Organic gardening is easy to learn, it can save you money, and it can provide you and your family with a beautiful lush garden full of fresh produce. To garden organically you'll want to learn how to worm compost, make compost tea, and regular plain old compost.
Organic gardening can save you money, it's good for our envirnonment, and it's just plain fun. It can also serve as a good learning experience for your children. If you have a decent sized yard with a tree or two then you probably have enough leaves to start a compost bin. A compost bin doesn't have to be fancy, it can be just 4 takes in the ground with chicken wire wrapped around them. But, if you can afford it they make some very nice compost tumblers for a hundred dollars or more. If you're quite the handy man, you can even make a compost tumbler yourself. That's a whole nother article though, I'm afraid. A good compost tumbler is easy to turn and aerate your organic matter. Aeration is essential to making compost fast. The natural composting process will happen on it's own over a period of several months to a year or more. But, if you want to acelerate the process and get more compost more often, you need a compost tumbler.
Compost tumblers are great for your excess outdoor garden trimmings, but there is something else called a worm bin that you need for your excess kitchen scraps. A properly designed worm bin has several levels whereby worms can travel freely to and from. Once they digest the bottom layer of kitchen scraps, they can travel up to the layer above to begin working on new scraps. The bottom layer can be easily removed to harvest the good soil that the worms leave behind. Once, you have purchased a worm bin, you're going to need to purchase some composting worms. The worm that is best adapted for worm bins is called a red worm. Earthworms prefer to dig down deep in your garden soil to do their good work, but they do not do well in worm bins. You'll want to get yourself at least a pound of red worms to start your worm bin off to a good start. If you can afford it get two or three pounds of worms.
The third method of organic gardening that I will introduce you to is compost tea. Compost tea is made from soaking finished compost in a bucket of water over a period of two to three days. Make sure that the compost you use is finished. This means that the compost has had time to age and breakdown into a dark rich soilike organic material. You also want to let your water sit out for a while to let the chlorine evaporate. Otherwise, the chlorine can kill the good bacteria that you want to multiply to make your compost tea. You need to aerate the water with an aquarium pump so that beneficial bacteria can multiply in favorable conditions. You will also want to add some brown sugar or molasses to feed these bacteria. Otherwise, if you fail to aerate and feed the good bacteria, harmful bi-products will form in your tea which can harm your plants in your garden.
I hope I have spurred your interest in learning more about organic gardening with this brief introduction to the practice. There are plenty of more resources online to learn more about organic gardening. Please feel free to post a question in my organic gardening forum if you have additional questions and I'll do my best to find an answer for you.
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