Urban Gardening for Beginners by Sarah Smith

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Starting up a garden in a rural countryside with plenty of sunny days and fertile areas can be tough enough in an of its own.

Even if you do everything right and plant your crops on time, if you’re not careful, birds and wild boards can come around and eat everything before you get a chance to reap the benefits.

Now imagine living in a busy neighborhood in a large city and attempting to do the same thing. While you probably wouldn’t need to deal with boars and other animals as much, setting up a garden on the seventh floor of a building can be a tough venture in an of its own.

In this article, we’re going to talk about what you can do to set up and take care of your garden, even if you’re a complete rookie and you’re planning to do it in the middle of an urban area. As you will see, there’s nothing that some tools, using a proper technique, and some dedication cannot tackle successfully.

Here’s the deal.

Check Out the Local Laws

Before you do anything else, make sure to check the local rules and regulations when it comes to keeping a garden in an urban area.

Being forced to disassemble your garden, so to speak, just because some rule or the other does not allow it to exist can be a truly annoying experience, so make sure you acquaint yourself with the law first before buying the equipment and embarking n this fruit and vegetable-growing mission.

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Choosing the Plants

Whenever you’re working in a confined space and trying to grow some plants, the thing to pay attention to would certainly be the sort of plant you’re choosing.

The thing is, you don’t want to go for any plants that tend to spill over sideways and take up more space than you can afford, so to speak. Generally speaking, plants that bear fruit upwards are the best solution here.

For example, planting corn, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and other plants can be an excellent way to ensure that you will both have enough space to fashion the plant arrangement when you’re first beginning to organize your urban garden, but that you will be able to pick up the fruits of your labor once the time is right, too.

Picking the Soil & Fertilizers

One of the easiest ways to mess up your urban garden would certainly be to choose a decent location for the garden, get the good sort of plants that you will both be able to take care of and eat at the end of the day, and then get the wrong soil into which to bury the seeds.

Add to that including the wrong sort of fertilizer to the soil (although if the soil is wrong, no amount of soil will solve the problem) and you can forget about growing anything in your new garden.

Now, to succeed growing something, no matter if the conditions are urban or rural, using a certain amount of fertilizer and ensuring the composition of the soil is correct would be the two most important preparatory parameters.

Different plants require various forms of fertilizer, so you need to check what sort of fertilizer to buy depending on what sort of plant you plan to grow.

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Prepare the Tools You Need

While keeping a small urban garden won’t require heavy-duty mechanization like they use in field work situations when they need to harvest an entire field of ripe corn, for example, you are still going to need a small set of tools, so you can keep your garden clean, lay the seeds into the ground, and enjoy the ripe fruits later on.

So, a set of must-have tools for urban gardening would include some gardening gloves, a trowel, some composting bins, as well as some watering-related contraptions that can make the irrigation part of the job a tad easier, so to speak.

A couple of sprinklers or a Hoselink reel can be an excellent choice here.

Pest Control

Imagine how frustrating it would be to successfully grow some tomatoes in the middle of a concrete jungle only to have the couple of the really good ones eaten by some mysterious vermin or a vile fruit-eating bug.

To prevent this terrible turn of events, what you may want to do is get some sort of pest repellent for the plant you’ve chosen.

These pest-repelling solutions aren’t that expensive and are fairly easy to apply, so it’s worth getting to know how to use these if you mean to preserve the plants you’ve decided to grow and to reap their fruits eventually.

All in all, growing your own garden can be a tough experience, especially if it’s in the middle of a city, but if you put in the necessary effort, do your homework, and arm yourself with patience, you will see some excellent results down the road.

 

Photo by Binyamin Mellish from Pexels