Want To Grow Organic Food? Here Are Some Tips
Series: Free Organic Gardening Course
- What Is Soil Made Of And How Does Soil Form?
- Home Soil Testing – No Need For A Soil Test Kit
- How To Prepare Soil For A Garden – 2 Different Ways
- Soil Sample Testing – How To Take A Soil Sample
- Natural Organic Fertilizers – How To Choose For Your Garden
- Organic Garden Pest Control – Without Toxins
- Organic Weed Control – Kill Weeds Naturally And Forever
- Organic Composting 101 – Making Compost Better
- Worm Bin Composting – How To Build A Worm Compost Bin
- Homemade Fertilizer – 2 Great Easy-To-Make Fertilizers
- Cover Crops For Gardens – Build Soil And Control Pests
- Soil Inoculant For Plant Nutrition (And Fewer Pests)
- Permaculture Principles – A Few Tips For Your Garden
- How To Make Your Own Garden Inoculant For Less Than $1
- How To Plan A Landscape Design – 6 Steps To A Good Garden
- Seedbed Preparation, Sowing Seed And Planting Vegetables
- Want To Grow Organic Food? Here Are Some Tips
- Forest Gardening – How To Grow A Food Forest
- When Gardening Organically, You Need To Think Differently
If you’re interested in learning how to grow organic food, I have some tips today.
Admittedly this post is a little bit all over the place, but hopefully there’s something in here that will be useful to you.
The video is worth watching, and at minute 3:57 I explain the ‘3 sisters’ that I was planting in the video last week.
(At the beginning of the video, I say ‘Back from Amsterdam!’ – that’s because I shot this video last year when I had just returned from my trip there where my sister and I had made a bunch of videos on container gardening.)
Feel free to ask your questions down below…
First, How Big?
Not too big. This is an important one.
I say even just doing a good job with 10 different kinds of plants is much better than struggling with 30.
You can grow a decent amount of organic food if you intensely plant 100 square feet, and it won’t be overwhelming.
The biggest time investment is usually in spring, when you amend the soil, optionally start seedlings, and plant and sow your beds.
Then comes summer time when you can end up with loads of the same kind of fruits or veggies at once, so you need to be ready to preserve or share them or they’ll go to waste.
If you start small, you can keep on top of weeds and watering and fertilizing and really pay attention to everything that’s happening in the garden, rather than spending all season scrambling to keep up.
Grow Organic Annuals
Some approaches to growing organic food have a long-term outlook, while others are more focused on immediate results.
Annuals like tomatoes and cucumbers are more for the short term.
They’re definitely a real treat, and they’re mainstays of an organic vegetable garden, but they do have to be planted every year, and they need some attention throughout the growing season.
A problem I sometimes run into, what with me not actually living where my garden is located, is that some of my annual plants struggle because I may plant them and then be gone on an adventure for a month.
So while annuals are great as long as you have time to plant and care for them, I’m increasingly interested in perennials…
ALSO Grow Organic Perennials
Permaculture emphasizes using long-term strategies to grow organic food-producing gardens that largely manage themselves after initial setup.
This approach focuses on fruits and nuts, perennial veggies like asparagus and lovage, and perhaps self-seeding plants like Russian kale and self-seeding herbs like dill and cilantro.
This is appealing to me because once these plants are established, they largely take care of themselves, and the weird weather we often have (too wet/dry, too hot/cold) doesn’t have as big of an impact.
And yet, another permaculture principle is “get a yield.”
We usually want to get some organic foods from our gardens right away, which lands us in the realm of traditional annual vegetables like potatoes, lettuce, etc.
You don’t have to choose just one approach – just find a balance that fits your situation.
Before You Plant
Some of the first things to take care of in the garden are water, access and structures.
In fact, there’s an acronym that sometimes gets thrown around in permaculture called W.A.S.P.
We want to make sure there’s:
- Water. Preferably more than 1 good water source near the garden.
- Access. Easy foot and wheelbarrow access anywhere you might need it.
- Structures. A potting station, a compost zone, areas for storing amendments and tools, etc.
- Plants. Then you can get excited about growing organic food.
It’s essential that the garden space meets the plants’ needs for sun, water, and soil type. Most annual vegetables require full sun in temperate zones.
If you have many shady areas, you can cross-reference a few online lists of more shade-tolerant food plants.
Organic Food Crop Rotation
While conventional farming relies on monocultures, there’s no reason we need to do that in the garden.
If you grow organic food plants in combinations, it can improve yield, soil health, and biological diversity.
This can start with something as simple as crop rotation, where we plant different crops in a bed each season, making sure to wait at least three years before planting something from the same family again.
It’s mostly agreed that this reduces disease pressure and lets the soil regenerate, as each plant has unique nutritional requirements.
Companion Planting – The Three Sisters
The 3 sisters: corn, beans and squash
Taking it further, we can combine different plants within the same bed.
Companion planting mixes plants that actively support each other.
A well-known example is the traditional Meso-American ‘3 sisters’ combination – corn, beans, and squash – which I planted this year.
- The corn provides a trellis for the beans and food for the nitrogen-fixing bacteria.
- The beans house those bacteria, who fix nitrogen for the nitrogen-hungry corn.
- The squash shades the soil, controlling weeds and decreasing evaporation.
There are many guides out there on companion planting, but they don’t all agree with each other as to which root crop loves which leafy green, so you may do just as well by experimenting.
I sometimes just mix 10-20 different plants in a bed, including growing organic food plants along some beneficials like wild marigold, nasturtium, and bee balm. This is called a polyculture.
Questions?
Any questions about how to grow organic food? Let me know below.
What are you most excited about growing this year?
Great video thank you. I am learning a lot from you. My question is, now that I have my Spring garden in, I’ve discovered there’s a pest in there munching the leaves of my veggies. I think it’s sow bugs. What’s the best, and safest way to rid of these pests?
You can control them with many of the same techniques that are used for controlling slugs: beer in a plastic container set down into the soil, 50:50 yucca extract and water sprayed onto the soil around plants, diatomaceous earth (DE), etc. The DE and beer will kill some beneficials, too, so it’s always about finding balance. If you can just control them until the green beans get bigger, that may be all you need.And then improving the health of the plants can really dissuade the sow bugs from eating. As for what the plants need, that’s not always so easy to tell. That’s when soil testing and fertilizing comes in, as well as spraying microbial inoculants and liquid organic fertilizers (whether homemade or purchased). My favorites are EM/SCD Probiotics, liquid seaweed, and liquid sea minerals, all available here: https://www.smilinggardener.com/sale/organic-fertilizers/
Love it! Thanks Phil – where can i find more which fruit/veggie plants work best as “companions”?
Here’s one resource on my site: https://www.smilinggardener.com/organic-vegetable-gardening/companion-planting-chart/
Phil,Thanks so much for more great information! I will have to give the polyculture a try in my garden in addition to planting a few things to attract beneficial insects. Just sprayed my EM mix for the second time yesterday. Things are looking happy and healthy! 🙂
Excellent!
I only have an L shaped raised garden bed that is 12′ on one leg and 16′ on the other. I also scatter plants in different parts of the beds in an effort to companion plant things. So rotating crops would get quite complicated and would probably be the difference in a foot or two if I planted something in a different place. So how much sense does it make to try to rotate crops in such a limited amount of space?
Good question. It may or may not make a big difference in such a small space. Perhaps best to just create great soil and not worry about rotation.