Artificial fertilizers have been around for hundreds of years, but their adverse effects were not known until recently. In the past few decades, a movement away from these synthetic fertilizers and pesticides has been growing. While organic farming and gardening only represents about one percent of all global agriculture, that percent is steadily increasing. Genetically modified plants might serve some useful purposes, such as growing faster and more plentiful to feed millions of people who would otherwise starve, but these foods are typically less nutritional than organically grown plants. If you're looking to start your own garden, you can skip right past fertilizers and the like once you learn some of the more important organic gardening tips.

Natural and Healthy

Even before the worst effects of genetically modified foods and artificial fertilizers were discovered, many people decided that it wasn't natural and probably wasn't in the best interest of the environment and our health to grow and consume these foods. Organic gardening tips can help you avoid using fertilizers and pesticides, instead relying upon natural methods to ward off harmful insects and bacteria while also improving soil health and composition. First of all, get your own compost pile started. Healthy soil is instrumental to a healthy garden, and just about any biomass will do. Instead of buying fertilizer to dump into your soil, you can decompose egg shells, bread crumbs, leftovers, grass clippings, and plenty of other things to improve your soil's health. Another helpful compost pile organic gardening tip is to mix different materials together to get more nutrients into your homemade fertilizer.

Regular crop rotation is another important organic vegetable gardening tip to keep in mind. When you plant the same crops in the same locations year after year, it depletes the soil of important nutrients while not restoring any back. Mixing up the types of plants you seed each year can improve soil health even further, and after a few years, your soil will be the envy of the neighborhood. To keep plants healthy, organic gardening tips will point you to a variety methods. Also, there are a few “green pesticides” which are approved for organic farming and gardening, and these don't have any of the harmful side effects of conventional pesticides. However, keeping your soil nourished and your plants watered is probably the single most important factor in keeping your plants healthy, as most crops are more capable of surviving disease, insect, fungal, and bacterial problems on their own if they are well nourished. With these simply being the tip of the iceberg, there are thousands more organic gardening tips to improve your gardening expertise and yield the best crops that you have ever farmed.