Growing your own organic fruits and vegetables is a great way to know what your food contains and where it comes from. While gardening without the use of pesticides and herbicides can seem like it might be hard to to do, if you have the right information, it can actually be very easy and rewarding. This article will show you how it can be done.

Check for weeds often in your garden as they will leech nutrients from the soil. Weeds can grow at a high rate of speed and overwhelm the resources available to your plants. Take the time to check for weeds at least twice a week to catch them while they are new shoots.

When dividing or transferring a plant, make sure you keep the roots cool and moist. Roots are the most fragile part of a plant and are extremely sensitive to light and heat. Put a dark plastic bag over the roots if you plan on not transferring the plant right away.

To keep dirt from getting under your fingernails while gardening, reach for a bar of soap beforehand! As much as we all love gardening, none of us really enjoy all that soil that gets stuck under our nails that can be so challenging to remove. Simply claw a bar of soap before you begin working in your garden and when finished, run your hands under water and as the soap washes away, so does the dirt!

Use a solution made of a combination of alcohol, water, and vinegar to remove the salt deposits that may accrue in clay pots. Spray it on the the pots and scrub away with a brush, preferably plastic. This allows you to continue to reuse those clay pots! Make sure the pots are dry before using them though.

If you plant flowers in a container make sure that you water them and feed them regularly, and that the pots have adequate drainage. Because there is limited soil in the pot, you need to pay more attention to the soil conditions. If the drainage is not adequate your plants will result in root rot.

An excellent way to store the goodies from a homegrown garden is to freeze them in small batches. Using small sealable plastic bags and cutting small amounts of fresh vegetables every few days will help store the extras from the garden. Just bag and toss in the freezer and the packets can be added at any time to soups and pastas year round.

Use groundcover to fill in bare areas of soil. Groundcover plants are very effective for ‘tying’ larger plants together and keeping weeds to a minimum. The earth needs to be well-cultivated, weeded and well-fertilized before you plant anything. In order for the plant to become well established, water thoroughly during dry spells and remove any weeds that may pop up. Fast growing groundcover plants include creeping thyme, sedum, ajuga, golden oregano, heuchera, lamium and vinca.

Abandon mass plantings to make your flower garden more personal. Mass plantings in every flowerbed have a tendency to make a landscape look like it belongs to a hotel or a corporate office building. Border plants and pockets of similar plants will give the same effect of a mass planting without being impersonal.

Experiment with color pairings. Purple and yellow work very well together, and can be used to create either a warm or cool effect. For a warm effect, use more yellow flowers than purple, conversely, using mostly purple flowers will give you a cool, soothing effect. A mixture of tall purple delphiniums or penstemon, and lower growing yellow achillea gives a spectacular display.

Wearing gloves to protect your hands is very important. It is very possible to get cut on something that is lodged in the ground if you do not wear gardening gloves. The best time to buy gardening gloves is at the end of summer when all of the gardening supplies have been put on clearance.

Learn to water your garden efficiently. A soaker hose can be laid in the garden and left on with low water pressure. This frees you up from having to hand-water the plants, so you can do other gardening work. Take care with seedlings, though — they are still delicate and need to be watered by hand.

To make sure you are doing organic gardening, define what organic means to you and make sure your seeds, plants and supplies fit your criteria. There is no set scientifically agreed on definition of what “organic” consistently means, so companies can label practically anything organic. Know what it means to you, then read labels to make sure you buy things consistent with your beliefs.

Grow organic herbs to add some flavor to your cooking and brighten up your yard. Herbs make great landscape plants: add them to a bed or pot in your yard. They are wonderful to flavor foods you cook, offer fragrance and have medicinal properties. Herbs are very easy to grow and actually thrive on neglect.

It’s all about the mulch. try mulching all of your flower beds and trees with at least 3″ of the organic material. It will conserve water, add some humus and other nutrients, and it will also discourage weed growth. It will also give the beds a nicer, more finished appearance.

Never use ‘unfinished’ compost in your garden. Unfinished, meaning still ‘hot’ compost can burn plants or bulbs if you try to amend your soil. An excessive smell of ammonia means that the compost hasn’t broken down sufficiently. You can work unfinished compost into a patch of bare soil, but be careful not to plant anything in the area for at least one week.

As you can see, growing your own garden, free from the chemicals that other foods contain, is not only easy to do, but you will have a wonderful, healthy crop of food that you can eat yourself, or share with family and friends. Make sure you tell them what they are eating.