7 Tips to Keep Vegetables Growing Healthy

it's disappointing to go through the effort of growing vegetables only to find your crops withering before you even get a chance to reap what you've sown today I'm mark from self-sufficient me and we're not going to let that happen because I'm going to give you seven seven top tips how to keep vegetables growing healthy so you can reap a ton of rewards let's get into it [Music] number one is water I wanted to do watering first because a lot of the other tips flow on from that so what I'm about to say make sure you let it soak in what I like to hand water as much as possible even if I use our watering system I still make a point of spot watering here and there because watering gets me focused on the plants if you're not going to hand water I suggest you wander around your garden every day if possible so that you become well connected with your crops and how they're going walking around your garden is fun and relaxing anyway let's face it most of us have more time these days to go for a stroll around the veggie patch observing our garden closely allows us to pick up small changes and see any signs or problems early so we can rectify them before they become a big problem affecting the health of our valuable crops so I did not just make an extra tip and call it observation well simple because an extra tip would have made it eight and I didn't want to do it I wanted to do 7 because 7 is half of my lucky number which is 14 plus watering and observation go hand in glove watering is obviously important for plants health as we all know plants need water to survive so not enough water can stress the plants but then too much water will drown or rot vegetables to find the balance is easy and I've shown this demonstration a million times in my videos and another times not gonna hurt simply put your finger up to the second knuckle pull it out or you could lose a lot around if you want to have a bit of fun and if the tip of your finger is nice and moist or wet and this one is because I've just watered these beds then of course the bed doesn't need any water you can just leave it rest if it's bone-dry well then it needs some watering and even the the smallest of seedlings will have a tap root by the time they've popped out of at least that long most of them that test that simple test is going to give you the best indication of whether that bed needs water or not I've just sounds seeds here so I hope I haven't just stuff something up number two is fertilize your plants need adequate food or they'll go into survival mode and this is not what you want for a food crop feeding a little more often is better than a lot in one go because too much food can have negative effects on plants so what's the balance well generally I like to fertilize every three to four weeks in larger garden beds or every two to three weeks in containers observation as stated in tip one is the key though if you see signs of slowing growth pile foliage weak looking plants with no other reason for these symptoms give them a good feed likewise if I see excellent growth or really green leggy growth on corn or extra foliage too much foliage on tomatoes at the expense of fruit then I won't fertilize as much or at all because it's obvious the plant is getting work needs slow release fertilizers can help in getting the balance right but honestly a good healthy soil with compost and some animal manure is perfect speaking of soil soil health is important it must be free draining enough to allow roots access to oxygen but then it should retain enough water so that the plant is able to get a drink when it needs one another thing that helps is symbiotic relationships like healthy soil has fungi microbes and small animals like worms that help plants to ingest the nutrients and trace elements they need to be really healthy you can also use tonics like a seaweed tonic or seaweed application they're very good to give plants a good pickup as well as fish fertilizers just a light or a weak application of these because they're very easy on plants and this one here is ocean to earth it's not sponsored or anything the guy sent it to me from down south II does his own on Facebook Australia here Google that or Facebook it find out if you can buy some from him I think he only does around Australia and it's pretty good stuff I use it just to help out plants that are looking a little sickly or might need a bit of a pickup or just generally on seedlings nice and weak of course to get them off to a good start similar to how I would use a seaweed application I wouldn't usually apply seaweed or fish fertilizer at the same time as the regular fertilizer I reckon applying it about halfway between your regular applications of fertilizer is a good time to do it number three is protection from pests we don't grow our plants for other things to eat growth for ourselves where we can except a little bit of crop loss with organic gardening that's fine I want to tolerate all of my food getting eaten by critters now before we go on to remedies organic sprays let me just say that healthy plants attract less pests the reason why is Nature has hardwired pests to munch on sick plants first but of course this isn't always the case and healthy plants can get hit by pests also and if you've got pests like aphids or scale that are sucking the energy out of your plant they're going to turn from healthy to sickly real quick aren't they so we do need to get on to outbreaks early one or two of those pests hanging around isn't a big issue but when they come in large numbers that's all we need to get onto it and notice that quickly before they start taking over plants and doing a real lot of damage one way you can do that is through exclusion it's very effective it's inconvenient for us but it is an effective way to protect young sweet plants from getting eaten by animals and bugs I sometimes only protect seedlings and then remove those barriers or exclusions those nets for when those plants are maturing and then perhaps cover them again as they're staying to fruit once the flowers have been pollinated but small screened pest netting is good for all animals and birds the tough nylon stuff I do