How NOT to be a Fabulous Gardener (Part 1)
There is an ocean of gardening advice online. This is both wonderful and also kind of a pain. Oceans are lovely, but…you know, you can drown in them. And if you’re the sort to really take advice to heart or to worry about getting things ‘wrong’, I imagine the mass of gardening tips, advice and warnings available online could get totally overwhelming.
I think the main problem is that it’s really hard to tell which advice actually matters; which things are truly going to impact the health of your garden, and which things are just little cherries on top of the cake that you could probably ignore for the first decade of your gardening career. Also, I swear that once you have the fundamentals in place, so many of the other little worries and problems seem to just vanish of their own accord. So, here’s a list of what I consider garden fundamentals. Things that, once taken care of, lead to a pretty reliably fabulous garden. Only I’ve written it back to front as ‘how NOT’ to do all that stuff, because I tried a more classic clickbait-y title at first and couldn’t bear the inward cringe. So here you are, here’s my fundamental advice on how NOT to be a fabulous gardener. Rebel wildly against it and watch your garden flourish.
1. Neglect your soil
My approach to gardening, for better or worse, has always been ‘Ehhh it can’t be that complicated’.
In a lot of ways, I think this is 100% true, and actually a great way to garden. People often make things a lot more convoluted than they need to be, and half of the gardening advice you’ll find on the internet is nit-picky rubbish that (I think) simply alienates would-be gardeners, putting them off ever giving it a go.
BUT, when I was just starting to garden this (admittedly rather arrogant) attitude meant I ignored a very valuable piece of gardening advice: soil is EVERYTHING.
As obvious as it seems to me now, in the beginning I absolutely underestimated the importance of soil - it was just a place to stick the plants’ roots, after all. So, in my own reckless, gung-ho fashion I determinedly plonked plant after plant in malnourished, parched and sandy soil. The result? Weak plants that were more susceptible to pests, produced less fruit and flowers, and shrivelled into nothing on hot days.
Soil is so much more than just stuff that holds your plants upright. Soil makes or breaks plants. Healthy soil nourishes plants, provides just the right medium for them to spread their roots into, and absorbs and retains enough (but not too much) water for them to drink their fill. And when your soil is healthy it doesn’t just support plant life but also provides a home for a whole host of beneficial insects - it is a fundamental part of your garden ecosystem.
The problem is I think a lot of us start out gardening without ever seeing truly good soil. So we don’t even know what it looks like, let alone how to create it. Good soil crumbles like a chocolate brownie. If you squish it into a ball it will almost (but not quite) hold its shape. It is the colour of dark roasted coffee beans and it is alive. The soil of my wildest dreams is crawling with earthworms, ants, slaters, mole crickets, millipedes, mites, earwigs, beneficial micro-organisms and helpful bacteria. These critters work in concert with your plants, fertilising, digesting and turning the soil.
If you DO want to be a fabulous gardener, commit to your soil. This means getting to know what it’s about. What’s good about it, what’s not so good about it, and what it needs.
Is it clay-based, sand-based or somewhere in between? (ideally it will be somewhere in between).
Is there anything living in it? (that would be a good sign). When water hits its surface, does it run straight off (not great), pool on the surface (also not great), evaporate instantly (argh!) or sink in, forming a muddy sludge (the horror!)? OR is it absorbed gently by the soil, leaving it moist but not muddy? That’s the goal!
I hope I’m not making this sound complicated, because it’s really, really not.
If your soil is sandy, add clay, mulch (I swear by Lupin mulch), animal manure (blended manures are good) and, if you have it, home made compost and worm farm castings (don’t stress if you don’t have that stuff, although making your own compost is AWESOME and you should definitely do that. I’ll write a post on that soon!). If your soil is clay-based and muddy, add all the same stuff except swap clay for grit.
That’s pretty much it! You don’t even have to dig it in. Needless effort! I sprinkle clay on the soil, water it in, add a layer of animal manure, water that in, then cover the whole thing with lupin mulch. I’ve been doing that 2-4 times a year for the last ~3 years and it has already made a huge difference. The health of your soil determines the health of your garden and the resilience of your plants. Start nourishing your soil regularly and you’ll begin to notice that everything else gets a little bit easier.
2. Plant a monoculture
If you really don’t want to be a fabulous gardener, plant yourself a monoculture. A garden composed of just one variety of plants that - ideally - don’t even flower. A single line of purple, spiky Tradescantia spathacea (google it, you’ll start noticing it everywhere!). A lone patch of agaves. One giant Strelitzia (aka ‘bird of paradise’). Just grass.
Thing is, those plants are all beautiful too (and lots of them DO flower). Any plant that’s cared for is absolutely beautiful. But plants have not evolved to exist in isolation, uniformly planted en masse. The natural world is beautifully messy and full of variety. Variety leads to a healthier garden and a more diverse garden ecosystem.
