10 tips for starting your first garden
Plants need a plan
Take a look at your potential garden
spaces. Well-lit spare rooms can become
homes to indoor hydroponic systems,
patios make ideal locations for container
gardens, sections of back lawns can be
transformed into productive plots and every balcony and windowsill can become
an oasis of thriving greenery. Whatever
the location, though, every garden space
needs both light and water in order to
thrive—so make sure your plans include
ways to supply these needs.
Plants need light
Select an area that gets enough light for
the plants you intend to grow. To do this,
monitor the amount of sunlight that the
space receives throughout an entire day,
preferably during the growing season.
Make note of how many hours of full
and partial light the plants will receive.
Greenhouses and indoor gardens will
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also require additional lighting such as
high intensity discharge (HID) lamps or
fluorescent T5s. Because it adapts so well
to a wide variety of lighting conditions
the human eye has trouble discerning the
actual magnitude of available light, but
with an inexpensive light meter empirical readings can be recorded quickly and
easily. If you’re using an artificial light
source, remember that light disperses
exponentially over distance so plants
twice as far away only receive a quarter
the light. With natural sunlight height is
much less of a factor because of the intensity and amount of available light, but
shadows become more important since
the light source moves over the course of
the day.
Plants need water
You might be able to supply a small
indoor or windowsill garden with just a
watering can, but for a large container