Grow Your Own Food in Your Backyard
If you’re new to gardening and want to learn to grow your own food this year, this is for you.
Gardening can help keep your sanity in a year filled with chaos. Your garden will still be there year-after-year, just as it has been every other year before that.
And not only is gardening an amazing hobby for your mind and body, it’s great for the environment, and it can give you a bunch of homegrown organic food! Not many hobbies can check all those boxes.
In this video, I’ll walk though what you need to do to go from an empty patch of soil to having a garden full of food you’ll get to eat!
Watch below or scroll down to keep reading
Time Stamps:
- 0:08 Why Grow Your Own Food?
- 0:32 Find a spot to put your garden
- 2:17 Buy soil
- 3:05 Buy plants
- 4:04 Water before planting
- 5:26 Dig a hole and plant
- 6:31 Plant spacing
- 9:00 Care for your plants
If you enjoyed this and might want to come back to it later, pin it to your Pinterest Beginner Gardening board.
Steps to Grow Your Own Food
Prefer to read? Want a summary of the steps from the video? This is what you need to do to get your garden started and start growing your own food!
Find Your Garden Location
The first thing to do is find a spot where you want to grow. One key thing to consider is to find an area with a decent amount of sun – ideally 6+ hours. You can still grow some types of food if you only have 3 hours, but ideally try to find a spot with 6+ hours. If you have a shady garden, this post will help you decide what to plant.
If you don’t have space for a garden, you can rent a place to grow. There are community gardens or plots you can rent. I had one close to where I grew up. I never noticed it until I got a garden of my own, but they’re out there if you need them.
Add Ideal Garden Soil
Now that you have a spot to grow in, you’ll need to get some new soil. This is optional, but strongly recommended. I like using triple-mix for this (or sometimes it’s called 3-way mix). It’s just a mix of a few different types of soil that help your plants grow really well!
Buy plants
Next you need to buy some plants (or get some from a friend). I have a few videos on this topic:
Plant!
Now it’s time to plant! The video above shows you the step-by-step process on how to plant for success, but I’ll run down the steps here as well:
- Add the soil (triple-mix) to your garden bed
- Find out the right spacing for your plants. Read the plant labels or use a Garden Planner to help you lay out your garden design.
- Water before planting
- Dig a hole larger than your pot
- Remove the plant from the pot (unless the instructions say not to)
- Put the plant into the hole and fill the hole up with soil, pat it down
- Water again.
That’s it!
You’ve just planted your own food. Now what?
Maintenance
After you’ve planted you need to keep caring for your plants. It’s going to take some time for your plants to give you food. Gardening will definitely teach you patience!
Continue to care for your plants by watering and keeping the area relatively weed free so that your plants don’t die on you.
And in a few weeks or a few months (or sometimes even a few years), you’ll have food!
Still have questions? This free gardening guide might help.
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