As promised, today I’m going to tell you how I found out how important creating a plan is before starting a vegetable garden.
The first vegetable plant that I started with was okra. I had a packet of okra seeds that I had brought some time before. So, I filled some used yogurt cups with soil from my garden (mistake #1). I added an okra seed into each yogurt cup, watered it a bit, and left it on the balcony.
Within a few days, all the okra seeds had sprouted and I had about 20 -25 okra seedlings (mistake #2). Day by day my okra seeding grew bigger and bigger until it was obvious that they were growing too big for the tiny yogurt cups.
I looked around my garden and found an old flower pot that was large enough to grow okra in. Unfortunately, we didn’t have any more flower pots that were large enough (mistake #3). So, I transplanted the biggest okra seedling into the large flower pot and left the others in the yogurt cups (mistake #4).
The single okra plant that I had transplanted kept on growing until one day a lovely bright yellow flower bloomed. The flower faded just after midday and a tiny little okra started to grow. A few days later the okra was ready for harvesting. Okra has to be harvested when tender because they turn woody once they start to mature.
After two or three days another okra was ready to be harvested. I kept getting just one okra every two days or and had to figure out how to cook just one okra a day (mistake #5).
Now coming back to my okra seedlings that were left in the tiny yogurt cups, they had become really unhealthy and were fighting to stay alive.
A few days later I saw some peculiar tiny yellowish-white spots on them that seemed to be spreading. After a rather long Google search session, I realized that the remaining okra had been affected by spider mites!
The spider mites soon spread to the luffa plants that I had started just a week or two after starting the okra plants. I had to destroy all the okra seedlings as well as the luffa seedlings 🙁
I made 5 big but very common mistakes that newbie organic vegetable gardeners make by starting a vegetable garden without properly planning it first.
In my next email, I’ll tell you exactly what the 5 mistakes that I made were and how creating a plan before starting would have saved me a lot of trouble.
Until next time,
Jules
veggiesgrow.com
