Growing your own fruits and vegetables is one of the best ways to ensure you and your family have a steady, affordable supply of nutritious foods.

While all fresh produce is packed with flavor and nutrients, using products like vegan potting soil and plant based fertilizer, also known as vegan fertilizer, will ensure that your home garden is truly vegan-approved.

Many home gardeners are unaware that a number of commercially-prepared fertilizers actually contain animal byproducts.

For example, composed animal manure is filled with traces of whatever the donor animal eats.

Given that some animal feed products may contain animal byproducts, the only way to ensure that your garden is really vegan-friendly is to use vegan fertilizers and soils.

What is Vegan Gardening?

Vegan gardening, also known as veganic gardening, is gardening without the use of any animal products, chemical pesticides or fertilizers.

Vegan gardening also means embracing, rather than battling, insects and wildlife that might otherwise be viewed as pests.

This doesn't mean that you need to surrender your home garden to nature, but it does mean that you should make a deliberate effort to integrate slugs, insects and wildlife into your plot.

Vegan gardening also means making your own green manure from plants and crops, using non-invasive, all-natural pest management techniques, and adopting year-round garden management practices.

Vegan Gardening Tips and Techniques

While your approach to vegan gardening will depend largely on the climate zone you live in, the size of your garden plot, and what types of plants you're growing, here's some universal tips that apply to almost all vegan gardeners:

• Leave a part of your garden untended to create habitat for birds, insects and frogs.

• Make your own vegan compost using garden trimmings and veggie scraps.

• Accept the fact that your fruits and veggies won't look perfect, and that you'll experience crop loss due to pest damage.

• Start seedlings indoors or inside a cold frame rather than planting seeds directly, as this gives the plants a chance to harden up before being exposed to slugs.

• Protect young plants by encircling them with copper tape.

• Grow cover crops between harvests in order to promote water retention, minimize topsoil erosion and generate nutrients that are turned back into the soil when the plants mature.

• Eliminate the use of eggshells and other animal products from your compost bin, or set up a separate composting bin that's vegan-only for use on your vegan garden.

What Advantages Does Vegan Gardening Offer Over Traditional Gardening?

While vegan gardening can be more time-consuming, and deliver lower yields than traditional, or conventional, gardening, there are a number of advantages to going vegan in your garden.

Firstly, a vegan garden is truly sustainable and eco-friendly, since it doesn't rely on animal products or chemical fertilizers.

This means that you can maintain your garden even if you live off-grid, or during a global pandemic when access to supplies and mobility may be limited.

Another perk to vegan gardening is that you can truly feel good about feeding your family the fruits of your labors.

There's no need to worry about chemical sensitivities to pesticides, or e-coli from contaminated fertilizers.

Here at Greenway Biotech, we're proud to offer a number of premium-quality fertilizers that are perfect for the vegan garden.

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