> Next: Cultivating
Caring for Vegetables
Let’s learn how to cultivate to prevent weeds and loosen soil, fertilize properly, and water efficiently, along with other garden care. Good care for your vegetables means high quality produce when it’s time to harvest.
In the pages that follow, you’ll find detailed information, explanations, and demonstrations for each of these important care subjects.
You’ll care for your garden properly by understanding each of the subjects in this section:
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- When and how to water a vegetable garden.
- How to prevent and control weeds in a vegetable garden.
- How to protect tender vegetable plants from killing frosts, heat, and bad weather.
- When and how to cultivate around the roots of vegetable plants.
- How to install tomato cages, lattices, and other vegetable plant supports.
- When and how to direct and correct growth and provide supports for your vegetables.
- When to prune or remove fruit from some vegetable plants so the remaining fruit grows better.
- How to recognize plants that are sick with diseases or are being eaten by pests.
- How prevent and cure diseases and pests of vegetable plants.
- What are the special techniques used with some vegetables, including lodging and blanching.
A well-prepared vegetable garden requires minimal care, usually less than 30 minutes or so every day or two. You’ll quickly master every care technique and grow beautiful vegetables in your home.
Let’s start with an overview of the most important care your vegetable plants require.
Easy Garden Care Options
The most common care practices in a vegetable garden are cultivating and mulching to prevent weeds, irrigating, fertilizing, directing growth by pinching and pruning, and controlling pests and diseases.
These gardening tasks take little effort and time compared to planning, preparing, and planting. Instead, you’ll likely find them the most enjoyable part of vegetable gardening—other than picking your reward and bounty of fresh greens and fruit when they ripen.
Preventing Weeds
Next, you’ll see how to keep weeds from growing in your garden, blocking them from competing with your vegetable plants for nutrients and sunlight.
You’ll also cultivate to uproot weed seedlings and loosen the soil as you work in air and deeply mix nutrients around your vegetables’ roots.
Learn more about preventing weeds in your vegetable garden by clicking on these links:
Irrigating
Nature sometimes gives us water to grow our vegetables through precipitation. More often, however, you’ll need to augment rain with irrigation by hand, hose, or automatic system.
You’ll learn the amount of water to apply, how frequently to irrigate, and how to gauge when your plants need more or less. The correct way to water also will be demonstrated, with different methods to use for each type of vegetable, depending on its growth habit.
Learn more about irrigating your vegetables by clicking on these links:
Fertilizing
Feeding your vegetables is another care task that should be repeated at regular intervals throughout the growing season.
You’ll learn the differences between types of fertilizer and how to consult package labels, which give useful information about which fertilizer to use. There are more than nutrients, too.
You’ll find which trace minerals and micronutrients are needed for vegetables, as well as learn about helpful organic mixtures such as kelp extract that boast growth enzymes that will give your plants vigor.
Learn more about techniques and options for fertilizing your vegetables by clicking on these links:
Other Care Practices
There’s a few more techniques worth learning to properly care for your vegetable garden.
You’ll learn to inspect your garden to monitor your plants’ health and discover when and how to thin, pinch, or prune. You’ll thin to allow your plants room to grow and produce larger fruit and healthy foliage.
If you notice a pest or a disease, you’ll find information on how to identify and control both in the sections on plant diseases and pests.
Because you plan to eat your produce, your emphasis will be on environmentally sound and sustainable control methods with little impact to you, your family, your pets, or the environment as a whole.
Learn more about other subjects useful for caring for your vegetable garden by clicking on these links: