I am starting our gardens from scratch this year, because of the move. I had seven years of work put into my last garden, so it is hard to have to start from zero again. It will let me do so many things that I just couldn’t justify in a rental property though.
As excited as I am to get started on a garden that is truly my own, I am glad for all of the things that I learned in my old garden. Here are some mistakes that I won’t be making this time around.
- Not planting fruit and nut trees
We didn’t know how long we would be living in our last house, so it didn’t feel like a wise investment at the time. In hindsight we were there long enough that we might have had a few years of harvests, depending on what we have planted.
We definitely aren’t making that mistake this time! We will spend what we can afford on fruit and nut trees that are ready to be planted this year. We also bought a number of tree seeds that we cold stratified over the Winter. These will take a few extra years to produce, but for the cost of one older tree from a nursery, we will plant as many of these varieties as we could want.
2. Planting mint
Or rather, planting it improperly. (Mints are my favorite teas, I couldn’t actually not plant it). One of my very first mistakes as a new gardener was to plant mint randomly in the ground. I had no idea how weedy it was and it was just dumb luck that I picked a spot that was contained on three sides. Even that one open side wasn’t worth the battle though.
Older and wiser, I planted it in pots in my next garden. Which promptly froze and died the very first winter. I finally figured out that I could have my precious tea if I planted each variety in it’s own pot, and then buried the pot in my garden over the winter.
3. Not giving things enough space
I started gardening in containers and very small corners. As a result I had a bad habit of trying to cram too much into each space, or just using way too small of a pot. (To be fair, the internet was slightly to blame for this. It is full of herbs growing in kitchen windows in tin cans or mason jars that they would be doomed to die in.)
At this point I grow very few things in containers, and use fairly big ones for those. The only exceptions were a few little flowers that I hung along my fence, but they were the only plants that didn’t mind.
4. Not properly marking where I had planted things
I try very hard at this one, but sometimes the ADHD wins. There were quite a few instances where I planted something “somewhere around there” and had to let half of the weeds sprout too until I could figure out where it was… Or the “I will definitely remember which variety of tomato I planted where” debacle.
It is probably false advertising to claim that I won’t do this one again. I do have plans to help avoid it though. One perk of a new garden is that I have to intentionally create a space for every single thing I want to plant this year. (What a terrifying thought…). I do a pretty good job of garden planning and writing down where each plant goes. I am also making myself a set of garden markers this year, which will help keep different varieties straight. Wish me luck!
5. Using plastic grow bags
I saved the worst for last. I was seduced be images of people effortlessly dumping out their potato harvest, and bought some cheap grow bags the other year. Worst. Thing. I. Ever. Did.
Now, I will be fair and will say that they were very cheap quality. So cheap that they started to disintegrate that very first season. I fished as much plastic out of that corner of the garden as I could, but it was awful. People who have bought and used better quality ones could argue that they aren’t breaking down at that rate. They are breaking down though. Seeing it in person really made it clear to me that this wasn’t something I wanted to have in my garden. Especially when I can attempt basically the same experiment again this year, but with strawbales.
What would you add to the list if you had written it? Any pitfalls of your own that I should avoid?
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