The first thing to mind when planning a new garden is to start small. A small plant bed, about 25 or 30 feet square is perfect, is just enough room for about 30 plants. This will give you a chance to try out your green thumb and if you find that you enjoy your garden, especially growing your own food, you can expand your garden plot.

Begin by selecting the garden site on your property. Gardening must be planted in an area that gets at least six hours of sunlight unobstructed by large shading trees or buildings. Stay away from large trees that will rob your plant's water and root nutrients, and at least three feet away from any fences or buildings. In hot climates it is adviseable to select a place that provides part shade from the intense afternoon sun. You can have a healthy garden with ten to twelve hours of sunlight, but in all cases be sure to read the planting directions for the different gardening plant sunshine requirements. Avoid areas that have rocky soil, steep slopes, or areas where water stands. With very rocky soil you will need to rake down and through at least one foot down to eliminate most of the rocks. It's important to avoid steep slopes because of frequent depletion of soil resources from water run offs. Obviously in standing water areas most non aquatic plants will drown.

In most cases soil will require tilling and composition improvement. Begin your garden site maintenance by removing rocks, debris, and any grass and weeds then dig the spot up about one foot deep. Level up the dirt and add enriched topsoil, compost, and minerals according to your planting requirment. For example, if your soil is too acidic, add lime; if it is too sandy, add peat moss. Fortunately, many plants can thrive in neutral to slightly acidic soil with just a scoop of fertilizer.

There are three important factors to research and to select your best gardening seeds.

• Growing Zone, also known as the minimum and maximum temperature required for the plant to thrive. Most gardening sites and books provide a growing zone table which associates your area to its temperate zone. Then you compare the growing direction from your plant to your growing zone to determine if it's suitable.
• Soil Type, determine if your planting prefers alkaline, acidic, if it can grow in clay soil or requires well tilled loose soil, and the type of fertilizer it thrives best.
• Sunshine and length of growing season requirement. In shorter growing zone areas it is recommended to start your plants and vegetables indoors. You can begin your indoor garden near a sun exposed window or on a sunny but sheltered porch. You can start the seeds with inexpensive seedling pottings. A cheap, free, method to make your own seed pottings is to cut in small rolls a used toilet or paper towel cardboard tube. Place cardboard rolls upright and fill with loose soil suitable to start seeds and water to a moisture.

Before you begin to purchase seeds you might want to check with your local seed exchange community. The local seed exchange community offers several benefits: It enables you to start a kitchen garden that fits your budget which in many cases could be nearly free. Second, local seeds are usually better adapted to your growing environment and resist pests, giving you better and bigger food produce.

Having mentioned the latter, the advantages of purchasing your seed or seedlings (seedlings are seeds which already sprouted seeds and tiny leaves) is "time", variety and guarantee. Many plants especially fruit and nut trees require several or more years before they are mature enough to produce harvestable food. You can save years and month by purchasing a started seedling plant or tree. In most cases the nursery garden supply store offers good varieties of fruit and vegetable plants with associated mineral and fertilizer products to maximize our garden's productivity. That's how I started my gardening experiment by browsing through garden catalogs to learn how seeds are selected, what tools were used for various planting phases and the type of fertilizer and pesticide (preferably organic) available if needed. Finally, most garden supply catalogs offer a money back guarantee if their plant fails to take root and thrive but be certain that you read between the lines because each store has their own limitations or exceptions.

Whether you exchange or buy seeds be certain to plant them according to directions. If you start with live plants, choose ones with green, healthy looking leaves and stems and healthy roots. Plant the smaller plants towards the front of the bed (facing sunshine) and larger ones to the back. The key to successful gardening is planting at the right time. Be sure to wait until the frosts are over before planting or start your seed in sheltered sunny locations. If you are planting seeds the package's direction will tell you exactly when you can plant them to achieve maximum growth.

Make sure your plants receive enough water in well drained soil without sogging the roots. Hand watering works well if you only have a few plants. For larger plots sprinklers or drip hoses works well. Watering is more efficient during the cooler parts of the day. How much water is needed will depend on the type of plant, most will require at least an inch per week. Obviously, during the hottest periods plants will require watering two or three times per week.

