Hi! I am Tim of Earth Connection School of Wilderness Survival and Ancient Skills and this is our video series on Organic Gardening. In this clip, we're going to talk about how to plan your garden. But first, I think we should talk about what is Organic Gardening.
Organic gardening is a gardening style without harsh chemical pesticides, genetically modified organisms for vegetables and basically it's an older more traditional gardening style. Everybody organic gardened before the artificial revolution of the 1900's. Everybody did organic gardening because nothing else existed. So we're going to use that same old school philosophy of using what nature provides to grow our crops and our vegetables.
Now, let's talk about our organic garden plan. What are we going to plan and when are we going to plan it? All winter every year, I go over my seed catalogs and I look at my books and I try to figure out what I should plant when? So in February I might start some cabbage, from little seeds, in trays of dirt and then a month later they are big enough to plant in the ground. So I've got all these on my calendar and I know what to plant and when?
Basically, you want to plant your cool weather crops in January or February so that they have a month or a month and a half or even two months to grow up to a big enough size, where they can live in the ground happy some time around March and we would plant them at that time. These cool weather crops typically are things like cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, lettuce, spinach, chard, lots of different things fall into that cool weather group, because they have a little antifreeze in their blood, they can survive a frost even a light freeze which we would get in the night time during March and even April.
So we would have all of these in our garden plan. We know what to plant and when. Then the more popular and more commonly planted garden items like our peppers, tomatoes, all these different kinds of very popular vegetables we would plant them a little bit later after the frost is definitely gone. You can refer to your weather zones to see which zone you fall into and that will give you the last date of frost, so that will tell you this is probably going to be the last frost for your area. After that, then you have a green light to plant warmer types of crops like those tomatoes and peppers that we talked about.
So your garden plan can go from spring into the summer time and even up into the fall because it's going to be cold again in the fall and we can bring back our cool weather crops. So around August when it's just too hot to in the garden we can sit in the nice cool shade and start our seeds again of cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, all the cool weather crops, we will start those seeds in August, then they can grow be protected from the heat somewhere just the partial shade, maybe the shade cloth over top of them to protect them, let's talk shade cloth a little bit later in our clip series, when we are showing you a miniature green house because we can use shade cloth with that as well.
We will cover these crops with a little bit of shade cloth while they are growing in the hot summer sun. They need the sunshine but they also need to be protected from extreme heat and then September rolls around or even October, we will take our cool weather crops and plant them in our garden beds or our garden containers and they will take over when the hot weather crops are done. So we can actually garden 8, 9 months out of the year, even longer depending on where we live.
So that's our garden plan, we want to figure out what we like and what we will grow well in our area and figure out when to plant it. So this is our garden plan.
Next, we are going to be talking about organic garden and container location.
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