Learn Some New Tricks with French Vegetable Gardening

Europeans generally tend to own less land than Americans, so they need to be more efficient in their allocation. The French are a prime example of European ingenuity when it comes to land usage, as exemplified by their gardens. A much larger percentage of French cultivate their own gardens as well, and their practices differ slightly from our own, and we can draw many useful lessons from their methods. If you want to vastly improve the efficiency of your own garden, then you ought to take a firm look at French vegetable gardening to get more out of the land you have.

Same Veggies in Smaller Spaces

The best part of French vegetable gardening involves superior land usage. Where Americans might stringently follow the guidelines for spacing on the back of seed packaging, French have different guidelines that involve placing seeds much closer together. Thus, French vegetable gardening yields more food per area than most American gardens. How is this possible though? You might cite various concerns with ventilation and soil nutrition, for starters, but the French method of gardening has some very obvious benefits. First and foremost, they place a much greater emphasis on using natural fertilizers like manure and aerating the soil to allow for oxygen to flow more freely. Also, they never allow weeds to grow, ever. Where nutrition and weeding are almost afterthoughts in America, they are integral to French vegetable gardening.

Organic vegetable gardening itself has many benefits over buying from the store. Organic foods are guaranteed to have no chemical pesticides or herbicides. They tend to actually taste better and have more nutrition content, and they are cheaper to grow yourself than to purchase from a grocery store. Their only downside is that they require more work and dedication than using chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides. Also, organic foods tend to be more expensive in grocery stores than chemically grown foods. Fortunately, French vegetable gardening lessens the burden on gardeners wishing to grow their own organic foods.

If you want to start practicing French vegetable gardening, prepare to purchase a host of hand tools to replace your machine tools. The French essentially have to use hand tools as machine tools are too large and unwieldy to navigate the thin confines of French vegetable rows. Of course, all you need is a single organically grown, juicy tomato, and you'll find that your efforts have been well worth the end result. Although farming and gardening has been a staple of society for thousands of years, you might find that you can still learn a thing or two.

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