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It’s every gardener’s dream to have healthy and fast-growing vegetables. Therefore, learning how to make your vegetable garden grow faster is vital for any farmer.
Some blog posts and other farming articles make it seem like having a great garden requires a lot of technicalities and work.
However, we are here to demystify that and give you some pointers that will leave your garden better than it has ever been. To start with, you need to know the primary ways of availing the best conditions for robust plant growth.
It is also crucial to match your choice of vegetables with the environment and the resources you have.
This article is intended to equip you with easy-to-use techniques to grow your vegetables faster and have a healthy garden comparable to what you see on gardening commercials and model farms.
Vigorous and robust vegetable growth is a function of healthy soil, optimal conditions, and careful tending.
The land you grow your plants on must be rich in nutrients and available in a form that plants can efficiently uptake. Also, plants must get adequate sunlight, and temperatures must be maintained as per the plants’ requirements.
You must also maintain sufficient moisture by frequently watering and ensuring proper drainage to avoid waterlogging. Another essential practice is to regularly weed your garden and keep your vegetable disease and pest free.
Table of Contents
How to Make Your Vegetable Garden Grow Faster
1. Know the Basics
As mentioned earlier, the fundamental determinant for healthy vegetables is the quality of the soil they are grown on. With this in mind, you need to know how to make the soil more fertile. First, your soil needs to have a granular structure found in loam soil, optimal for circulation and drainage.
This structure is essential for air and nutrient circulation and absorption, which ensures minerals and nutrients are not locked up in the ground, and the delicate root system of your vegetables can access them.
After that, you can take the necessary measures to restore your soil’s nutrient composition to optimal levels. For instance, you should ensure that your garden is rich in nitrogen, phosphates, and potassium, essential for plant growth. You can achieve this by adding fertilizers, green manure, or compost.
Modify your soil with decomposing plant material as it is very efficient in maintaining the soil structure on top of adding organic matter.
Humus introduced by the compost is excellent for water retention as it can hold up to 90% of its weight in water content. It is also instrumental in giving life to microbes and other soil organisms, crucial in nutrient breakup and release for natural uptake.
2. Use Transplants
The next phase of your garden after testing and enriching the soil is planting.
A clever technique to make your vegetable garden grow faster is using transplants instead of direct planting, which gives your plants a head start before facing challenges of the open garden like weeds, disease, and pests set in.
Also, most vegetable seeds are small and fail to germinate and rot when directly set in garden planting depths. You can start seedlings indoors for around seven weeks before transferring to the field or buying them from commercial gardens.
Always choose stocky, young, and healthy seedlings instead of emaciated ones for the best results. A few days to transplant harden off the seedlings by imitating field conditions in the nursery. Finally, ensure to transplant on a cool overcast day and follow with watering to reduce transplanting shock.
3. Light and Warmth
Plants need sunlight to synthesize nutrients, form plant tissue, and produce fruit.
Vegetables are particularly reliant on sufficient sunlight as they need more than six hours of sunlight daily to have great yields.
Therefore, in locating your garden, choose a sufficiently sunny parcel.
Adequate sunlight also warms the air, thus preventing a frosty environment, which causes blight and other diseases.
Also, numerous pests, such as whiteflies, thrive in poorly lit gardens that rob the plants of nutrients, cause injury, and cause diseases, therefore, stunting growth, reducing productivity, or killing the plant altogether. Such being the case, closely monitor light intensity using a home test kit with a sunlight intensity option for your plants’ vigorous growth.
Another popular technique is maintaining the right soil temperature. Most vegetables require warm soils to germinate and for robust growth. Cold soils often lead to the rotting of young plants and slow growth.
As a result, this leads to reduced fruit production or failure to produce. Using raised beds for planting vegetables is an effective way of increasing soil warmth to desirable levels.
Experienced gardeners also spread black polythene over the soil early to raise the temperatures at the same hampering weed growth, leaving plants to utilize nutrients without competition.
4. Effective Moisture Management
Most vegetable plants require adequate and consistent moisture levels in the soil if they are to proliferate. Therefore, it is wise you invest in small, inexpensive soil moisture monitoring devices/kits.
Alternatively, you can physically test the moisture content by sticking a finger in the soil. Your finger should feel moist at least an inch below the surface. Always water the garden frequently to keep the ground moist- but avoid waterlogging the garden.
While plants must have a consistent water supply, if irrigation is not done correctly, it can be costly and wasteful. It would be best if you employed cost-effective irrigation techniques to not only save on cost but also be environmentally friendly.
For instance, we would recommend you considered using drip irrigation methods like installing drip hoses that deliver water close to the plant while avoiding runoffs, therefore, reducing wastage.
Overhead irrigation methods, besides being wasteful, also contribute to surface panning, making the soil difficult to work and encouraging runoffs, which carry away nutrients.
A significant advantage of drip irrigation is that it avoids wetting the leaves, a notorious way of spreading disease and pests from plant to plant. If you consider all these factors, the need for you to employ wise water practices cannot be overemphasized.
5. Replenishing the Soil
Vegetables need more nutrients in a shorter duration than most plants as they produce large and lush leaves and fruits in a single season.
For starters, before planting, introduce nitrogen-rich manure to your garden. Once the plants have taken root top dress around the plants’ base with an appropriate fertilizer to deliver nutrients such as potassium.
When the plants approach the production stage, consider adding a fertilizer like ammonium sulfate to boost healthy fruit and leaf production. Keep monitoring the nutrient levels using the test kits and adjust the fertilizer requirements appropriately to avoid over-fertilization, which can degrade the soil, harm your plants, and adversely affect the environment.
With the popularity of organic farming on the rise, you can choose to go natural and use animal manure, compost, and green manure. This can also have the same if not better results as that of synthetic fertilizers.
6. Weed and Pest Control
All your gardening best practices will be of no benefit if your plants compete for nutrients with weeds. An effective way of discouraging weed growth is by spreading about two inches of grass clippings or straw on the soil, monitoring for weed growth, and removing them before they establish. You can do this weekly.
Watch for the presence of pests and insects and remove them by hand if appropriate or apply insecticides where the infestation is heavy while following insecticide use guidelines for health and environmental concerns.
Most vegetable diseases are fatal and contagious among the plants; therefore, we recommend that you uproot and destroy all infected plants. Also, remember to rotate crops in the other seasons to kill crop-type-specific disease cycles.
Conclusion
The definite way to ensure your vegetables grow as quickly as possible is by first making sure that the soil you grow on is fertile, has the right balance of nutrients, and has a healthy structure.
Once your land is suitable, manage it by replenishing it as per requirements based on your soil test results. Water, sunlight, and soil warmth are essential for lush leaf and quality fruit production.
Since vegetables require a lot of moisture, smart watering practices will make gardening easy in your pocket. Lastly, ensure your garden is clean and free from disease to ensure the exclusive availability of nutrients to the vegetables.
