For beginners, gardening might seem complicated but what if your garden is mobile as well? People who live an RV or spend most of the summer inside one, face the challenge of whether to grow a garden or give up their favorite hobby. Luckily, you can grow a beautiful garden on the go and here are a couple of tips on how to do it.
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Keeping your plants in one piece
It might seem obvious but the biggest challenge of RV gardening is preserving your plants in one piece when on the road. One neat trick is to gather all your pots and place them inside a bin to prevent them from tipping over.
In fact, if you aren’t frequently on the move, you can always transport plants like this and then keep outside while you’re stationary. Another solution is to build shelves that have holes inside them or shallow indentations for smaller pots.
This way, pots won’t move anywhere, no matter how fast you are driving. Of course, avoid watering the plants while the RV is moving, as not only will you get wet but it will be impossible to pour the right amount of water when your hand keeps trembling. As you probably already know, overwatering is a basic gardening mistake.
Exterior gardening
We’ve mentioned earlier that gardening is best done when you stop for a while in one place. For these peaceful periods, you should get large containers that can house tens of flower pots.
You needn’t buy these containers, as an old crate or a plastic pan will do just fine after you’ve punctures several holes in the bottom.
The container is them attached to the window sill to hang outside, soaking up the sun while you water all the plants regularly and respectively of one another.
Selecting the right soil
Since you won’t be using the local soil for cultivating plants (which is a good thing if you stop in a marshy or an arid region), fill the pots with the best possible potting soil, such as hummus. Container grown plants lose moisture from the ground quickly, so they require more frequent watering unless you plant them in soil rich with nutrients.
Apart from sunlight and water, ground in containers should be fed regularly, using different nutrients. Since these chemicals have the “toxic” label on them, keep them with the rest of the cleaning agents in the RV, so they don’t spill accidentally.
Don’t forget to pack gardening tools
Speaking of storage, gardening out of an RV may seem like a hobby you don’t require many tools for. Quite the contrary, mobile gardening requires you to have all the tools imaginable, as you will be in the wilderness for weeks on end.
That’s why a section of the RV should serve as storage for various gardening tools, from gardening gloves to a spray wand. This part of the RV will be a proper gardening shed on wheels.
Feeding the RV crew
So far, we have treated gardening on wheels as a challenge but what if we told that everyone traveling in the RV can profit from a green thumb onboard? If you like flowers, you can sell them at the markets in town and villages you stop by.
Even better, you can grow your own food in the form of vegetables and herbs. For a person living on the road, every dollar saved is important, and shopping for groceries can be expensive in some parts of the world.
Growing your own food doesn’t only come with financial benefits but nutritive ones as well. Namely, you get to control what you eat, as you are sure no pesticide was sprayed on your peppers, cucumbers, or tomatoes. In addition, this means customers will pay extra for organic and let us say, exotic food as well.
Consider purchasing a grow light
Although growing your own food is profitable, you will need to provide them with excellent soil quality, plenty of water, and sunlight. The latter is perhaps the hardest to secure, as the skylight on your RV doesn’t let sufficient sunlight inside.
Purchasing an LED grow light is ideal for mobile gardening. Powerful light bulbs will produce both strong light and light resembling the light coming from the sun. As an alternative, you can shop for RVs with extra windows on the side, to make room for more extendable garden beds.
Choosing the right plant species
If there is one drawback to gardening in your RV, then that’s the selection of plants. In normal conditions, the only constraint is choosing which species to grow is the local climate (You can’t expect lemons to thrive in Norway, for example).
However, not all plant species are suited for life on the road. Avoiding planting needy species that you’ll have to water every single day or expose them to sunlight for 12 hours. Most herbs don’t require too much care, and vegetables such as radishes are ideal for growing on the road.
Also, if you plan on transplanting your “mobile” plants into a constant garden, these species have the highest chances of survival.
“Garden surfing”
You’ve probably heard of couch surfing and pen-pals but has it ever occurred to your to look for a fellow green thumb in another part of the country? There are folks who like to take their RV in summer and drive it far away, changing their place of residence during those couple of months.
Well, you don’t have to garden alone, as there are many online gardening communities where you can make friends across the globe. In most cases, gardening enthusiasts are kindhearted people who will welcome with open arms and show you all the tips and tricks they know. More importantly, they will introduce you to the local soil composure and the climate, so you can bring the garden outside the RV.
Give back to nature
You are probably thinking right now that it isn’t such a good idea to plant a mobile garden in a foreign place. However, if you are a nature lover then you’ll be happy to even leave some plants behind you. The local fauna can feed off your carrots, cabbage, or onions, while the ground is fertilized with new plant species.
Growing a garden on the go isn’t a walk in the park but it is far from impossible either. Arming yourself with knowledge and patience is enough to get you started. Remember, your mobile garden should have plenty of sunlight, water, and soil rich in nutrients.