Grow Your Health: How to Get Started

How to Grow:  Getting Started.

1. Look around your life for something you could grow in.  Your yard is a great place to start if you are permitted to grow in it.  We rent, so for us, this was not an option, but I did have plenty of things that could hold dirt, and when my father bought a raised planter box so I could teach my boys to grow (in memory of my mother), we had a great time!  The following year, when we were no longer over at my dad’s house as much, I found a great deal on large totes, and bought several so that I could separate and make soil adjustments for the produce we wanted.  We’ve also grown in milk jugs and empty vegetable cans, as well as cloth bags!   If you really don’t believe in your ability to grow, a small hydroponic indoor garden will do you good.
2. Plant your first thing.  No Green Thumb?  How do you know that?  Did you know that green thumbs come from persistence and natural learning.  But fear of failure is usually the thing that prevents most of us from trying.  So, just pick something you’d like to grow and plant it.  I recommend starting from seed simply because you will learn more about the entire growth cycle by starting from seed, and planting herbs or vegetables.  But whatever you plant, pick something you love and just do it.
3. Watch your plant grow.  Is it healthy?  Is it having problems?  If you notice problems, don’t ignore the problems, find a solution.  There are a myriad of helpful tools available right there on the device you are reading this from!  There are even apps that you could download that will let you take a picture of your plant, and the app will “assess” the condition of your plant and suggest solutions.
4. Here are some of the things that I learned my first year gardening:
   1. I CAN grow plants.  I got edible tomatoes after a few tweaks.
   2. Grow Solutions are out there:  as I’ve mentioned in previous posts, my first year I had beautiful tops of tomatoes with end root rot — which can easily be cured by saving your egg shells, toasting them, grinding them and diluting them in a capful of vinegar, the solution of which you add to a gallon of water and water your plant with.  Resolving that issue, we had tomatoes for salads and salsa the rest of that season!  How did I figure this out?
   3. Think outside the grow box.  The internet has a good deal of information on it.  Do your research, use your own knowledge, and try one of the solutions that make sense to you, and see how it grows…  Turns out not only did I find out that this method works, but I stopped throwing egg shells away ever, and even discovered I could make a little money selling this eggshell solution to fellow gardeners who don’t want to go through the trouble of preparing the eggshells!
5. Things I learned my second year of gardening:
   1. White Flies are NOT our friends.  They can decimate a perfectly healthy plant in a matter of days.   This was a definite “no-grow” for me.
   2. There are grubs that can hide in your soil and destroy a perfectly healthy plant in a single night.
   3. Sometimes you will fight the pests and lose.  When that happens, try a different approach, and be prepared against them in the future!
6. Things I learned my third year of gardening:
   1. Companion Planting works!  If you want your plants to grow and remain healthy, it is best to learn what plants attract or detract their natural predators.
   2. The color of your containers should be taken into account when planning to grow in them – especially if you live in a very hot area of the country!  Living in the extreme southeast, the black containers I found a great deal on required slightly different consideration as our plants grew, as heat is attracted to the darker colors, and the soil literally got too hot, not being in the ground.  Lots of plants can’t grow in heat like that, especially the humid heat we get in the extreme southeastern United States!
   3. Look around for local resources that will help you grow on the cheap!  I found out that the small city we live in has free compost and mulch!  What an awesome money saving resource!!!

My second year of gardening, I also became a certified herbalist, and began learning how to make tinctures, teas, and other remedies for the common issues my family deals with.  I’m a natural scientist married to a biomedical research scientist, so for us, knowing exactly what is in the things that I naturally grow or forage that result in such positive results in our bodies is important.

As the years have gone by, my goal is to grow every year, and apply the knowledge I have gained from previous years to make a more productive garden to provide for the needs of my family.  If I apply this strategy continually, I will eventually have the absolute best garden I can have every year, and every year I will grow more either in quantity of produce or in knowledge!  As the years have gone on, I have slowly added to my yard, as I find them far more enjoyable than ugly container gardening.

I hope these pointers encourage you, and get you starting to grow your own food and/or your own herbs.  Don’t let the failures get you down – because then they will remain failures!  Turn your failures into opportunities to learn, and make them the assets you take into the following grow  seasons!!!