Jami Boys - Vegetable Gardening the Easy Way

Vegetable gardening at home is a great way to save money on organic produce and provide quality, fresh food for you and your family. Planting even one tomato plant can provide you with 10+ pounds of fruit over a season. The variety, flavor, and texture of produce from vegetable gardens, no matter the size, are far superior to grocery store produce.

When you plant vegetables, you can enjoy the pleasure of savoring delicious, sun-warmed tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and more fresh from your backyard. Plus, growing vegetables is a fun hobby - its a great way to spend time outdoors and connect with the earth.

You may already know all this and agree with it - but you just dont want to spend a lot of time weeding, watering, and maintaining a garden. If this is you, I have good news - it doesnt have to be hard!

This book firmly emphasizes easy gardening . Youll find tips and techniques that truly make gardening easier, from the ground up. I wouldnt garden if it involved lots of weeding and digging, and I dont want you to have to either.

My goal with Vegetable Gardening The Easy Way is to arm you with:

• Inspiration: Even if you dont know anything about growing food you can grow enough quality, organic produce to eat fresh produce through the summer and even preserve for the winter.
• Knowledge: Learn the basics for gardening success, including step-by-step instructions to sow seeds indoors or out, plant, water, and harvest.
• Tips that Work: There are things Ive learned through trial and error, and often against tradition, that make gardening easier than what you may remember your parents or grandparents doing (hours of back-breaking weeding with a hoe? No thanks!) .

In all honesty, gardening will always take some time to plan, plant, care, and even harvest and prep your vegetables (although you can decide how much), but it can take less time. In addition, gardening doesnt have to cost a lot, its fun, provides good exercise and outdoor activity, takes you back to a simpler time, and gives a feeling of accomplishment few things can rival. Youll know what Im talking about when you serve a meal that you can say, I grew that!

I love growing my own vegetables now but it didnt start out that way. When we bought our first house on a city lot I was all about flowers: roses, daylilies, and peonies especially. I remembered as a kid having to weed our familys patch of garden and so I wasnt really interested in that. I discovered Organic Gardening magazine, though (for the flowers of course), and learned about raised vegetable beds. I thought I could handle that since they minimized weeding.

So I added a couple of raised beds to grow lettuce, tomatoes, and beans in my garden surrounded by flowers. And then something I never wouldve guessed happened: the first time I created a dish using the vegetables I grew gave me such a great feeling that I began carving out more and more space for vegetables. My goal became to be able to say that all the produce in a meal came from my garden!

But then I had a LOT of produce - what to do? I taught myself to can salsa, jams, tomato sauce and freeze beans and roasted tomato sauce which pretty much sealed the deal: I needed more room to grow vegetables and fruit.

So we moved to a house with more space (just under an acre) and I finally met my goal to produce all the organic vegetables for our meals, which blessed us so much. Not only that, I began to provide all our familys produce during the growing season, buying very little, if any, produce from April through November. And with preserving, I lessened the amount purchased through the winter, too.

My story is just to illustrate how you can catch the bug to grow your own food, providing a fun hobby that also provides for you and your family.

However, you dont have to move to a larger space to grow vegetables you can garden on any amount of land, which is one of the beauties of raised beds, I think.

In fact, if you are just starting a garden, that is my biggest tip: Start Small!

Add one or two raised beds to a sunny area of your yard and plant only what your favorites. You can always add more beds later, but starting too big and having the garden get out of control by midsummer or drowning in heaps of produce in September is one of the things Ive heard from people who were turned off from gardening. Catch that I grew that! bug first, have fun with it, and then add more beds if you want.

And while winter is a great time to plan and dream of your future garden, any time of the year works, too we have built raised beds in July and planted them with fall-growing varieties. Any time is a good time -so lets get started gardening!

Jami Boys

An Oregon Cottage