Living the Country Lifestyle All-In-One For Dummies by Tracy Barr

Author:Tracy Barr
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Published: 2010-03-08T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

Maintaining Your Edible Garden

In This Chapter

Watering, mulching, and fertilizing for optimal results

Getting rid of weeds

Helping your plants breathe

After planting your edible garden, you want to keep it growing vigorously until harvest. To do that, you need to keep your plants healthy and well-nourished throughout the growing season. If you let up just a bit on water or fertilizer, your harvest will be small or of poor quality. If you’ve ever tasted a cucumber harvested from a plant that has dried out, you know how bitter a poor harvest can be. But don’t worry. In this chapter, you find out everything you need to know to keep your garden happy.

Watering Basics

Although Mother Nature is often very generous with rain, there are times when she leaves gardens with a dry spell. Flooding isn’t good for your garden, but neither is drought. If your plants don’t have adequate water at the right time, they can easily die. But not all plants have the same watering needs, so you have to be discriminating.

Different plants need different amounts of water. Some vegetables, like celery, are real water lovers and prefer to have moist soil around their roots at all times.

The depth of a plant’s roots also makes a difference. Shallow-rooted plants (like onions and cabbage) need more careful watering during dry spells than deeper-rooted plants (like tomatoes), which can pull water from greater depths.

Why water matters: A short science lesson

Sure, without moisture, plants die. Everyone knows that. But you may not know why water is so incredibly vital. The answer is threefold, actually:

Sufficient water pressure within plant tissues creates turgor, or rigidity, so the plant can stand up. A plant without turgor pressure collapses.

Water keeps nutrients flowing from the soil, into the roots, and through the plant parts; it keeps the show going.

The show is the chemical process of photo-synthesis, which you no doubt remember from biology class in high school. The plant uses light, carbon dioxide, and water to make sugar (a pretty impressive trick). Without photosynthesis, plants can’t grow or develop flowers or fruit. And the by-product, which is so beneficial to the Earth, is oxygen.

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