Here is a great summer salsa recipe full of fresh from the garden ingredients:

5 large ripe tomatoes
1 jalapeno pepper
1 medium onion
1 cucumber
1 bunch cilantro (or to taste)
salt
lemon juice

Start by washing all of your ingredients thoroughly so that you do not get garden soil in your fresh garden salsa.

For this recipe you need to dice the tomatoes up into small chunks, and put them in your salsa bowl. Keep the chunks about dime size, so that you can still taste the tomato, and get a good bite, but have room for other ingredients to mix in as well.

Take your jalapeno pepper and slice it in half. If you want medium salsa, remove the seeds from half of the pepper. If you want mild salsa, remove all of the seed. If you want the salsa to be hot, leave them all in. use a food processor to dice the jalapeno pepper up really small. If you have other peppers in your garden, or want hotter, or different flavor, feel free to substitute whatever peppers you have. Once diced really tiny, stick in on top of the tomatoes.

Peel your cucumber, and dice it up small, larger than the pepper, but smaller than or the same size as the tomato chunks. Stick that in as well.

Peel off the outer layer of your onion, and dice it small. You want to be able to get a good mix of all the ingredients on each chip, so you don’t want anything chunked too big. A food processor makes this job easy, and helps you not to tear up while dicing onion.

Next, slice your cilantro up, stalks and leaves. Make sure you consider your personal taste for cilantro. If you like a lot, put a lot in, if you don’t don’t.

Next, mix all of the ingredients together, add some salt and lemon juice to taste. Then, stick it in your refrigerator in order to let the flavors of the various fresh garden vegetables mingle. Refrigerate at least thirty minutes, then serve with chips, guacamole, etc.

A fresh garden salsa can be refrigerated, and often the flavor is best if you make it one day in advance to give the various foods a chance to mingle. However, after about three days or so the fresh ingredients will start to wilt, and not taste as good. So, make batches based on how much you need for your use that day, rather than giant batches.

History or the Garden

About 11,000 years ago, the first farmers began to select and cultivate desired food plants in the southwest Asian Fertile Crescent – between the ancient Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Although we believe there was some use of wild cereals before that time, the earliest crops were barley, bitter vetch, chick peas, flax, lentils, peas, emmer, and wheat. About 9,000 years ago, Egyptians began to grow wheat and barley. About the same time, farmers in the Far East began to grow rice, soy, mung, azuki, and taro.

Then, about 7,000 years ago, ancient Sumarians established the first organized agricultural practices that made large-scale farming possible. Of particular note, they established irrigation as a way to nurture crops where none were possible before. Vegetable gardeners today use many of the same techniques established in early history. But today’s vegetable gardeners have millennia of experience behind them. Trial and error today is success or failure at the margins. Failure is not disaster.

Weeds are the enemy to gardens

As in centuries passed, a successful vegetable gardener cultivates the garden before planting for three main reasons: to eliminate weeds, to distribute air and nutrients throughout the soil, and to conserve moisture. Preparation of the soil is the single most important step in assuring abundant harvests.

Weeds are the most powerful enemy of a healthy vegetable garden. Letting them multiply in your vegetable garden will create much work and disappointment through the growing season. And when your vegetables begin to grow, removing weeds can your new vegetable plants beyond repair. Weeds also steal the precious nutrients necessary to produce healthy vegetables.

Rather than sacrificing the new garden to a patch of weeds, the successful vegetable gardener will cultivate the bed often, breaking up the soil to maintain healthy air, moisture, and heat to facilitate desirable chemical processes that produce abundant plant food. Ancient growers learned by trial and error the importance of keeping the soil loose around young plants. Early farmers deposited rotten fish beneath their crops as fertilizer and then used tools of shell and stone to nurture healthy soil and get plentiful air to the roots of their crops.

Water is necessary to a successful garden

As important as air is water, even when the vegetable garden is a promise waiting for new seeds. Consider the process of “capillary attraction” – the ability of a substance to pull another substance into it. When you dip one end of a strip of blotting paper into water, you’ll see that the moisture moves up the invisible channels formed by the paper’s texture. But when you place the side edge of the blotting paper into water, the moisture won’t move upward. In a vegetable garden, capillary attraction describes the attraction of water molecules to soil particles. Well cultivated, loose soil maximizes capillary action, maintaining an even distribution of moisture throughout your vegetable garden soil.

Even so, water stored in soil during rain immediately begins to escape, evaporating into the air. Surface water is the first to vaporize into the atmosphere. With capillary action, sub-surface water moves upward and evaporates. Left to natural processes, your garden will lose its moisture as quickly as if you left sponges in the topsoil. Cultivating your vegetable garden by hoeing the soil around your plants disturbs natural capillary action and slows the loss of water for your vegetables.

Hoeing is vital

It’s important to hoe your vegetable garden often, particularly those areas not shaded, at the very least every other week. If this seems too difficult, using a wheel hoe will reduce your labor and keep your vegetable garden healthy and productive. Looking somewhat like an old-fashioned plow, the wheel hoe allows you to cultivate very close to your healthy plants, maintaining an even depth and destroying new weeds before they get established. With the wheel hoe, you can cultivate as fast as you can walk.

If you wait until weeds are established, you’ll have to pull the weeds by hand, damaging the root systems of your vegetables, depleting the soil of nutrients, and creating a much greater workload for you as gardener. And the work you invest will not be to cultivate a productive crop. It will be to prevent damage that may have already been done. A wheel hoe is essential for a large vegetable garden, but it will also save much time and effort in a small one. However, a simple scuffle hoe is effective in small spaces as well. It takes less storage space and cultivates the soil effectively.

