Luke Smith - Vegetable Gardening: A Beginners Guide to Cultivating Your Own Vegetable Garden

Introduction

V egetable gardening is one of our speciess oldest jobs. Humans first started exploring and practicing agriculture around 9500 BCE, or more than 11,000 years ago. It was this discovery, that not only does the ground produce food, but we are also able to control that production, which allowed us to start forming villages, towns and eventually cities.

Agriculture brought many advances. Medicines could be grown; ancient Egyptians began to use plants like aloe vera as medicines. Agriculture also paved the way for us to start producing textiles like cotton or hemp. But none of these discoveries hold a candle to vegetable gardening. Before the discovery of agriculture, it wasnt uncommon for tribes of humans to be starved throughout the winter; great swaths of the population were often wiped out due to lack of food. Being able to control the production of food allowed us to make enough food to store throughout the winter and avoid starvation. It absolutely changed the future of mankind; we went from being primitive animals to inventing the written word so that these practices could pass down from generation to generation.

The switch into agricultural practices created a new way of living. For centuries to come, being a farmer would be seen as a noble tradition. Often discriminated against due to the laws of the ruling class, these hardworking individuals kept the kingdoms and villages supplied with food. Despite all the hardships, vegetable farmers were a necessary part of the human equation.

It wasnt until the emergence of nowadays modern man that vegetable gardening and farming started to get a bad rap. With all the new technologies that are invented everyday and the fact that you can go to the grocery store and find any vegetable you want, the concept of vegetable gardener and farmer have begun to seem less appealing to the average person. Now, instead of learning how to garden, young adults are heading off for an education in law or business. Others would look towards fame and fortune, either succeeding or burning out along the way.

As the twentieth century came to an end, it seemed as if vegetable gardening as a career, hobby, or even an interest was fading away, just another feature of the distant past that no longer concerned mankind as it moved into the future. When you can order your food online and chemical treatments produce vegetables twice the size they were in the past, it seemed clear that getting your hands dirty in the soil was no longer needed.

But the twenty-first century has seen this reversed. As man has created more technology and automated more and more processes, there has been a fatigue that has cropped up. People have started to get tired of all of the chemicals being pumped into their food; they are no longer as appealing as they once were. There has been a movement towards embracing green or environmentally sound practices, as well as a push towards organic foods that are free of harmful chemicals.

The twenty-first century man has found that returning to the soil is a peaceful experience. There is a sense of pride in growing your own food, a feeling of doing something that matters and getting back to the roots of what it means to be a human, by taking part in and sharing an experience that has connected human beings together for more than four hundred generations.

With this book, you will learn how you, too, can feel this sense of peace, pride and connection to the world around you by growing your own vegetable garden. In chapter one you will learn the many positive reasons to start a vegetable garden of your own. Chapter two will help you plan your garden and consider the kinds of vegetables you will be able to grow. Chapter three will teach you all about how to plant those vegetables from seeding to soiling. Chapter four will explore the steps we take to maintain that garden so it gets plenty of the necessary nutrients to grow large, healthy harvests. Those harvests will be our focus in chapter five, along with how to preserve your newly harvested vegetables. Finally, chapter six will teach you all about the various pests and diseases which you will find yourself fighting; the preventative steps in the chapter will help you avoid those fights as long as possible. Some final thoughts on where to go next to learn further information and continue your journey from beginner to expert are also included in this chapter.

Chapter One: Why Start a Vegetable Garden?

I f you are still reading this book, then you must already be considering starting your own vegetable garden. This consideration was probably spawned by one of the reasons that well be looking at in this chapter. I feel comfortable making this assumption because, as you will see, there are a ton of reasons why somebody would want to start a vegetable garden, which range from finances to health and from the environmental impact to the mental benefits.

While the information in this chapter wont be able to tell you if vegetable gardening is a good fit for you or not, it will give you enough reasons to make the initial investment and give vegetable gardening a try. With all of these benefits in mind, the earlier challenges faced when growing your own vegetables wont seem as difficult because you will be able to clearly see the reward.

I TS ORGANIC (AND TASTIER !)

One of the big changes in the last few years has been the strong push towards organically grown vegetables. The use of chemicals in order to fertilize or treat crops for pest control makes perfect sense when you consider vegetable farming as an industry. The goal of any business is to ultimately make money. A farming business may have a mission statement about the quality of their food or the happiness that it brings to the table, but at the end of the day that business doesnt exist without making money. Chemicals, which quickly kill off pests, and fertilizers, which produce larger than average vegetables allow for larger yields at a lower cost. Considering that these vegetables then need to be shipped around the country to various stores, you can see why this business model works.