10 steps to getting started if you have no gardening experience

*10 steps to getting started if you have no gardening experience. *

*The key elements you must have are some sun, soil and water. *

*Minimum tools needed. Gloves and a shovel*

*http://www.verdant.net/food.htm
*

* 1. Stop applying all pesticides and weed killers to the soil in and around
your entire garden. No exceptions. *

*2. Start small, 50 square feet for example. Find the spot that ideally has
sun all year in your yard. If it's shaded part of the year, that's OK too.
Avoid the area next to buildings or fences because of possible contamination
of the soil by paint, heavy metals or chemicals.*

*3. Remove whatever debris is covering the dirt including rocks larger than
a fingernail. If plants already grow there dig them out with the shovel and
save them off to the side.*

*4. Cover your gardening area with organic material such as leaves, dried
grass and fine plant material from your own or other's non-pesticide sprayed
gardens.*

*5. Get a bucketful of good compost from someone else's garden or crumbly
black sweet-smelling soil from under forest trees. Spread this thinly all
over your garden. You will be inoculating your soil with all manner of soil
organisms, little bugs, worms and other beneficial life forms that are going
to do most of the work for you if you give them the chance. *

*6. Use the pick or shovel to mix the top 3 inches of soil and organic
material. Burying the organic material any deeper just kills the critters
and wastes your energy.*

*7. Keep the soil damp like a wrung out sponge, not soggy.*

*8. Never walk on your soil. Make a kneeling board to avoid compacting it
and use an old cushion to save your knees. *

*9. Obtain vegetables in 4" pots. Dig a hole slightly larger than the 4"
pot, squeeze the sides to unstick the plant, fluff it's roots sideways and
plant it. Mulch around it with organic material to keep the soil moist
underneath it. *

*10. Start your own compost heap in a corner of the garden. Just heap up all
the clean organic material that you can get and mix it up occasionally.
Apply the compost periodically to the soil around your plants or use it to
start your own seeds. *