Planting your own vegetable garden can be a challenge if you are just starting out. It can be difficult to know where to begin and how to continue caring for the plants so that you can enjoy good quality vegetables.
Tine Vogelaar, owner of Bobtail Nursery in Ponoka, offers practical nursery seedlings that are ideal for the garden and sees many benefits to approaching it this way.
“People can buy little vegetable plants instead of seeding everything so that they can harvest them earlier since the growing season is so short,” said Vogelaar.
Vogelaar believes that harvesting the plants earlier in the season helps add to the success of a vegetable garden and keeps the plants from being ruined.
“Plants such as broccoli and cauliflower, white cabbage, red cabbage and kale have a large chance of getting little bugs or worms in them later in the season,” she said. “So it can be important to harvest them early.”
Vogelaar grows the seedlings to perfection until they are ready to be bought and planted. The seedling she grows are able to be harvested earlier in the season.
“I start the plants for people to put in their garden and they are done a little earlier,” she said.
Vogelaar believes that a benefit of growing your own garden is that you know exactly how the vegetables were treated and cared for.
“The nice part of growing your own vegetables is you know they haven’t been sprayed with chemicals,” she said. “You know exactly what is going in them.”
Having a vegetable garden can be fulfilling to watch grow and produce and if successful the vegetables can be enjoyed all year round.
“You will have fresh vegetables all summer,” said Vogelaar. “There are vegetables you can freeze and use them in the winter or can them.”
Vogelaar also suggests growing plants around the house if space is an issue.
“For people that don’t have room for a vegetable garden, tomatoes and peppers work really great because you can easily grow them in a pot or hanging basket on your deck,” she said. “You can still have a fresh supply all summer and can and freeze any extra.”
With files from Tiffany Williams.