds of sprays while they were forming on the parent plant.

In addition, non organic seeds could even be genetically modified. Genetically modified or engineered plants have had their genes altered to encourage them to have certain qualities, such as disease resistance, higher productivity, sweeter taste, etc.

This is different from selective breeding and hybridization which has been going on for centuries in order to produce the vegetables and fruits that we have today. With genetic modification, there is no way of knowing what else might be altered when the genetic material is tampered with. Even an apparently beneficial alteration such as making a plant more resistant to disease can have a negative effect if this means that bacteria evolve to survive. There is a risk that human diseases could become increasingly resistant to antibiotics as a result. There is also a risk of harming biodiversity and perhaps producing new allergens or even new diseases.

If you try to shop locally for organic seeds you may find there is not much choice available in your local stores. Of course this varies according to where you live. Some people are lucky enough to live close to a good nursery with a large range of organic plants and seeds.

However, even if you do have trouble finding organic seeds in your local area, there is no problem because you have a huge choice on the internet. As more and more gardeners and agriculturalists are turning to organic gardening methods, more organic seeds become available. Not only can you now get them for most every type of vegetable that you would want to grow in your garden, but in many cases you even have the choice of several different varieties of each plant.

Ordering online is ideal because being so small and light, seeds are very cheap to ship. You can have a large order and still pay very low shipping charges.

The most popular organic seeds are for vegetables that will be grown for food. This is not surprising. People who grow items to eat do not want to have them contaminated with pesticides and weed killers even before they are planted. In a flower garden, while purists may still want to choose organic, it is more likely that people will buy regular seeds and simply avoid using environmentally unfriendly products on the growing plants. But for anything that will be going onto your table, organic seeds are best.


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Organic Gardening: A Beginner’s Guide

By Alison Wood on Saturday, August 8th, 2009 | No Comments

We are now all aware of the benefits to our health that eating organic food can bring us. Not only from the increased nutritional value of the food but also from the lack of chemicals that we are ingesting with every bite, if we go down the organic route.

Organic food however, does come at a premium in terms of cost, and thus that is why many people are turning to growing their own.

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If this is something that is of onterest to you then you might want to take a look at the Organic Food Gardening Beginner’s Manual. This guide walks you through everything you could want to know about starting out in organic gardening and comes with some great bonus gifts including ‘My Garden Diary’ and ‘Seed Saving Tips and Techniques’ amongst others.

If you just want to start out small and grown some herbs and salad vegetables or if you want to launch your own sustainable plot then don’t delay, a wealth of healthy fresh fruits and vegetables await.


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