Gardening as a Hobby – 10 Easy Steps to Start

As a necessity of our age, almost every part of the cities is crammed with reinforced concrete buildings. This increases the longing we humans feel for nature and natural things. For this reason, many people have started gardening as a hobby. Gardening as a hobby gives us the opportunity to grow our own organic fruits and vegetables. So, what should I know before starting my very own hobby garden?

First of All, What is Gardening as a Hobby?

You can grow organic products within the hobby garden, namely in the organic garden. Growing their own organic fruits and vegetables enables people to get rid of negative energy and nourish them with natural foods. You can grow your own vegetables and fruits organically and also not very expensive. You can start growing organic products by making your own gardening as a hobby.

Gardening as a hobby is not more economical, but it is an escape area from the busy life of the city, using easy-to-produce vegetable, flower or tree species by spending your free time. Many factors affect people’s demand for these gardens. In addition to being places where people who have dealt with soil in the past can live their memories, albeit partially, curiosity and interest in nature may also cause the desire to use these gardens as a new lifestyle.

With the desire of the person to be alone, the opportunity to have a place of his own leads people to prefer these gardens. As the soil positively affects the mental health of the people, it is a mother that takes the negative energy and gives everyone more than they want.

The biggest problem of many people living in big cities is not being able to access healthy and natural products. Vegetables and fruits grown using hormones, chemical pesticides and chemical fertilizers negatively affect human health. As such, the demand for products grown with natural methods without the use of all these chemical drugs is increasing day by day.¹

Hobby Gardens are areas that are mostly established near the city and do not have a fixed size, where people work in their free time without waiting for economic income and produce vegetables, flowers and fruits. Hobby Gardens are either the ones that are controlled by a management, have certain rules, are mostly used in summer, but there are also ones that are made independently.

Hobby gardens are mostly known by names such as Hobby Garden, Organic Garden, Small Garden, City Garden Allotment Garden, Street Garden or Community Garden. Of course, you can also start growing organic products by doing your own gardening activities in your front- or backyard.

How Can I Plan my very Own Hobby Garden?

Regardless of the size of your hobby garden, you first need a good planning. Where and how to start your own hobby garden are very important questions to ask yourself in this process. You should pay particular attention to these points if gardening as a hobby is your wish:

• Being close to the settlement area and being easily accessible
• Air and soil are not polluted
• Having a safe and controlled area
• Whether or not it has an area that allows growth
• Having clean and sufficient water resources
• Whether the area is suitable for gardening
• Manageable and controllable size
• Whether plants are suitable for life or not

What are the Benefits of Gardening as a Hobby?

Design your Dream Garden

Designing your dream garden offers the freedom to create a personalized outdoor space that reflects your unique vision and preferences. From choosing the layout and selecting the plants to incorporating specific features and elements, you have complete control over every aspect of your garden’s design. Whether you envision a tranquil Zen retreat, a vibrant flower-filled paradise, or a functional and sustainable vegetable garden, the possibilities are endless when you have the ability to design your dream garden as you wish.

Escaping From City Life

Embarking on a journey of gardening as a hobby allows you to escape the fast-paced city life and immerse yourself in the wonders of nature. By tending to your own garden, you can find solace in the tranquility of greenery, while relishing the joy of cultivating and harvesting your own homegrown products. Experience the bliss of being in-tune with nature as you cultivate a deeper connection with the environment and savor the bountiful rewards of your own labor.

Establishing a Close Neighborhood Relationship

Gardening as a hobby not only provides personal fulfillment but also serves as a catalyst for fostering strong relationships within your neighborhood. By sharing gardening tips, exchanging seeds or plants, and collaborating on community projects, you can establish a close-knit network of fellow gardening enthusiasts. This sense of camaraderie and shared passion creates a supportive and vibrant community where knowledge and resources are freely exchanged, enriching the gardening experience for all involved.

Stress Reduction

Engaging in gardening as a hobby offers a natural and effective way to reduce stress levels by staying connected with the soil. The act of planting, tending to plants, and feeling the earth beneath your fingertips promotes a sense of grounding and mindfulness. Through this intimate connection with the soil, gardening provides a therapeutic escape from daily pressures, allowing you to find peace and relaxation in the nurturing environment of your garden.

Providing Ecological Production

Furthermore, gardening as a hobby contributes to ecological production by fostering sustainable and environmentally friendly practices. By cultivating your own garden, you have control over the use of pesticides and fertilizers, enabling you to prioritize organic and natural methods of nurturing your plants. This ecological approach not only benefits your immediate surroundings but also promotes biodiversity, conservation, and a healthier ecosystem overall.

