If you're considering organic gardening, take a look at the benefits of making the switch to a more earth-friendly way to cultivate your yard. To ensure healthy-growing plants, survey your property to find which plants are best suited for your landscape and garden, and check out non-toxic ways to control pests and fertilize organically.

Perhaps the most popular small fruits for the home garden, strawberries are also among the hardest to grow organically. Strawberries have many insect pests and diseases that damage plants and berries alike. Establishing your plants in well-drained, fertile soil and maintaining a weed-free patch are essential for success.

Gardening organically means using no chemical fertilizers or pesticides; the only growing aides are sunlight, water (preferably from water-conserving sources such as rain barrels), and possibly some organic fertilizer. Fruit and vegetable gardening is great for the environment in a number of ways, but it’s even better if you employ organic gardening principles.

Besides the obvious reasons for organic gardening, like growing pesticide-free food and maintaining a landscape without synthetic fertilizers, here are just a few of the many other reasons to become an organic gardener: Human health: Many pesticides harm people, causing illness when they're consumed or when they make contact with exposed skin.

Homegrown fruits and vegetables grow best in fertile soil. It’s important, though, to keep the fertilizers natural in order to avoid introducing potentially harmful chemicals into the environment. Compost is one of the best, most eco-friendly fertilizers there is — and if you make it yourself, it’s even free! If your soil is a bit low on nutrients, you can add them quickly by using blood and bone meal (which is crushed or ground blood and bone); rock potash, compost, or liquid fertilizer from nature; seaweed or fish emulsion; or a wormery.

Going natural in your yard is worth it to give your yard a life free of toxic and harmful chemicals. Not only do you limit your children’s exposure to these chemicals when they’re in the yard, but you also don’t track the chemicals indoors on your feet or let them blow in through the windows. Just realize that it may take seasons rather than days to eliminate weeds, for example.

As someone living a green lifestyle, you want to know what you’re eating and how your food is produced. When eating green, you need to consider chemicals and additives along with factors such as how the animals were raised and what went into the field of grain aside from the grain itself. Going with organic food products is one way to maintain green eating habits.

Organic fertilizers generally come from plants, animals, or minerals. Soil organisms break down the material into nutrients that plants can use. Some organic fertilizers contain significant amounts of only one of the major nutrients, such as phosphorus in bone meal, but they often have trace amounts of many other beneficial nutrients.

Insect and disease killers that come from plant extracts are called botanical pesticides or botanicals. Although derived from natural sources, botanicals are not necessarily safer or less toxic to non-pest insects, humans, and animals than synthetically derived pesticides. In fact, most botanicals are broad-spectrum insecticides, which kill both good and bad bugs indiscriminately.