Are you ready to start your first homestead garden? Or maybe you tried to start a garden in the past, and it was a sad failure? Do you think that you have to have a green thumb to garden?
Fear not! You can have a garden on your homestead! No green thumb required!
I admit it is slightly more challenging than I initially expected. My parents had a garden, and from my perspective, they just planted seeds and went back a few months later and harvested dinner. I tried that, and it didn’t work. My first suburban garden was completely overtaken by weeds, and the vegetables were not helped by my lack of watering. Yes, I was that clueless!
If you are not totally sold on the idea of starting a homesteading garden or growing any of your own food, start with this article, 8 Reasons to Grow Your Own Food.
If you are not sure that you want to dig in the dirt, or maybe you don’t have a yard, you can always get started by Growing Your Own Sprouts.
Planning your homestead garden
The following articles will provide you with the basic info you need to start your homestead garden. You don’t need to spend a fortune on equipment. Yes, there are lots of fun tools you can buy, but very few are required, and when done right, you should get a huge ROI from your garden!
- Get Ready to Garden
- Planning the Sustainable Garden: What Will You Grow?
- Planning the Sustainable Garden: How Much Will You Grow?
- A Beginner’s Guide to Medicinal Herbs
- Herbs in Small Gardens
If you’ve looked into a seed catalog and wondered how you can choose between the hundreds of varieties, this article about tomatoes may help! With hundreds of tomatoes varieties available in every imaginable size, shape, and color, tomatoes used to be one of the seeds I would overbuy dreadfully. The first time I looked into a seed catalog that included heirloom tomatoes, I wound up with about 20 different varieties! Obviously a lot of those seeds went to waste.
And if you love all sorts of greens beyond lettuce, check out this excerpt from Eat Your Greens! It talks about the benefits of growing your own lettuce and other greens.
What do you do with 50 or even 100 pounds of tomatoes? Can and freeze! When our three children were growing up, we would can hundreds of pounds of tomatoes in the form of pizza sauce and pasta sauce, and we would freeze dozens of packages of peeled tomatoes, which we would use for tomato soup through the winter. Because you will usually grow far more than you can eat fresh, you should always plan your garden for food preservation.
Don’t have a country homestead? No problem! This guest post, Homegrown in the City, tells you all about the author’s city garden. Back when we lived in the Chicago suburbs, we could grown enough tomatoes to freeze for a year’s worth of pasta dishes.
Getting started
You may be tempted to buy transplants at your local garden center. That’s a great option, especially for new gardeners who are working on the basics. Transplants will cost considerably more than starting seeds though.
You will also have a lot more variety in your homestead garden if you start everything from seeds, and you can Save a Fortune by Starting Your Own Seeds.
- Garden Vertically With a Sandwich Board A-Frame is perfect for those who don’t have a lot of space for a garden.
- Compost has been my only fertilizer for years! You can make your own for free, and it’s wonderfully balanced. There’s a reason it’s nicknamed “black gold!”
- You may be wondering if you can use last year’s seeds in the garden if you bought more than you planted. The short answer is “probably!” But that article explains it more fully. And if it’s seeds from three or four years ago, the short answer is, “it depends.”
Advanced homestead gardening strategies
- 7 Benefits of Gardening with Chickens
- Getting started with saving your own seeds
- Beans: the perfect intro to seed saving
- Want to learn how to grow mushrooms?
- Planting a medicinal herb garden
Podcast episodes on gardening
- No-Dig Gardening with Charlie Nardozzi
- The Vegetable Garden Pest Handbook
- Getting Started with Organic Vegetable Gardening
- Grow Your Own Spices
- Pawpaws: The Complete Growing and Marketing Guide
- The Healthy Vegetable Garden
- Home Hydroponics with Tyler Baras
- Attracting Beneficial Bugs to Your Garden
- Secrets to a Weed Free Garden
thank you so much. I appreciate it.
thank you so much. I appreciate it.