Creating a Lifestyle Model

In addition, gardening as a hobby has the potential to inspire and influence city life by showcasing the beauty and benefits of green spaces within urban environments. By creating a thriving garden in a city setting, you can serve as a living example of how nature can be integrated into daily life, encouraging others to follow suit. Your garden can become a lifestyle model, demonstrating the possibilities of sustainable living, connecting with nature, and cultivating a deeper sense of community in the midst of the bustling cityscape.

Exquisite and Natural Growth Environment

Further, gardening as a hobby allows you to create an exquisite and natural growth environment for your children, fostering their love for nature and teaching them valuable life skills. Through hands-on involvement in gardening, they develop a deeper understanding of plant life cycles, the importance of sustainability, and the joy of nurturing living things. By nurturing this connection with nature from an early age, you provide your children with a lifelong appreciation for the environment and a foundation for their own gardening adventures.

Meet the Vegetables and Fruits in a Natural and Organic Way

To go on, gardening as a hobby empowers you to meet your home’s vegetable and fruit needs in a natural and organic way, ensuring a fresh and healthy food source. By growing your own produce, you have full control over the cultivation process, allowing you to avoid harmful chemicals and pesticides commonly found in store-bought options. This organic approach not only provides you with nutritious and flavorful fruits and vegetables but also promotes a sustainable lifestyle that supports your well-being and the health of the environment.

Health

Gardening as a hobby offers the added benefit of improving your health by providing you with a consistent supply of organic products. By cultivating your own fruits, vegetables, and herbs, you can enjoy the nutritional advantages of fresh, pesticide-free produce. Incorporating homegrown, organic ingredients into your diet supports a balanced and wholesome lifestyle, contributing to your overall well-being and vitality.²

Pleasant Time with Gardening as a Hobby

With gardening as a hobby, you can embark on a delightful journey that brings joy and contentment to your life. Engaging in this rewarding activity allows you to immerse yourself in the beauty of nature, experience the satisfaction of nurturing plants, and witness the magical transformation of seeds into flourishing gardens. Whether it’s tending to colorful blooms, harvesting homegrown vegetables, or simply spending time outdoors surrounded by greenery, gardening provides a peaceful and fulfilling way to enjoy your leisure time.

Distracting Negative Energy

Growing your own fruit and vegetable seedlings as a hobby serves as a wonderful distraction from negative energy, allowing you to focus on the positive aspects of nurturing life. As you immerse yourself in the process of planting and caring for your plants, the therapeutic benefits of gardening take hold, uplifting your spirits and promoting a sense of well-being. Beyond its therapeutic nature, cultivating fruit and vegetable seedlings is a fun and enjoyable pursuit, offering a sense of accomplishment and excitement as you witness your efforts turn into a bountiful harvest.

Selling products

I also presents an opportunity for potential trade, as the products you grow can be easily sold with a high profit rate. Whether it’s selling your excess fruits, vegetables, or even unique plant varieties, the demand for fresh, homegrown produce often allows for lucrative sales. By leveraging your gardening skills, you can turn your passion into a profitable venture while sharing the abundance of your garden with others, creating a win-win situation for both you and your customers.

High Morale

Watching the growth of the small saplings you planted as part of your gardening hobby is a source of great joy and fulfillment. Witnessing the progress and eventual success of your efforts boosts your morale, instilling a sense of accomplishment and optimism. This positive experience translates beyond the garden, providing inspiration and motivation to approach other aspects of life with a positive mindset and the confidence to overcome challenges.

Which steps are necessary to start gardening as a hobby?

1. Consider your Possibilities

• Do you want a vegetable garden?
• Is it a tree garden?
• Is it a flower garden?

If your preference is in the direction of a vegetable garden, you can start gardening as a hobby by determining the products that you simply like to eat and that can be planted according to the actual season. In the flower garden direction, you will concentrate to planting flowers that appeal to you with their colors and scents that you can look at with affection, usually bloom in summer and renewable per annum. Your local seeder will offer you some good suggestions on this subject.

2. Choose a Proper Area for Gardening as a Hobby

Almost all vegetables and most flowers need 6-8 hours of full sun a day. Therefore, observe which side of your garden gets the foremost sun. If you have a shady garden, you don’t need to be desperate because many types of vegetables we consume, such as broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, arugula, celery, grow in the shade. This step is vital to make sure that the light requirements of the plants are met. Ask your seeder how much sun the plants you plan to grow will probably need to grow healthy.

