5 reasons people fail when growing vegetables at home

Successfully grow fresh vegetables at home

Growing your own fresh herbs and vegetables saves money, time and is a great way to spend quality family time with your children in a dynamic learning environment. There are some common reasons why home vegetable gardens fail. I have provided my top tips to ensure that this is not YOU. I believe that anyone can grow fresh food at home and have it available to regularly add to family meals.

The main reasons people fail at their attempt to grow fresh vegetables at home include:

Any of these reason individually, or combined can lead to never trying again and loosing the valuable opportunity to experience the excitement and satisfaction that comes from harvest your own home grown fresh food that you can use in family meals.

Many people I have spoken to over the last 4 years have told me that they would love to have fresh organic ingredients on hand that could be collected as required and added to family meals.

This is not a dream, it is part of our lifestyle. I collect fresh ingredients from our vegetable garden daily for family meals. During the summer months I purchase very few vegetables and no herbs from the store. During the remaining seasons of the year I collect ingredients for our family meals on a regular basis.

Growing your own fresh herbs and vegetables saves our family money and it also saves me valuable time. I do not need to go to the shops for “top ups” of fresh vegetables or herbs very often as I can collect them as required from our backyard.

These are my tips to avoid failure when growing your own vegetables at home:

This is the basic framework I created for the Kitchen Garden Box. It is based on growing from seed. The Kitchen Garden Box removes the guess work from growing your own vegetable garden. If you are after a seasonal step by step guide to planting, growing, harvesting and cooking a years worth of fresh produce it will take you through the process, all the while providing fresh ingredients for your family meals.

Guarantee your success in the garden with the Kitchen Garden Box. Start the new year by getting outside with the kids to grow your own fresh food for family meals this year. It is simpler than you think.

Get your copy of my Water Roster so that you never again forget to water your vegetables or herbs.

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The biggest difficulty I have growing vegetables is the combination of sustained, extreme heat and lack of rain. When you get many days straight in the high 30s and 40s and little or no rain for months (we got under 400ml in 2015), no amount of watering seems to help, especially if sub-soil moisture is non-existent. Mulching also doesn’t seem to help much if overall soil moisture is very low.

I have to admit I’m pretty hopeless at many of these – namely planting in the right position/climate and watering! But a fairly basic and self installed automatic sprinkling system has helped with the watering – and right now in this never ending rain I don’t have to worry too much. I think you are definitely right about involving the family – I have my nieces and nephew staying at the moment and while we were cooking dinner the other night my 8 year old niece told me that “I like your garden, it’s like going to the shops” because we picked chillis, herbs, capsicum and tomatoes to go straight into the meal. And they all ate it all as well! Happy New Year and happy gardening for 2016.

If growing more of your own food is your resolution for 2016, Ive got some of my tried and tested tips for motivation on my blog! http://bit.ly/22Hqsik

For those struggling to get anything going we have found some success with potatoes with little effort.
Potatoes seem to a set and forget as they are below the soil.
We managed to get a very large potato in recent weeks.