Over the last few days, we have been harvesting salads, radishes, and herbs from our garden. In this post, you are going to see, that even if you have bad soil, not much sun, nibbling rodents, and more (like us), you can still grow a bountiful garden!
Here is our herb garden:
It does not get full sun and our soil does not drain very well, but look at what we have harvested from it!
(We have containers for most of our plants here to take care of the problem of bad soil. The soil has been loosened where the mint is in the ground.)
As you can see, we even have some lavender plants near this area. On the web, you will see that lavender likes full sun and well drained soil. Lavender plants will do better in full sun and well draining soil, but these plants have neither, and they are still doing fine.
In our mostly greens garden, we made a chicken wire and zip tie cage to protect the plants from animals that will eat them, and tilled the soil to help the plants grow. This space does not get full sun, but it still gave us a good harvest. In the summer heat, lettuce will bolt (when a plant starts to flower and their leaves taste bad) pretty quickly, so in this scenario, the shade might help. There is mostly bok choy (a plant with edible leaves) right now, because we harvested and pulled out the other plants, (they were bolting) and started seeds in the bare spaces.
These places in the garden that I showed you today are not the best spots for gardening, but we still have managed to get a bountiful harvest from them. Here are some of the things we will/have done to maximize our harvests. Firstly, we water our plants everyday, because in the summer/late spring heat, the soil will dry up very quickly. Also, every week or two we will fertilize our plants. This is especially important if you are growing your plants in containers or poor soil. Another thing you can do to get good harvests from your plants is to spray your plants with neem oil. Neem oil is an oil that keeps away or kills many plant bugs.
Keep in mind that many of these plants will do better in full sun and well drained soil if you can plant them in those conditions, but if you don’t have lots of sun or good soil, do not let that keep you from growing a garden! Bye now!
Tiger Shakti 