Three bonus tips:

• Choose a relatively flat place for your garden, because dealing with a sloping garden is more difficult, both time-consuming and expensive
• Make sure the garden is in an unobtrusive place
• Check windscreens (e.g. your house or your neighbor’s house) that prevent the plants from being damaged by strong winds

3. Clean the Ground

Remove any debris of leaves, stones and grass covering the area you plan to plant. Get a rake so you can clean it easily with a rake. Hoe the moist or wet soil and remove large pieces such as stone rocks from the soil. Don’t forget to remove wild plant roots as well.

4. Feed the Soil

The more fertile the soil, the more efficient the plant you are going to plant. Your soil may be extremely wet, weak, barren, or very acidic or alkaline. The solution for your hobby garden is usually simple: Add organic matter. When digging up a new soil, add rotten leaves, dry grass clippings or an old layer of manure.

5. Tilling of the Soil

Tilling the soil is important to preparing new beds for planting because it allows the roots to possess easier access to water and nutrients to the soil. There are two methods for hobby gardeners: cultivation and digging. Digging can be done with a shovel or with small motor scythes. If the garden is large, scythes are a good method. Digging is more practical for making small beds. Dig if the soil is moist enough to form a loose ball in your fist. Mix the organic matter from step 4 at the same time, turning with a sharp shovel to gently turn the top four to eight cm soil.

One more tip. Walking on prepared beds compact the soil, so temporarily lay planks to distribute your weight.

6. Choose your Plants

First, we determined your garden preference. After preparing the soil, choose the plants you will plant consistent with your garden preference. Decide whether you will plant these plants as seeds or seedlings and obtain them from your local seeder or in an online shop.

7. Plant your Chosen Fruits Flowers and Vegetables

Some plants like pansies, violets, and cabbage love the cold so you can plant them in fall or late winter. Tomatoes and most annual flowers, on the other hand, prefer warm temperatures, so don’t plant until the danger of frost is gone in your area. Many plants such as lettuce and sunflower are easy to grow directly from seed in the garden. Be sure to read the seed packet for information on sowing time, depth, and spacing.

If you are an adventurous novice and just start gardening as a hobby, you can dive into the growing season by sowing seeds indoors a few weeks before the last frost date. Follow the seed packet instructions and place the containers on a sunny windowsill or in light areas if you do not have a window space. Make sure to keep the seeds and seedlings moist but not wet!

An easier way to start your garden is to seed the plants. You can easily plant your plants in the pits you have prepared according to the seedling container. Remove the plants from the container by pushing them up from the bottom. If the roots have grown into the soil, use a fork or your fingers to untie some of the outer roots before placing them in the pit. Finally, water a little.

8. Water at the Right Time

Seedlings should never be allowed to dry out, so daily watering is vital. As the plants grow, their water requirement decreases. After that, how often you will need water depends on your soil, humidity and rainfall. Clay soil dries more slowly than sandy soil. Sunny and windy conditions dry the soil faster than cool, cloudy weather. Pay attention to water early in the morning to minimize evaporation.

If you are going to get your water needs from the well, definitely obtain a submersible pump. Another option is that if water will be supplied from the minus code, you can also choose a centrifugal pump. In order not to have difficulty in choosing the pump, read the things to be careful about in choosing the pump.

9. Protect your Garden

To keep weeds and moisture in, hoe the soil with a few inches of shovel. You do not have to water it often and prevent the sunlight from hitting the soil, preventing the germination of weed seeds. Sprinkle organic ingredients such as fragrant cocoa bean shells to nourish the soil.

10. Keep up your Hard Work

Your garden is beginning to grow. Help him reach his full potential by keeping up with your gardening work.

• Water the plants.
• Remove the weeds before they grow.
• Get rid of dead, dying and diseased plants.
• Remove the damaging insects from the plants by removing them from the plant and dropping them in a bucket of water (e.g. tomato horn worms) or spraying insectifuge with spray pumps.
• Support tall plants (e.g. tomatoes) with a trellis, stake or rope.

References

1. Harding, D., Lukman, K. M., Jingga, M., Uchiyama, Y., Quevedo, J. M. D., & Kohsaka, R. (2022). Urban gardening and wellbeing in pandemic era: preliminary results from a socio-environmental factors approach. Land, 11(4), 492.
2. Coyoca, M. B. P., Del Rosario, M. A. B., Lazo, J. R. L., Calixtro Jr, V. L., & Edaño, L. B. (2022). Impact of gardening on physical and mental health in the midst of Covid-19 pandemic. Indonesian Journal of Community and Special Needs Education, 2(2), 99-102.