I thought this would be a fun but useful post.
If you had one piece of advice for gardening, what would it be? Like that one thing your discovered or learned that to your results to the next level.
Mine: Mulch your fruit trees well. This will help retain moisture and also keep grass and weeds from popping up which could compete with the tree for nutrients.
Call it when you’re tired. Getting one more thing checked off your garden “to do” seems more important than ever when you’re tired, but you are also more likely to have an accident. Personal experience: I wanted to get just a few more forkfuls of manure spread before dark and put one fork tine neatly into the flesh of my foot. 'Tis but a flesh wound, but don’t be me.
Youch 😕 Good advice, for sure. This applies to a lot of things outside of gardening as well.
Luckily, there are many stretchy sinews and a bone surfboard shaped thing in there, so the fork tine could not go that far. EDIT: typo
Don’t be discouraged if one type of growing style doesn’t work for you, maybe another will. Not everyone is capable of doing everything.
If organic amending isn’t working, maybe try the salt nutrients, or time delay nutrients in your soil. There’s nothing wrong with it.
My cannabis growing exploded once I changed from soil to aeroponics(hydroponicsesque), doesn’t mean I can’t grow in soil, I’m just apparently better at aeroponics, or it suited my lifestyle better.
To build on this, just because something didn’t work one year, don’t give up on it entirely! Tweak something and try again. I had a terrible year last year with one of my dwarf tomato breeds, but this year they’re doing great because I kept them warmer as seedlings. Similarly my cilantro that never took off last year is going strong this year due to more watering.
Gardening is a learning process. Embrace what works for you and change what doesn’t.
Also I’d never heard of aeroponics but that is super cool!
Embrace the failures, sometimes it’s a learning experience, other times you did nothing wrong and it still didn’t work. You still learned something if you want to spin it, which could be that failures can happen in a perfect situations sometimes. Or you forgot to sterilize your scissors once.
Let’s learn!
I hear that. We’ve been using no dig with our veggies the last few years, and it works great for us. Always wanted to try hydroponics!
Label every seedling. Every single one. I learned the hard way when I accidentally planted mint in my flower garden that completely took over and took many attempts to get rid of.
Oh geeze 😕 mint is super invasive.
That’s the right advice. Mint should not be put anywhere you don’t want full of mint.
Dwarf/small plants for small spaces. I spent years trying to grow regular sized tomatoes on a balcony and having them go totally wild. Now with dwarf tomatoes I can easily fit them in pots in my yard. Same with sweet peas- they make varieties that grow shorter, which is great if you don’t have a super tall space to grow in.
In general find varieties that work for your space/garden and grow those. It’s okay to not grow the same stuff as everyone else.
Also, grow potatoes in buckets. Gosh darn it but the home grown veg guy is right. It’s just easier.
I didn’t believe it until I tried it myself. Don’t water cucumber seeds when you plant them. Only give them water after they emerge. They will! And they will be less likely to develop powder mildew.
This is from Steve Solomon’s book “growing organic vegetables west of the Cascades.” Amend the soil with fertilizer, then mound up a low hill 18” wide and 3 feet from other plants. Push your fist 1.5” down into the center of the hill this restores capillarity, which he talks about often and I’ve been restoring capillarity for all my seedlings this year and it’s an amazing trick. Water can pull itself up from deep underground using …. Shoot. What’s that word? Where water climbs up a tree? But when you till or fluff the soil before planting you break it up so that there is too much air between soil particles. The water can’t climb up. Think of a time you saw a deep footprint in a muddy ground. Not only did the footprint hold water better than surrounding soil, but even after it dried, at night the footprint could become wet again. This is from the capillarity of the soil. It’s compressed enough that water can travel in it.
Before I plant any seedling now I press on the soil, like with the edge of a board. Place seeds in the hole, or valley, then sprinkle soil on top. And water them too. But only with the cucurbits don’t water them until they emerge. And they will!
I think the word is cappilary action? So yep, capilarity. I never thought about the soil being too fluffy before, but that makes perfect sense.
Ya I guess that’s the word. Seems pretty obvious now 🤣.
Huh. I’m gonna try this next season. Maybe do some stuff this fall like that. I wonder how well this will work for surface sows like lettuce
I did it with Romaine and it went great. I did water the romaine and I found the soil under them to be better at holding water. Also I just planted our tomato starts and pressed firmly on the soil around the stem. I’ve noticed the soil where I pressed holding water on hot days when all else is dry
they make ‘dirt knives’ that work way better than a spade for me most of the time. Especially if you got rocks. I have bent and broken a dozen spades but the dirt knife is like a spade+crowbar you can be rough as you like with it it cuts the dirt!
Love a solid hori-hori, but I’ve also broken a handful doing dumb stuff. My current daily driver hooks to the left a bit
Small Consistent Effort
You keep it small, you never have to worry about burnout. Spend 20 minutes weeding, then go on your day. You keep it consistent, you’ll never have to worry about shit getting too big on you. If you’re weeding your entire garden in a go, you’re working too hard. You might feel like you need to GET IT DONE RIGHT NOW, but that’s just your monkey brain going to panic mode.
Relax. Do a little something every day and over time it’ll come together.
Bonus: keeping up the effort in the off-season (doing bed prep, conjuring the spreadsheet devils) means less work in the swap-ass summer. Everything you do now pays dividends, and you can eat an elephant if you take it one bite at a time with occasional naps
