Natural Gardening the Fast and Easy Way
Article by John Yeoman
Natural gardening is the art of growing more food with less work the way our grandparents did – using skill and wisdom rather than expense and chemicals. How do you start on the path to getting more food – and fun – from your garden the natural way? Here are five key principles:
1. Get your garden essentials free
You should have to purchase very little for your natural garden. Nature provides most of it free!
For example, do you really need to buy garden seeds, at least after the first year? Be sure to choose only seeds that are not F1, F2 or ‘hybrid’ and you can safely collect and keep the seeds from the plants you grow. Chances are, they’ll grow true to their variety next year. So you can save the seed again. And again.
Better still, trade your seeds with other gardeners. Of course, the same applies to any garden essential that you can trade or borrow. You’ll discover a host of interesting new friends and won’t ever have to buy anything for your garden again.
2. Discover natural weed suppression
Don’t buy herbicides and weed killers. They contain toxic chemicals that stay a long time in the soil, whatever manufacturers may claim.
Most annual weeds will die after repeated doses of fierce brine or strong household vinegar, say, from a pickle jar. As for those perennial nasties like horsetail, bindweed, quack grass and the like, a plastic membrane or old carpet does the trick. You just cut little holes and grow plants through them.
True, those pesky weeds will return once you take off the membrane but, over many years, you’ll be able to grow a lot of food in that area with little work.
3. Apply natural pest control
For every pest, there’s a natural gardening remedy. Most leaf-crawling bugs like caterpillars and aphids will succumb to a mix of vegetable cooking oil shaken with water and a little washing up liquid. Some folk add garlic, chilli or other spices as irritants but oil is the key ingredient. It seals the bugs’ breathing holes.
Just-boiled water will also kill soft-bodied insects. It won’t harm a large mature plant. Flick the liquid on with a brush.
If your soil has nematodes or other soil-crawling pests, plant French marigolds (Tagetes patula) around the plants you want to protect. (They have a great musky fragrance too!) Do note, they must be Tagetes patula. Other marigolds or calendula don’t work.
Got problems with flying bugs? Smear garlic paste on sticks and stake them around your beds. Carrot fly and the like won’t come near.
4. Organic disease preventives
Many old gardeners’ tricks really do work. For example, when you plant seed potatoes put soot or lawn clippings around them and it deters scab.
Late blight in outdoor tomatoes can’t easily be controlled, even with the latest copper-based chemical products. But you can stop blight taking hold simply by growing your tomatoes out of the rain. A simple transparent awning will work.
Fungal diseases can usually be prevented by not crowding your plants, keeping damp away and spraying an infusion of kelp or horsetail. Hundreds of other natural remedies for plant diseases exist, based upon common sense or organic solutions based on plants you can find in your own garden.
5. Make your own gardening gadgets
Don’t buy a labor-saving gadget! Consider instead whether – with just a little ingenuity – you could make your own for pennies. Or for free.
For example, all hoses become ‘leaky hoses’ in time. So you can make your own automatic irrigation device by perforating an old hose at six-inch intervals, stopping one end and attaching the other end to an outdoor tap or rain barrel. You’ll have a watering device as good as anything that’s shop-bought.
It’s foolish to buy plastic clips to fasten canes and trellises. Cut strips out of plastic milk bottles and staple them! Or you can collect the wire twists from discarded champagne corks. (Get them free from restaurants.) They make a strong durable ‘clip’ that can be twisted around wigwams of canes, at the top, and will hold them together even in a storm.
Don’t shop – think!
As Homer Simpson might say: ‘Duh! It’s easy.’ Once you learn to think like a natural gardener, you’ll save a fortune – and have a lot more fun in your garden. You can also laugh, politely, at your neighbors who exhaust their wallets to buy ready-made solutions to gardening problems rather than thinking their way out of them.
After all, the old time gardeners didn’t always have easy access to a garden center or farm supply shop. But they didn’t do so badly, growing food the natural way. If they hadn’t done so, you wouldn’t be around today to read this article!
About the Author
Dr John Yeoman PhD chairs the Gardening Guild, the center for natural gardening ideas. You’ll find a wealth of ingenious ideas to grow more food with negligible work in his book Lazy Secrets for Natural Gardening Success. It’s yours free at: http://www.gardeningguild.org/lazy
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