Hi Everyone!

With so many newbies starting to grow their own veggies this year, thanks to COVID, there's a lot of people that could benefit from hearing your veggie gardening tips and tricks!

What's your favourite veggie gardening hack? Post it below to share with everyone!

We run an Instagram Page where we post lots of tips on growing all sorts of fruit and veggies. Head over & give us a follow if you're interested @homegrownharvests

Here's 10 of our general tips & tricks to start things off!
1. Always include flowers in your veggie garden to attract pollinators such as bees.
2. Save your kitchen scraps and start a compost heap. This can be used to improve your soil and get better yields out of your plants.
3. Don't plant everything all at once, grow in successions so there is always new produce ripening and it's not all ready at once.
4. Putting beer into a small dish and placing it in the garden is a great way to attract and kill slugs that would otherwise eat your veggies.
5. Using mulch or straw around the base of your veggies will stop the soil drying out as fast and reduce the amount of watering required.
6. Save space by growing plants like peas and beans vertically on a trellis, then you can plant leafy greens underneath.
7. If you see diseased or pest infested foliage on your plants remove it from the garden completely & be sure not to compost it!
8. When planting make sure you leave enough space between each plant, this will ensure they get enough nutrients from the soil to grow to a large size and produce a bumper crop.
9. Don't water too much! If your soil is still damp hold of watering from another day. Over-watering can be just as bad as under-watering.
10. If it doesn't work, try again! Gardening is always about trial and error. You'll never always get it right & that's ok

DID YOU KNOW - Cabbage plants can produce more than one cabbage in a single season? When you harvest the cabbage cut it off using a sharp knife leaving the bottom few leaves on the plant and it will shoot and re-grow a new cabbage. Images for proof!

I grow a lot in a little space. I've currently got a 9x15 foot garden with 12 tomatoes, 10 peppers, 2 zucchini (at least I think it's 2), 3 short rows of beans, and random herbs and such scattered in any open space and pots. Works well for city gardening.

I create a trench system that allows water to be held near plants and moves it around the garden. This is useful in clay soil because otherwise the water just runs off without soaking in.


I use grass clippings as mulch. This is also helpful with keeping my clay soil from getting too dry.



My biggest tip is just try stuff. So far I've not amended my soil much (haven't had time/ money) but my plants do well with fertilizer that is mixed with the water.

Great tips @Ceckery

Love the photo's too!

Do you save your veggie scraps and compost? Adding regular compost to clay soils is a great & cheap way to start breaking them down! I know some of those products aren't cheap when purchased from the store.

I haven't started composting yet. I don't really have a good spot for it. Either my soil isn't as bad as it could be or I'm just really lucky (or maybe it's the fact that I have summers off so I tend to baby my garden).

Compost is simply the greatest to add to your garden. If soil is cray it loosens it up. If sand it helps the soil hold moisture.

Plants thrive on it. In fact one year I planted tomato plants in six inches of pure compost. They loved it and I never had so many tomatoes ever.

Ceckery You sound like me as I too am dealing with clay and trying different plants etc. Our beans and Peas did not make it although we got one good round of green beans and waxed beans before a storm and insects got to my plant leaves ! Great tips ! Next step is to find a decent all around compost but I have no place in my yard for this except to purchase so I am looking into fish type fertilizer next year .

My beans are doing great. I'm actually probably planting more within the next week. I think the fact that I'm mulching with grass clippings about once a month is really helping. I'm also planning to mulch with leaves over the winter. The grass serves multiple purposes. It keeps the clay moist longer, preventing it from becoming hard and cracked. It also keeps it from becoming a muddy mess (though I put down stepping stones in my path and try to stay on those most of the time). And the grass decomposes, enriching the soil. I just do thin layers sometimes flipping it after a day or so, so it can dry out better. I'd much more often but have to pay attention to when things are fine to the lawn so I don't use treated grass that might kill the plants. Here's my garden from last week. The beans are climbing the fence on the far right.

Always plant beans, they are soil improvers.