recommend it it does work the other things you can do is encourage insect eating birds and animals to visit your garden through growing trees and keeping cats away you can encourage good bugs that eat bad bugs and don't use systemic indiscriminate pesticides that just kills and wipes out everything homemade remedies like this pest oil here that I made last year still got a fair bit left because don't really use it that much but it's there in case we do and I've noticed a few aphids around Magnolia fruit trees though they can be easily made up and kept in the shed if you need it and a pretty effective on the baddies whilst leaving the goodies alone I should say for really persistent and bad outbreaks of chewing insects and sucking insects you can use an organic application called payee through which is made from the Daisy plant and there's also synthetic applications of it that you can buy as well and they are classed as organic but they are really potent they will kill indiscriminately but it only lasts on the plants or in the environment for around 24 hours try not to use it at all if you don't have to I mean if you see one or two bugs just don't pull out the hard stuff and spray it all over the plant use it very sparingly not when the plants are in flower or when bees are around and if you are targeting those pests specifically well then it shouldn't do a lot of long-term damage in your garden the other thing pests do is bring in disease which is number four protect your plants from disease to keep I'm healthy and if you have healthy plants you will get less disease so then that goes back to fertilizing water soil you want all those elements but that's why they were pretty much first but then apart from having all those elements right what you can do to keep your plants healthy is prune off any affected leaves falling stems tomatoes is a really good example by pruning them and or the blight that starts to fall on tomato plants you can then ward off that disease from taking over the full plant and killing it off prematurely of course you should practice good garden hygiene if you have plants that have died suddenly from a disease rip them out don't compost them burn them or throw them in the rubbish take them to the tip don't recycle on back into the garden and if you're finding it's difficult to get on top of some of the diseases like a real common one is powdery mildew well then you can spray it with home remedies or of course you can buy fungal products from the store that can help there's also good organic options in those areas as well and one reason why your plants might become susceptible to disease is timing which is number five timing is critical for growing your veg if you grow it at the wrong time you can do it but you're gonna run into some problems for example we can grow corn at this time of year but it doesn't grow very well we grow a corn through the summertime because that's the ultimate time for it to grow if we grow it now as the weather scrolling down even though we live in the subtropics and we have a very mild winter the corn suffers it gets attacked horribly by insects and it does get diseases grow stunted and you don't get a very good crop out of it so it's really a waste of corn seed to plant it now going into our cooler season where as we plant broccoli and lettuce for example they thrive in this is the best temperature and climate and time of year all growing those salad types and brassicas so I reckon you stick to your growing charts look at your local growing guides as a guide they're not always that accurate but they can be used as a guide and once you've been growing for a few seasons you can then shift a few weeks here or there to know when the best time is for planting or sowing and growing those particular crops that exactly the right time so they don't get targeted by pests and disease number six is weeding and these all tie in together like I said right from the beginning on observation and then I've just been talking about pests and disease if you don't keep up the leading in your garden especially around the plants that you're growing directly it can become a problem and weeds can make your plants unhealthy simple fact is weeds attract insects pests and also disease not only that weeds will grow obviously in the same soil that your plants and vegetables are growing in and weeds generally grow faster they have bigger root systems and what they can do is not only steal water from your crops but they can steal valuable nutrients that your plants need to thrive and remain healthy and you can limit weeds by mulching and that's tip number seven and the last tip whether you buy your mulch will make your own it doesn't matter as long as you've got a nice thick mulch they can go under plants or in spare patches of garden to stop those weeds coming up but that's not the only benefit I've got a few examples here three beds that I've used sugarcane mulch in that I've purchased and that works really well breaks down and goes into the soil produces even more nutrients and this bed here is an example of using old corn stalks that I've just simply mulched up myself to create a mulch that goes on top of the bed there like this you know always bang on about moles molting in the vegetable garden around fruit-trees is such an important thing for healthy plants so if you want to see more on that I've made several videos on mulching one in particular what happens when you mulch in the garden have a look at that if you're more interested in knowing more about mulch can you think of any other things that we can do to keep our food crops healthy you can great welcome down in the comment section below so that we can all learn from them I hope you enjoyed this video if you did actually give it a healthy thumbs up thanks a lot for watching bye for now

Channel: Self Sufficient Me

Views: 245,950

Rating: 4.9768414 out of 5

Keywords: Tips for growing healthy vegetables, keep vegetables healthy, grow healthy food crops, grow more productive vegetables, grow vegetables at home, how to grow vegetables, vegetables, garden, gardening

Id: xk2xKI1EfGs

Length: 13min 56sec (836 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 09 2020