Introduction
Vegetable gardening is simple and easy, and can yield successful crops year round. However, vegetable gardening can become quite complicated, especially for beginners, if the required steps are not followed. Besides, it can be challenging at times even for expert gardeners and therefore the produce doesn’t give anticipated results. To make things easy and smooth, I am taking this opportunity to discuss the five most common crop failures that occur in the modern day urban gardening system and how to turn around those failures into successes of growing crops at your home.
1 Seeds Fail to Germinate
It’s heartbreaking when you did everything according to plan and yet the seeds fail to germinate. This is one of the most common vegetable garden failures. Failure in germination of seeds is caused by old seeds, washed away seeds, lack of moisture, extremes of temperature, improper planting depth or seeds being stolen by animals.
It’s vital to plant crops that are suitable for a giving season and climatic conditions. Like for example: growing tomatoes, when there’s less than 4 hours of sunlight available, planting carrots in clay soils and warm temperatures or growing cabbage in Mediterranean climates, as they are prone to pest infestation.
2 Spindly Plant Seedlings
Young plant seedlings become leggy, when they are growing in an overcrowded container or pot. Needless to say, this occurs because the growing nutrient hungry plants compete for organic nutrients, adequate sunlight. Furthermore, root damage caused by disease or transplanting also result in spindly seedlings.
3 Low Yields
Low yields of crops in vegetable gardening usually results from insufficient watering and using wrong type of fertilizer for a particular type of crop. For example, tomatoes and peppers require high potassium and leafy plants like cabbage grow well in high nitrogen containing soil. Due to overcrowding of plants they compete for nutrients. I would suggest doing soil tests and then add nutrients accordingly to the needs of the crop.
