GROWING CHINESE VEGETABLES - Growing Chinese Vegetables in Your Own Backyard - page 181

PART TWO
GROWING CHINESE VEGETABLES
In the gardener's world, soil, sun, and water are essential elements: soil to provide nutri-
ents, sun to aid the plants in converting nutrients into food for the plants, water to make
the nutrients available. Nature manages to maintain a delicate balance in a seemingly cas-
ual, almost offhand way; gardeners can't be quite so casual when they manipulate nature
to grow a vegetable garden.
One of the most important things to learn is that lack of success with a vegetable
doesn't mean the gardener is a failure. Some seasons, growers do everything right and are
still defeated by a sudden hailstorm, a drought, or a spell of unreasonable temperature.
All gardeners must be philosophers and take the bad with the good. Fortunately, even in
the worst season, the home gardener will always have some unexpected successes.
In the wild only the strongest, most rugged plants survive; in the vegetable garden,
the most precious crop is sometimes a comparatively delicate plant that must be coddled.
Vegetable gardeners can take a tip from nature: The healthiest plants are the ones that
produce the most and the tastiest crops, and they're the most resistant to disease and the
vagaries of the weather. But how to produce this ideal crop? In this part of the topic,
we'll look first at how to succeed on a small scale, by planting your Chinese vegetables
in containers, and conclude with what should actually be the first item on your list when
you're creating a garden: how to improve your soil.