Problems tend to rear their heads when you grow a limited variety of plants. For one thing, the garden is unlikely to provide a home to a wide range of insect and animal life. Things like bees, wasps, ladybirds, butterflies, willy wagtails, moths, silvereyes and finches. These animals are all attracted to different things and a garden that only has a small number of plants will not be able to provide something for each of them. For instance, bees absolutely love borage flowers, while milkweed plants attract monarch butterflies and wasps prefer fennel blossoms. Without a mixture of plants, you’re unlikely to get a real mixture of insects. And without a mixture of insects, you’re unlikely to get a wide range of birds visiting your garden.
Insects are vital to the health of a garden - many of them do your ‘pest control’ for you (e.g., wasps eat aphids), and birds help control insect numbers too. My garden is always full of white cabbage moths in spring and yet my vegetables almost never get eaten. I’m certain this is because of the birds that flit through the garden, nibbling the caterpillars and helping to keep everything in a natural balance. It may seem counterintuitive at first, but the more insects you encourage to your garden, the healthier your garden will be. No garden critter is really ‘good’ or ‘bad’, it’s all about their population numbers. Planting a very diverse garden leads to more balanced populations of all the different bugs, meaning no plagues and no decimated crops.
3. Plant your garden beds sparsely
Another way to have a less-than-fabulous garden is to spread your plants out sparsely through your garden. Just like with the plant monoculture, sparseness does not occur in nature. In nature everything is crammed in. Rippling grasses rub shoulders with flowering shrubs. Creepers spread their tendrils up into the canopies of trees. There are a few benefits to growing your plants naturally quite close together. For one, they help to shade the soil. Leaving patches of soil exposed to the sun can damage the beneficial organisms in the soil. If you plant thickly, the sun hits the plant’s leaves instead, helping them to grow big and healthy, while protecting the soil underneath. Planting a wide range of plants in close proximity to each other also helps with pollination (bees are more likely to visit plants that are planted close to each other, helping to fertilise all of them), and can help protect certain plants from critters that might want to munch on them. Close planting between veggies and other plants - such as pungent herbs - can confuse these insects, making it harder for them to find - and eat - your entire crop. Now, I’m not suggesting you plant an oak tree and a giant mulberry right on top of each other - plants do need some space to grow. But if you see heaps of patches of exposed earth in your garden, consider filling them up with a cover crop, some flowering annuals or tasty herbs. Something to keep the soil busy and full and healthy. Avoid lots of empty spaces and your garden health will improve (and it will look prettier too!).
Crowded wilderness and a black Carnaby
4. Rely on sprays and pesticides
My final rant for you (at least, until I write How NOT to be a Fabulous Gardener Part 2) concerns garden ‘pests’ and ‘weeds’. Both of these things, I am convinced do not really exist. Obviously there are introduced bugs and plants, and these can definitely grow rampant and breed out of control. But, generally speaking, combatting anything in your garden with herbicides or pesticides is a total waste of time and usually does more harm than good.
Pesticides often kill garden insects indiscriminately. This means that in addition to killing whatever seems to be a ‘pest’, really helpful, lovely little critters get obliterated too. The garden then has a void of insect life, which some other 'would-be-pest’ will inevitably rise up and fill, giving the impression of yet another plague. Worse still, birds that eat insects which have been poisoned can carry that poison back to their babies, making them sick. Also, it’s just a waste of your money and time. You don’t actually need to spray anything. You might get little flare ups of certain bugs in the garden - I sometimes notice heaps of aphids covering a particular plant, or waves of slaters crawling through the mulch. But if we act on nature’s timeline and wait patiently, 9 times out of 10 the garden sorts itself out. In his book Down To Earth (highly recommend!!!) Monty Don says that it might take up to two years for you to see a change in your insect populations, but if you just hang tight and believe in the value of a real garden ecosystem, before too long you will see that all the animals in the garden control each other for you. No pesticides needed.
Same story for herbicides. They’re just not necessary. VERY occasionally I pull up some ‘weeds’ (aka plants that I haven’t learnt to appreciate yet) but, generally speaking, if you plant your garden densely enough the plants you love will out-compete the plants you don’t really like. Basically, I recommend adding plants rather than subtracting. And if you have a bare patch of earth and a clover decides to spring up to fill it, throwing out gorgeous little pink flowers in winter without even being asked, maybe the best course of action is to decide that the plant is rather lovely after all.
Pink clover flowering generously without even needing to be asked
Ok, that ends my rant, for now. I hope that some of this highly opinionated and entirely unsolicited advice might come in handy for you and your gardens! See you soon for How NOT to be a Fabulous Gardener (Part 2).