Taking time to observe your garden can help ensure you end up with a successful harvest. But what
should you observe?
This week’s blog post—
3 Things to Observe in Your Garden for a Successful Harvest—focuses on what you can observe in your garden.
The 3 things in general to observe in your garden are:
1. Wildlife visiting your garden.
2. Moisture level in your soil.
3. How your vegetables are doing.
When you take the time to observe these 3 things you get to know your garden which will help you make better decisions on how to manage your garden.
Let’s look a bit more why observing your garden is so important.
Why You Should Observe Your Garden
Often you might see
gardening advice that is given as if it applies to everyone. The most common is that your garden needs the equivalent of 1 inch of rain every week.
But there is also lots of advice out there about making sure to fertilize your plants on regular cycles.
These are examples of advice that don’t require you to observe your garden. Instead you just do X on a regular cycle regardless of the unique aspects of your own garden.
There are more examples of this sort of thinking but what connects them is they’re all examples of not taking time to observe your garden.
Let’s look at watering as an example.
You could just
water on that regular cycle or you could use a basic test—that is just stick your finger in the soil and see if the soil is moist and cool.
This works best if you have a mulch layer over your garden but even without mulch you can still use this test.
I use this test regularly in my gardens and other growing areas. I know my plant
roots go deep into the soil so if the top layer of soil is moist then most likely the soil deeper down will also be moist.
Though you do want to make sure you water deeply when you do water and not just get the surface of the soil wet.
If the soil is still cool and moist then I don’t worry about watering. The result is that I water far less than is generally recommended. My
perennial food systems don’t get watered at all.
I will water my plants if needed but instead of following some general one-size-fits-all rule I instead observe my garden which let’s me respond to what my garden actually needs.
This is just an example of the benefit of observing your garden.
What Do You Observe in Your Garden?
I would love to hear from you about what you observe in your garden and how your observations affect your
gardening.
Please leave a reply to this
thread and don’t forget to go check out the
blog post. The post dives into 3 ways you can observe your garden so make sure to visit it.
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If you leave a comment on the
blog post make sure to leave a post here on permies too so I can easily give you the slice of pie.