Growing your own vegetables can be difficult, especially for a beginner. It can be very disheartening to go through all the effort of creating aesthetically pleasing garden beds, digging up soil, planting your seeds and waiting hopefully, only to end up with tiny, rock-hard veggies that never seem to ripen before they rot. 

Most people give up after a few tries at getting their veggies to grow. However, some people just struggle time and time again, with no real understanding of why their plants seem to keep shrivelling up or rotting away. 

Without going to the trouble of having an expert come out to your home to assess your growing situation, it can be really hard to work out exactly what you are doing wrong, especially if you have bought all the things you think you need to keep your plants alive. 

Growing vegetables can be a hard journey, but it is really rewarding when you get big, bountiful harvests of freshly grown vegetables straight from your garden. To start you off right, we have a couple of things to keep in mind when starting to plan out your garden. 

All of these tips and tricks can come down to one simple thing, choosing the right soil for the plants you are trying to grow. Veggie mix soil is a great choice for growing veggies, as it is perfectly optimised for their strong and healthy growth. If you are trying to grow shrubs or flowers, try a garden soil mix. 

How Soil Can Affect Your Plant Growth

Drainage

This is one of the most overlooked, and yet most important parts of creating a viable veggie garden. Drainage is essential for creating the right level of standing water within the garden soil. The exact amount of drainage you want depends on what you are trying to grow. 

This is one of the reasons we split our gardens up and grouped similar plants together. If you tried to grow your veggies right next to trees or other garden plants, you would probably find that they couldn’t thrive very well and may not even survive. This is because the other plants are likely to have much longer and stronger roots which can get to water faster than the veggie plants, thus depriving your veggies of the necessary water and nutrients to get growth started. 

You can also create drainage through mixing soils, or through putting physical holes like pipes or layers of brush in the bottom of your garden bed. This can help to increase drainage if you have very fine and silty soil, as fine soil holds too much water and drowns the plants. 

If you don’t want to mess around with all the mixing of substrates to create the optimal drainage for your veggie garden, the best idea is to try a veggie mix soil. These have been expertly crafted by the team at Gembrook Garden Supplies to provide the perfect drainage so your veggies can access the water they need without being swamped in it. 

Nutrition

The next most obvious problem to address when looking at slow or poor growth of veggies, particularly if you are getting really small and hard produce from your plants, is the nutrition blend you are feeding them. 

Nutrition for plants comes from a variety of sources. Most people are aware that plants can use the process of photosynthesis to create energy, but this alone is not enough for veggie plants to thrive. 

Plants also require nutrients like carbon, calcium, and nitrogen, which they largely absorb from their soils. These nutrients can be enhanced from fungi interactions within root structures or can be artificially introduced through fertiliser. 

The aim is to have your soil able to consistently produce and maintain its supply of nitrogen, carbon, and calcium through the process of decomposition. You can also add compost to the base of the soil when you initially add it into the veggie bed to jumpstart the nutrient content of the soil. 

However, getting those nutrients off-balance can be devastating to the plant growth life, as too much of any one of them can result in plant growth being hindered, or even lead to plant death. 

A great idea is to try using ready-made soil like the veggie mix soil from Gembrook Garden Supplies. This soil has a preset level of nutrition specifically designed for the average veggie garden. If you have a truly unusual vegetable feel free to get in touch with the team to check if the veggie mix soil would be right for you! 

Looking for the right soil for your garden?

Simply put, we would highly recommend that any beginner gardeners use ready-made soil like the veggie mix soil or the garden soil from Gembrook Garden Supplies to start their veggie garden journey and ensure success. Get in touch today and let the experts help you out and start planning your dream garden!

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