Some Golden Rules

While container and lasagna gardening can make the idea of growing your own vegetables a lot more doable, the amount of knowledge that comes along with even beginning can be overwhelming too!  In “The Zero-Mile Diet: A Year-Round Guide to Growing Organic Food”, Carolyn Herriot provides us with 10 of her golden rules for growing great produce. Today, I am going to share a few of those with you.

Herriot’s first rule is seed selection, which involves choosing to plant vegetables that you already enjoy.  While the idea of planting unfamiliar or new items is enticing, it might not assist you in actually using the items in your garden. If you have a limited amount of space, you might also want to grow plants that will save you more money at the grocery store.

Another important rule for the garden is diversity. If your garden contains a variety of items like flowers, grasses, and berries, bugs will be kept away and plant growth will be improved; a homogenous garden will only serve to attract pests and disease.

The last rule I’m going to give you is crop rotation. While you may not notice a problem if you don’t move plants around in the first few years, diseases like white rot and pests like weevils will eventually show up. If the host plant is moved, the life cycle of the disease or the pest will automatically be broken.

While I hope some of these rules will help, you’ll have to read the book for the rest!

A recipe for your own fertilizer:

Mix four parts (by volume) seed meal (Nitrogen) with one part dolomite lime (potential Hydrogen), add one part rock phosphate (Phosphorus) and one half-part kelp meal (Potassium).

Thank you to Carolyn Herriot and Harbour Publishing for recipes and information from “The Zero-Mile Diet: A Year-Round Guide to Growing Organic Food.” You can attend the book launch on July 10th, 2010 at 2:30 PM at the Organic Islands Festival in Victoria, BC. For the complete Program Schedule, click here.

Tags: education, Food, Organic, Sustainable