Organic gardening gets a lot of airtime these days so I thought that I would do some reading on the subject and as is usually the case, there is so much information to look at. As that is the case, I’m going to write about organic gardening over the next few weeks when time permits. Today, I’ll try and explain the basics from what I’ve read so far.

What is organic gardening?

Organic gardening is all about working with what you have in your garden and working with nature and its cycles. If you have a damp patch, for example, then use plants happy in those conditions, rather than trying to change the damp patch into a drier one.

There are a few principles that are important in organic gardening:

• Build up and maintain soil health. Having healthy soil means you get healthy plants.
• Encourage greater biodiversity around the garden as this allows a natural ecosystem to exist within your garden, which in turn helps to control pests there too,
• Responsibly use any resources available to you to aim to cause as little damage as possible. Reduce, reuse and recycle.
• Avoid using harmful chemicals-these can harm the good stuff as well as the bad.
• Keep your growing area healthy, not just free of diseases or pests.

Other things that are good practice within organic gardening include using mulch on garden beds, digging less in your garden beds and companion planting.

I’d also add good observation as going out for a walk around your garden and looking at you plants frequently allows you to notice any problems early. Noticing a problem early means it quicker and easier to deal with it than leaving it until it’s a major issue.

That is a quick basic into to organic gardening. Over the next few weeks I’ll go into further detail on this topic, but how quickly depends on how much time I have available.