5 Top Backyard Garden Tips For Beginners

Wednesday, December 10th, 2008 at 10:02 am

Image by Aziez Ahmed via Flickr

I am a bit embarrassed to say this but man did I mess up our first year as backyard gardeners. My wife left it in my capable hands but I think she should have looked to see if I had a green thumb first.

Not to worry though. It was a learning experience and we will do much better planning this winter.

I am sure that I am not alone when it comes to being a newbie as a backyard gardener. So rather than just plan things in secret I decided to share a few tips that should help us and those that read this post.

Backyard Garden Tips For Spring

Garden Tip #1: Start planning your garden NOW, while it’s still winter. We waited until it was already spring before we started our planning and by the time we had our plan in place we were late, very late.

It’s all a learning experience by there is no need to learn the hard way, like we did last season.

Garden Tip #2: Know the nutrients and soil conditions for each plant you put in your garden, whether they are vegetables, fruit or flowers, they all have nutritional requirements that will cause them to suffer if not met.

Garden Tip #3: Our soil sucks big time and almost like concrete so we chose to use raised bed so that we would have the right soil no matter where we planted.

Garden Tip #4: Know what the spacing for each plant you decide to grow but keep in mind that some plants can be planted fairly close together and then thinned out as they grow.

This tip is great for those that like baby beets or baby turnips. You can have an early treats while giving the rest of the plants more room to grow as they mature.

Garden Tip #5: Keep good notes on your progress and don’t give up if you mess it up like I did. Just learn from those mistakes and do better next time.

Even though I was late planting we still had a lot of great produce, just not as much as we would have if we had planted a month sooner.