How to Avoid the Vegetable Gardening Mistakes

A lot of gardeners lose hope when things go wrong. They tend to feel down and frustrated for sure. Therefore, we are going to look at how to avoid the vegetable gardening mistakes in an effective way. After going through this article, you can definitely gain more confidence to continue your gardening work. Then, no gardening problems can put the pressure on you from now on.

How to Avoid the Vegetable Gardening Mistakes

One of the most common problems that gardeners run into is the nutrient deficiency with their plants. You have to know that the plants take up the nutrients from the soil. Thus, if your soil does not have adequate nutrients, your plants will not go very well.

Plants need 3 things to grow including water, sunlight, and nutrition. Nutrition is one thing that is overlooked by a lot of gardeners. Plants need adequate nutrition to grow well. When there is a missing of nutrition in the soil, you can see a lot discolored leaves and the health of those plants are not good.

Therefore, how do you solve this problem to make sure that plant have adequate nutrition from the soil? I highly recommend that you should prepare your soil well in advance. In particular, add a lot of organic material like compost manure 4 to 6 months before you use the soil.

The organic material takes about 4 to 6 months to break down. You can also use organic fertilizers, and if you use them, you need to wait for at least 2 to 4 months before they become available. If you are using synthetic fertilizers, they are immediately available to your plants.

So, the choice is yours, just remember to provide adequate nutrients to your soil, and your plants can thrive.

The container plants go root bound

Letting the container plants go root bound is one of the worst things you can do to your plant. It means that your plant is ready to grow, it has all the nutrients it needs, it has all the vigor that it needs to grow. However, it does not have any space.

It is constrained by the containers, so you need to solve this issue at once by following my useful tips. Every 1 or 2 years, you should look at your plants and try to repot them into a bigger container. When you are repotting your plant, make sure that you free up the roots.

You can even prune the roots a little bit. Use new potting mix and make sure that plant is no longer root bound and has some space to go.

Lack of calcium for tomatoes and peppers

Tomatoes and peppers are one of the favorite plants every gardener wants to grow. But they also suffer from one problem which the gardener would never like to see. And that is blossom end rot where the bottom part of the plant rots because of insufficient calcium in the soil.

The treatment is very easy. If you see plants or fruits with blossom end rot, just remove them and then make sure that you add a lot of calcium in the soil. You can add it by fertilizers, you can use crushed eggshells which must be added months in advance.

And you can also use some calcium supplements for the soil that will help you avoid this dreaded problem. Besides, you should water your plants very well on a regular basis.

High nitrogen, crowding and insect attack

Now, we are going to discuss a problem which plagues all root plants such as radishes and carrots. When you add a lot of nitrogen to your soil in the form of manure, and you can see this problem.

Although your plant will produce a lot of leaves and a lot of greens, the roots are really short, and this is one common mistake that many gardeners make. They add a lot of nitrogen to the soil, which you need to avoid for root plants.

Moreover, you may face another issue which is the severe damage from insects, probably slugs or earwigs. With this problem, your plant will lose all its vigor and there is also crowding for sure.

Over watering

Over watering is one problem that affects some root crops and tubers. We can take the onions as an example. When the onions are starting to forming bulbs, and at this stage, we have to stop watering them. If you have too much water around the onions at this stage, the outer part starts becoming soggy.

Furthermore, the roots do not develop well although the plants still grow. This is the situation that you want to avoid. So, when the onions start forming bulbs, I advise that you need to stop watering or at least water very rarely, like once a week or so.

Premature harvest and crowding

There is nothing worse than harvesting vegetables earlier than you are supposed to. I am sure that a lot of people are guilty of doing this. I used to harvest my garlic although it is not the time to harvest them yet. Thus, the leaves have not really turned completely brown.

In addition, the garlic still had about 2 months into the growing season to finish harvesting. As a result, the bulbs were very small hardly developed. Although I could use those bulbs, once I cured them, they would form small garlic bulbs that cannot be used.

Hence, it is a better idea to wait for the vegetables or the plants to complete their life cycle. Therefore, you can seek for the harvest time of your plants so as to make sure that they are ready to harvest at the right time.

Cauliflower troubles

Cauliflowers are fun to grow. But there are two problems with them that might discourage you from growing them at all. The first thing is the insect damage. I used to see my cauliflowers which were severely affected by aphid damage.

At that time, the leaves shriveled and the cauliflower head itself was not very strong. To avoid this kind of problem, what you need to do is spray this plant much earlier when you see the first sign of the aphids.

You can spray them with the soapy water or you can spray them with canola oil. Make sure that you take good care of them.

Another problem with cauliflowers is buttoning of the head. Sometimes, very tiny heads are being formed. This happens because of two reasons. If the temperature in your area goes very high and cauliflower is a cool season crop, it does not like high temperature.

The other reason is high nitrogen in the soil again due to manure or some fertilizers that you use. Also, make sure that your watering is adequate and regularly.

Grow your plants in shade or partial shade

Most plants need about 6 to 8 hours of sunlight every day. Therefore, you need to make sure that you are providing that to your plants.

Incorrect season

The next common mistake that a lot of garden make is not growing in the right season. For instance, I used to grow the potatoes in the heat of July. And the plant did not grow very well and the yield from this plant was very low.

So, the solution is to make sure that you are growing in the right season. For example, in zone 10, potatoes should be started in spring for a late summer harvest. That is the best way to grow potatoes. You can get the good yield if you follow this technique.

Not buying seeds from the trusted source

Always remember to buy your seeds from a trusted source. You might be tempted to buy cheap seeds on some websites like I have done before. I have spent a lot of time sowing the carrot seeds, preparing the potting mix and maintaining the plants.

The plants actually grew well with no problems. But what happened was when I got to the harvest time, it was not the purple carrots at all. It was some kind of yellow carrots that was not good tasting at all.

Hence, it is always a misery when you do not order the seeds from a trusted source. You can get cheated and you can even get something that you did not order.

Conclusion

In summary, I hope that all of my sharing in this article about how to avoid the vegetable gardening mistakes will contribute to your knowledge. I think that many gardeners have actually landed up in a situation where you had to face some issues above. However, you do not need to worry anymore. In case you have any queries or confusion, please feel free to keep in touch with me anytime.