Preparing your vegetable garden properly before you plant vegetables is well worth the investment in time and labor. Keeping your vegetable garden rows free of weeds later on is slow going and difficult.

Here are a few tips for keeping your vegetable garden clean and clear of weeds as your plants mature:

1. Work at the weeds while the ground is soft and/or moist. Soon after a rain is the best time. Weeds will come out by the root easier without breaking off, leaving the unwanted plant to grow again.

2. Just before you weed your vegetable garden, cultivate the rows with your wheel or scuffle hoe very shallow in the topsoil and as close to your vegetable plants as possible. This will loosen the soil and make weeds easy to see. A double-wheel hoe with discs is best for this purpose, especially for large plants.

3. Make sure all of the soil is loosened when you cultivate. Pull all the weeds out carefully, avoiding disturbing the vegetable plants. Your weeder will destroy weed seedlings, but you’ll have to hand-weed near plant bases and where weeds have matured.

4. Use a small hand-weeder near your vegetable plants. It will loosen the soil, making weeds easier to eliminate, and save a lot of wear and tear on your hands and fingers.

5. Practice with your wheel hoe. At first, watch the wheel’s direction and the pressure you put on the handles. The discs or rakes will follow automatically, maintaining an appropriate cultivation depth in your vegetable garden rows.

6. “Hilling” was once a common way to nurture young vegetable plants. This is done by building the soil up around the stems of young vegetable plants, usually the after you’ve hoed your garden two or three times. In wet soils or dry climates, hilling may still be the way to go. But in most areas, level soil is best. It makes it easier to cultivate the soil in the long run, thereby assuring healthy vegetable plants through the growing season.

Rotating Vegetable Crops

Crop rotation, or growing different vegetable crops each time you plant, is an important part of maintaining a healthy, productive vegetable garden. Some Roman texts mention crop rotation, and early Asian and African farmers also found rotation a productive method. During the Muslim Golden Age of Agriculture, engineers and farmers introduced today’s modern crop rotation methods where they alternated winter and summer crops and left fields fallow during some growing seasons. With Chemical Revolution of the mid-20th Century, crop rotation lost some of its appeal. But for home vegetable gardeners, rotation eliminates the risks of using dangerous chemicals and prevents the environmental consequences associated with modern pollutants.

Each different vegetable plant depletes the soil of different nutrients, and each leaves different nutrients as its roots and stems decay. Rotating crops with each planting keeps the soil balanced and rich. Planting the same crop time after time drains it of necessary nutrients, leaving it less productive. Crop rotation also reduces the build-up of pathogens and pests that destroy healthy vegetable gardens. Rotation helps maintain a healthy mix of essential nitrogen in your vegetable garden.

Rotating crops is more important with vegetables like cabbage, but it is a good practice for your vegetable garden generally. Even the hardy onion benefits from rotation, especially if you’ve done a good job of breaking up the old garden soil and mixing the remaining vegetable plants to serve as compost for the following crop.

Here are some basic tips about crop rotation:

1. Do not rotate crops of the same vegetable family, for example turnips and cabbage. Be sure the following crop is a complete different type of vegetable.

2. Deep-rooting crops like carrots or parsnips, should follow vegetables with roots near the surface like onions or lettuce.

3. Follow root crops with vines or leaf crops.

4. Rotate vegetable plants that have long growing seasons with quick-growing crops.

5. Decide on your vegetable garden rotation when you’re constructing your planting plan. Making these decisions in the middle of the growing season will be more difficult and waste time and money.

If your gardening preference extends beyond aesthetic beauty, then maybe a vegetable or fruit garden may be for you. Plants that you can eat gives you the benefit of eating healthy and also saves on costs with the food bill every month. You can use these delicious treats as additions to meals every night, or just as toppings for things such as salads or desserts.

Now it’s one thing to grow these tasty treats during the summer time, but it’s another thing to grow them in the winter months. It can still be done, but you have to take a little more care when growing these plants during the colder months. One plant that you should consider growing is a plant called the Rudbeckia because it is known to grow and thrive throughout all parts of the year.

However if you’re looking to strictly grow your plants during the spring and summer time, then the gardening world is virtually yours. These plants can bring you inspiration and they don’t have to be edible to enjoy them. Beautiful flowers are a great way to enliven your home and add to the curb appeal of your home. Some of the most famous spring and summer plants to grow are tulips, violets, lilies, and roses.

You may want to consider shrubs or grasses when you start gardening your plants. If you have a sidewalk near your home, you may want to go with a type of grass called “monkey grass”. Monkey grass are great for appearance and can act as a fence barrier for your home. Shrubs are delightful and add to the appeal of any home.

With so many options to choose from when gardening your plants, you may be wondering where to begin. You should know that it’s up to you and your decision should be based on the plant that will bring you the most joy. No matter what you choose, your garden will have to be taken care of with proper maintenance so that you can end up with a garden that doesn’t have any life.

Gardening is a favorite past time for many people and if it’s a favorite for you too, then you should get started right away to enjoy this amazing hobby. Never fret about where to begin or how to start as experience is the best teacher. Once you get going, you’ll discover that you have a greener thumb that you thought you did. Your new garden could be the talk of the neighborhood if you design right. Just be sure to follow the tips in this article and you will be well on your way. Good luck!