One of the key success ingredient to high yield gardening is to enrich your growing soil with mulch or compost. A few inches of organic mulch will improve your soil's fertility and help the soil retain moisture. Wood chips, grass clippings, leaves, manure, and pine needles are all things that can be found for free and used as mulch. Especially leaves in the fall when deciduous trees shed their leaves: With these leaves alone you can have all the mulch you'll ever need. An inexpensive method to prepare them for composting into rich dark soil by wrapping chicken wire mesh fencing around four corner posts. Basically you can configure your composting area to any size you expand the corner post to. Then wrap it with appropriate length wire mesh completely around and tie with any wire string or rope available. Toss the leaves inside including other biodegradeable, organic fibers and keep the compost pile moist but not soaked. An occasional stir with a pitch fork will speed up the composting process by allowing air to mix into the lower levels. Optionally, for convenience. you can also implement a collecting box at the bottom to make it easier to remove compost but this is not an absolute necessity.

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Top 8 Reasons To Grow Your Own Organic Food (And to buy organic when you can't grow it)
1 - GET THE NUTRITION YOU NEED & ENJOY TASTIER FOOD
Many studies have shown that organically grown food has more minerals and nutrients that we need than food grown with synthetic pesticides. There's a good reason why many chefs use organic foods in their recipes—they taste better. Organic farming starts with the nourishment of the soil, which eventually leads to the nourishment of the plant and, ultimately our palates.
2 - SAVE MONEY
Growing your own food helps cut the cost of the grocery bill. Instead of spending hundreds of dollars at the grocery store on foods that don't really nourish you, spend time in the garden, outside, exercising, learning to grow your own food.
3 - PROTECT FUTURE GENERATIONS
The average child receives four times more exposure than an adult to at least eight widely used cancer-causing pesticides in food. Food choices you make now will impact your child's future health.
4 - PREVENT SOIL EROSION
The Soil Conservation Service estimates more than 3 billion tons of topsoil are eroded from the United States’ croplands each year. That means soil erodes seven times faster than it's built up naturally. Soil is the foundation of the food chain in organic farming. However, in conventional farming, the soil is used more as a medium for holding plants in a vertical position so they can be chemically fertilized. As a result, American farms are suffering from the worst soil erosion in history.
5 - PROTECT WATER QUALITY
Water makes up two-thirds of our body mass and covers three-fourths of the planet. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates pesticides-some cancer causing-contaminate the groundwater in 38 states, polluting the primary source of drinking water for more than half the country's population.

6 - SAVE ENERGY
American farms have changed drastically in the last three generations, from family-based small businesses dependent on human energy to large-scale factory farms. Modern farming uses more petroleum than any other single industry, consuming 12 percent of the country's totally energy supply. More energy is now used to produce synthetic fertilizers than to till, cultivate and harvest all the crops in the United States. If you are growing your own food you are cutting down on transportation and pollution costs.
7 - KEEP CHEMICALS OFF YOUR PLATE
Many pesticides approved for use by the EPA were registered long before extensive research linking these chemicals to cancer and other diseases had been established. Now the EPA considers 60 percent of all herbicides, 90 percent of all fungicides and 30 percent of all insecticides carcinogenic. A 1987 National Academy of Sciences report estimated that pesticides might cause an extra 4 million cancer cases among Americans. If you are growing your own food, you have control over what does, or doesn't, go into it. The bottom line is that pesticides are poisons designed to kill living organisms and can also harm humans. In addition to cancer, pesticides are implicated in birth defects, nerve damage and genetic mutations.
8 - PROMOTE BIODIVERSITY
Mono-cropping is the practice of planting large plots of land with the same crop year after year. While this approach tripled farm production between 1950 and 1970, the lack of natural diversity of plant life has left the soil lacking in natural minerals and nutrients. To replace the nutrients, chemical fertilizers are used, often in increasing amounts. Single crops are also much more susceptible to pests, making farmers more reliant on pesticides. Despite a tenfold increase in the use of pesticides between 1947 and 1974, crop losses due to insects have doubled-partly because some insects have become genetically resistant to certain pesticides.

Additional Informational Resource
• Organic Tomato Magic: Grow Incredible Tomatoes, and Double Your Harvest.
• The Complete Grape Growing System: Learn the art of growing grapes.
• Organic Food Gardening Beginner's Manual
• Ultimate Aquaponics Home System: It is the combination of hydroponics with aqua-culture.
• Organic Pest Control Secrets: Get Rid of Pests Without Chemicals.

Yes you can do it!

- - - Peter Landy.

"Freedom, is not Free - - - Use it or Lose it "

Contact: landypeter@yahoo.com