A Rough Guide To Organic Gardening

1. Look After Your Soil - a healthy soil grows healthy plants.

• Get to know your soil (type and ph) and grow plants that suit the conditions.

• Keep the soil covered with plants, mulches and green manure cover crops to protect and nurture it.
  

• Recycle plant nutrients by making compost.

• Rotate crops - include a nitrogen fixing green manure  crop in your rotation.

• Use additional organic fertilisers sparingly - the mining and/or transport of these products can have an adverse environmental impact: eg. bone meal, seaweed meal, organic chicken manure, rock phosphate.

2.  Save your own seed from disease free plants and make your own potting compost.

• When these are not available buy seed and peat free compost from organically certified suppliers.
  

3.  Create a diverse Ecosystem

• Provide different habitats and shelters for wild life - piles of leaves, long grass, ponds etc
• Grow a range of plants to attract beneficial insects.
• Grow a mixture of crop varieties and companion plant.
• Accept a level of pests in the garden to attract the predators

4.  Avoid Pest and Diseases - prevention is better than cure

• By choosing resistant varieties of crops
  
• Follow planting times to avoid specific pests
• Encourage air flow around plants by pruning and correct planting distances.
• Apply water to soil rather than to plants
• Give plants the amount of water they need.

5. More pest and disease management tips

• Learn to identify creatures on your plants so you know which are friends or foe
• Monitor plants regularly and pick off and squash the pests.
  
• "Jet wash" to dislodge pests on plants
• Employ a variety of barriers to protect your plants from particular pests
• Use decoy plants.
• Only use organically acceptable pesticides as a last resort as you may kill off beneficial insects too or disrupt the natural ecosystem.

6. Manage weeds without herbicides.

• Some weeds are beneficial providing food and shelter for insects
• Grow ground cover plants such as green manures to inhibit weed growth
  
• Dig out by hand or hoe before they set seed.
• Mulch with locally sourced, recycled plant material
• Mulch with cardboard and newspaper

7. Manage water carefully

• Collect as much rainwater as you can
• Water the soil rather than the plant foliage 
• Water in the evening rather than on the heat of the day when it will evaporate more quickly (except tomatoes).
  
• Try to sow or transplant just before rain is forecast
• Protect young plants from sun and drying winds
• A good soaking once a week is better than a dribble of water every day

8. Use Untreated Wood

• Best practice is to grow your own wood - otherwise buy coppice products from local sustainable sources
• Recycled wood including scaffolding boards should be untreated and railway sleepers should not have been treated with creosote
• Linseed oil can be used to preserve wood.