What is the ideal garden? Everyone has their ideas of how their garden should be.
And if they have the interest and can work hard to achieve what they want, then they can attain that garden, says Rose Ssanyu who owns Kevin gardens.
Ssanyu started gardening from her verandah. As a gardener for the last 30 years, she says any gardener must have orchards. These are crops in form of fruits.
“Whereas there are no set rules of what to grow in one’s garden, an orchard is something that every home garden should have. There is nothing lovelier than harvesting fruits from one’s garden,” says Ssanyu.
Soil preparation
“Deep cultivation is a foundation of successful gardening. Most failures of fruit trees are because the ground in which they are planted is not stirred deeply enough,” she says.
“One may apply fertilisers to the soil to increase the fertility, but this may not do much as there would not be enough area for the roots to spread,” Ssanyu explains.
Adding that for a beginner, stirring the soil properly saves one a great deal of trouble as the plant grows and roots find ease in penetrating the soil in search of nutrients other than the hard ground.
Deep soil cultivation should be coupled with manure application, most especially cow dung so that the soil is soft and rich in plant nutrients for the growing fruits.
Next is the selection of the right fruit trees. It is wise to choose the kinds of fruits that are likely to thrive under ordinary conditions, for example, avocado, oranges, and mangoes among others.
Others like apples, grapes, and tangerine need a lot of special treatment and should be planted when one is well-set for them.
Since snails, aphids and beetles affect most fruit plants, one should spray the plants with insecticide and fungicide whenever one notices attacks on the plants.
