From Planting to Maintenance: Ensuring a Healthy Garden

After the excitement of planting my garden, the next crucial step is ensuring its maintenance. This is essential to keep my plants healthy and thriving throughout the growing season. This week I focused on the importance of watering. Proper watering is fundamental for garden maintenance. I read through this blog post and it gave me some useful tips.

1. Watering your garden consistently is key. In this blog post they say that at the seed stage you should apply a soft mist of water a few times daily. Then when the plants are established and have started growing you should at least water 1 to 3 times per week.
2. Most vegetables need 1-2 inches of water per week. In the blog it provided a chart that shows how much certain vegetables need.
3. Shallow rooted vegetables need to be watered most often. This will include my lettuce and onions.
4. Be careful on how often you water deep-rooted vegetables. I will have to keep an eye on how often I am watering my tomatoes!

While going through the blog post I found I also found this link which led me to a blog about raised garden beds. I learned that the raised part of a garden bed is more exposed to heat and dry air. This means that they also lose moisture quicker during the summer. It is important to watch that your bed is not getting to dry during high temperatures and dry spells.

After doing lots of research on the process of proper watering, I also decided to focus more on the joy of gardening. I tried finding an app on my phone that could guide me on more of the benefits but I struggled to find one. So instead I decided to use Google. I found a couple quizzes that I decided to take to both learn the benefits and to see what I already knew. Quiz 1 taught me that gardening is truly good for your physical health. You are constantly doing different movements while gardening. Although my raised garden bed is not that big, I feel like it will still benefit my physical health. I also learned that gardening helps your mental health because it helps make you feel less stressed by decreasing your cortisol levels in your body. Learning this really interested me as I tend to feel lots of stress when it comes to school and work! Moving on too Quiz 2, I also learned a lot of interesting information. A few things that really stuck out to me is the fact that gardening  can help lower the risk of strokes, diabetes and heart attacks. The next thing is that being in green spaces, digging in dirt and “listening to birdsong” (might have to try that one, lol) are all good for your mental health. Although I already knew some of the benefits and joys of gardening these quizzes helped me learn more and have benefitted me on my learning project.

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Coming Up Next

1. Maintenance of my garden – focusing on weeding
2. Planting flowers
3. How to properly maintain potted plants