4 Tips to Maintain Your Home Garden
A home garden can add to the beauty of your house but maintaining a home garden is a continuous struggle. Many things can decrease the beauty of your home garden such as plant diseases, incorrect use of fertilizers, bad water quality, soil erosion, and incorrect sowing of plants. Following are four tips to help you maintain your home garden and increase the overall beauty of your home.
1)Disease Prevention:
Diseased plants can destroy a home garden, due to the transfer of pathogens from a diseased plant to other healthy, normal plants. Diseased plants also increase the expenditures like pesticides and even fertilizers as the plants become less capable to use the innate benefits of fertilizers being a disease prevention tonic like the research at the reputed website of researchgate implies. And you could use those funds on a better thing like a drip-irrigation system and better, natural fertilizer.
Different plant diseases can be due to different underlying causes and many articles on Google explain those causes in detail. But one critical thing you should do to avoid your plants getting diseases is to avoid introducing a diseased plant in your home garden.
For this purpose, whenever bringing a new plant to your home garden, you need to check for signs of diseases on them. Not all plants have the same signs, but you can check them online for the specific plant and a word counter can help you know which plants have fewer requirements and you can go for those plants.
Some big symptoms of diseased plants that you need to look for are given on finegardening. In short, you should see for signs of dead spots on the plant and see if there are any insect infestations on it. And give extra attention to the roots. The roots being saggy and mushy, instead of being firm and spaced all over are good indications of a diseased plant to avoid.
Also, remember to prune the plants from time to time as it may promote the growth of the plant and healthy plant are more resistant to diseases.
2)Using Permaculture:
The permaculture approach has many benefits, and it has been explained thoroughly on Wikipedia. What should be done is to emulate the natural environment as much as possible. Some good practices in permaculture are to only plant those plants with each other that support each other and not harm each other.
For example, sowing a plant that develops deep roots with a plant that develops shallow roots in the home garden, so that they can access water at different levels in the soil and don’t disturb each other’s growth. Prefer companion plants that grow in your specific area.
Other things of permaculture include things like sowing as many native plants of your locality as possible in your home garden. This also helps prevents diseases in your home garden as the plants become stronger. One thing you may also do is make a fence around the garden to keep out the things that will disturb this system that you will build.
Consider this example, when we sow a darkness-loving plant in our home garden in a place that gets full sunlight all the time, you can imagine what the result would be. It would result in a weakened plant ripe for bacteria to attack.
3)Fertilizer and Compost
Compositing and mulching are almost always good ideas for maintaining your home garden’s growth. There are many benefits of compositing. Composting seems like one of the most effective ways to balance out the nutrients in the soil and the Ph level as well as discourage disease of plants and create soil of good density.
There are other benefits also but there’s a small problem. If you don’t know how to compost and put compost in your home garden that has not fully completed its process of decomposition, then you run the risk of introducing diseases in your garden as the bacteria on the plants would have been killed only when correctly composted as the high temperatures during compositing can easily kill them.
Another thing you can try is to use fertilizer for maintaining your home garden. As repeated cultivation of plants will deplete some of the nutrients that the plants needed. There are two approaches to fertilization that you can take.
One is to take the advice of a local gardener or gardening specialist and put fertilizer according to what they tell you. But this method may still cause a lot of overabundances of one type of nutrient over another which can burn the roots of the plants in your home garden according to the article on finegardening mentioned before.
The other method is a more advanced one and may be better for maintaining your home garden. You take your home garden’s soil to a local testing agency and put fertilizer according to what nutrients your plants need that the soil lacks.
4)Clean Water:
You need to know what type of water you give to your plants. Water is not just H20, it has a lot of minerals also that are beneficial. But water has been classified into two broad categories of hard water and soft water according to the type of minerals and their concentration present in the water.
Soft water is usually the filtered water that we use may use for drinking and washing and hard water is the one that usually comes from our taps. Now, we don’t want to drink that tap water so neither should the plants, right? It’s not that simple.
According to indysoftwater, soft water is not that rich in sodium content so it’s fine to give it to plants. But indywaterpros compare both hard water and soft water and it appears that while hard water is really bad for your dishes and bathroom, it can be really good for plants due to the minerals like calcium and magnesium present in it. The minerals which the plants in your home garden really need in a suitable amount.
Use soft water for your plants only in the case that it does not have too high of an amount of sodium in it, as the plants can be endangered due to excessive sodium content, and some analysis of how much sodium is okay is given on the article of indywaterpros article mentioned before.
To conclude, maintaining your home garden is a hectic process and you may always not have the time needed for the caring of the garden. Therefore, you may need to hire a handyman that can do the work at a reasonable rate.
Author Bio: Muhammad Talha is a writer for wordschecker.com. To get deeply researched content or to grow your website, you can contact at talhaehsan333@gmail.com.