Use These Gardening Tips to Shape Your Planning For Spring
It’s that time of year when the holidays are over, but spring seems far away. While it’s still wintry conditions, it’s a perfect time to begin dreaming of your garden and making plans for an enjoyable yard. When you start planning in January, you have time to really think through your goals for your garden and research gardening tips for reaching those goals.
If you’re not sure what your gardening goals are for 2018, you have plenty of time to consider a few options. Here are some common reasons for having a garden, along with some gardening tips for each goal:
Access to the freshest possible produce: Homegrown tomatoes are one of the most common reasons to start a backyard vegetable garden, but there are other motivations that keep gardeners at it, year after year:
- A supply of herbs and hard-to-find ingredients
- Food security for your household
- Knowing where your produce comes from, and what was used to grow it
- Canned or frozen produce in the winter months
- Of course, those heirloom tomatoes
Start now: You don’t have to wait for March or April to begin planning your garden. Begin researching the best varieties for your region and start diagramming where you’ll place each of your vegetables in your garden. You can also take time to refine your plans for fertilizing your vegetable plants.
Teaching children to garden: Maybe you’d never go to the trouble to garden if it weren’t for your kids. Here are a few of the most common kid-related motivations for a summer vegetable garden:
- They’ll learn about the growing cycle of a plant.
- Plucking vegetables right out of the garden for dinner may increase their appeal for picky palettes.
- Kids love to get their hands into dirt and help with watering, an activity that gets them away from screens and helps them connect with nature.
Again, you can start planning your kid-friendly vegetable garden in January. Think about the vegetables your kids enjoy eating, and then mix in a few additional plants that you’d like for them to try, or that are fun to grow. Including fast-growing varieties like loose-leaf lettuce can help kids get a relatively fast reward for their efforts.
Love for the environment: Some gardeners not only love harvesting fresh vegetables, but also feel a responsibility to plant a garden. Here are some of the reasons why you may be environmentally motivated to begin planting this spring:
- You know the value of reducing the amount of turf in your yard that needs maintaining.
- You’ll create a habitat for butterflies, bees and hummingbirds, depending on what you grow.
- Your vegetables will be transported by foot to your kitchen, rather than by truck to your grocery store.
An environmentally-friendly garden will require some research before spring arrives. You’ll need to determine which plants, like milkweed, will encourage butterflies to visit your plot, or what type of fertilization methods are the most environmentally-friendly, such as composting.
One of the best gardening tips is to organize your plants with attractive labeling materials from Kincaid Plant Markers. Built to last for a lifetime of gardening, our plant markers will help you create a beautiful yard, no matter what your motivation is for gardening.
