If you have a lawn, you probably wondered often enough why you keep up with such a useless, time-consuming and expensive piece of outdoor landscaping when you could instead have a healthy and productive organic vegetable garden. Now that even the White House is starting a garden, it could be the right time for you as well!
Don’t be put off by the idea of organic vegetable gardening being a strenuous and unrewarding physical activity involving lots of tilling. If you follow this easy guide and some easy principles, you won’t have to do any tilling and you’ll turn your lawn into a garden with real ease.
First, use chalk or some other system to mark off the area of your future organic vegetable garden. You may make it as big as the one of the White House, which can feed a dozen people or more with its eleven thousand square feet, or smaller, according to your needs. Once the area is delimited, water it well.
After that, you need to add a first layer of organic material that will let the grass die off and will form a healthy and fertile base for your herbs and crops. This layer should consist of earth, lawn cuttings, some gravel or sand, and organic compost. The latter is available commercially if you don’t yet have a compost heap. Cover everything up with cardboard.
Next you need to build a simple raised bed, made of planks, which you will put on top of the newspaper or cardboard. In due time the paper will decompose and become part of the organic base, but at first you will need it as a barrier between the early plants and the high-quality soil that you will now add.
The frames of the raised beds for your vegetable garden need to be filled with more organic compost, this time mixed with normal organic soil and some vermiculite for aeration.
You are now done with the preparation of the organic vegetable garden patch. Leave it be for three or four weeks so that small burrowing insects have the time to come back and to turn the former piece of sterile lawn into a rich patch of good quality soil.
Now you can start your kitchen garden, either using seedlings from other plants or from a nursery, or by growing vegetables from seed. In the latter case, it is best to use certified organic seeds. There are several online retailers that sell them if you can’t find them in your area.
When you choose the edible plants for the organic vegetable garden that used to be your lawn, pick a mix of herbs, pulses and vegetables, paying attention to seasonality and to the produce that is usually eaten in your family, and that you will soon be able to grow yourself instead of buying it at the grocer’s.
It’s recommended to involve any kids that live in your area in the planning of the organic vegetable garden. This should of course include your own children, but also any other kids in your neighbourhood that your family is on friendly terms with. They will be engrossed in the activity, and you will get some help to transform that lawn into a garden.
As for compost, you should start one or two composting heaps right away, as they will supplement and enrich your organic vegetable garden. You can supplement the compost from local materials, such as unused wood chippings from a local carpenter or the grass clippings from your neighbour’s lawn.
OrganicHerbalGardening.com is the premier resource for organic gardening on the Net, with updates on topics such as seasonal gardening, as well as on indoor herb gardens, organic cooking, organic fertilizers – click the links above to find out more!
