Have the desire to grow a garden, but don’t have the space or a large budget? Follow along with Captain Create this Summer to learn money saving gardening tips. At the end of the harvest, we will learn to cook healthy meals with what grew!
Exercise And Gardening
Exercise is so important for bodies to stay healthy and strong. It not only improves our physical health, but it also provides opportunities to spend time with our families.
Gardening can be very labor intensive. Between planting, weeding, watering, harvesting and maintaining the garden, gardening really shapes up to be a work out. To encourage healthy family habits, invite your family along to try some of these planting methods!
Time To Plant
It’s now warm enough in Utah to plant most veggies and fruits outside! If you’ve been following along on the blog so far, your seedlings, AKA your baby plants, are now becoming big enough to put outside!
Utah is known for having extremes in weather, both extreme cold and extreme heat. To ensure that your seedlings do not freeze overnight, it’s important to plant them after the last frost of the season. Usually in Northern Utah that time is around Mother’s Day, but make sure to check your local weather for your specific last frost date.
Utah State University’s Extension program has a great guide for frost dates on the Wasatch front, check out this article if you have any questions.
The Ultimate Planting Guide
While I researched planting methods I found this guide from Utah State University Extension program to be the most helpful. This guide includes a long list of garden produce and care instructions, and is great for first time gardeners!
USU Extension’s Growing Guides
Planting For Success
There are multiple methods to planting your cute little seedlings and starts, but at it’s basics it’s important to space your plants out properly, cover the roots with dirt and stand the plant upright.
Spacing varies from plant to plant. I found that the easiest way to space plants is to follow the instructions on the seed packet or marker that is included with a start. If you find that your garden is too full, you can “thin” your seedlings. This means that you remove several seedlings to create space for others. This results in healthier plants that can get more light and nutrients, which results in higher harvest yields!
Plants that need lots of water like tomatoes and melons may benefit from creating a well for water. This can be done by creating a circle around the seedling that is dug several inches into the dirt, which allows lots of water to soak around thirsty roots. What a fun opportunity to play in the dirt!
If you have a larger garden it may be beneficial to grow your plants in raised rows to save time on watering. The trick to this method is planting your starts in a raised row, and create ditches between each raised row where the water will flow. This speeds up watering and can promote root growth.
These are just some techniques to help your plants grow, remember that the basics of planting is simply putting a seedling or start into the ground. If you want to experiment with spacing and planting techniques, go for it!
Money Saving Tip: Improve the chances of higher harvest yields by planting your seedlings/starts properly.
Next Week
I hope that you enjoy time outside in the sun, working to plant your garden full of healthy produce! Remember to drink lots of water and use sun protection as needed.
Next Friday come back for more affordable gardening tips! If you’ve missed the previous posts to this series, I linked them below. Happy gardening!
-Captain Create