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14 Mistake You Can’t Afford to Make When Growing a Garden

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Today, we are going to share with you 10 mistakes you cannot afford to make when growing a garden. Let’s go!

Start Small

The first mistake is starting too big. It’s better to start a small garden. Time to time grab some harvests from your garden, and feel like you can do more. Wanting to do more because you start a relatively small garden and feeling like you want to expand, that’s encouraging. But starting a big garden that you can’t keep up with, that’s discouraging and it won’t motivate you to continue growing more year after year. So, you can learn a lot from a little garden that will prepare you for a bigger garden in the future. Remember, small is not Always Bad.

Choose Easy Varieties

The next mistake is growing what I call advanced varieties. When you first start gardening, simple and easy is best. Growing some hybrid veggies, for instance, the super sweet 100 tomato, is easy and reliable to grow. As opposed to growing an heirloom variety that’s kind of tough to grow, like the queen of the night tomato. Also, look into growing some varieties of crops that produce quickly.

For instance, early Jersey Wakefield cabbage only takes about 60 days from seed to harvest. While dead on Savoy cabbage takes about 105 days from seed to harvest. Shorter time to production means less time for problems to occur.

Don't Start Seeds Too Early

Another mistake that almost all new gardeners make is starting seeds too early. When your plants have to sit and wait in a pot for the weather to warm up, they can get stressed and root bound.

You see the brassicas in the image are the same age as this cabbage you see right here. Look how much healthier the right one looks. I just didn’t have space to put this one in the garden, but when you start plants too early, it can just cause a lot of unneeded stress.

Avoid Planting Out Too Early

 If you did start your plants too early, you don’t want to make the additional mistake of planting out too early. A couple of nice days can really trick you. Here, we had a few days where it was like in the 80s during the day, then the 60s at night. So I kind of wanted to press my luck a little bit and get some tomatoes early. As a result, this tomato got a little too stressed because it dropped into the 40s a few nights after that. So, if you do want to press your luck and start some stuff early, make sure you have backups or some plan or way to cover your plants if a cold snap comes.

Space Plants Properly

A mistake I often see beginner gardeners make is planting too densely. It can be kind of confusing trying to plant out a whole bed with proper spacing. That is why I love using the square foot method. The square foot method allows you to grow the most amount of food in the smallest amount of space while not overcrowding things and still getting good production.

Use Fertilizer

 If you’re going to push the limits and plant stuff close, you don’t want to make the mistake of not providing your plants with the proper nutrition with some good fertilizer. I suggest using something as simple as an all-purpose fertilizer, or even a fish fertilizer if you want to use a liquid fertilizer. Plants that are healthy and vigorous can fight off pests and disease better.  So providing your plants with the right amount of nutrition, especially when they’re densely planted is super important.

Have a Pest Management Plan

When I first started gardening, I made the common mistake of not having a pest management plan. When you first get going, you’re worried about what to plant, when to plant, how to plant. The last thing you want to think of is pests, but the reality is they will come in. So the best way to deal with them is actually to prevent them in the first place.

My favorite way to prevent pests is with something as simple as just an insect netting. So protection of your plants is key. Something like this just makes a massive difference. Now the cabbage white butterflies can’t come in and no cabbage worms on my young plants. If you have plants that are going to flower like cucumbers or something, just make sure you take the insect netting off when they start to flower so they can get pollinated. Another advanced form of protection that I like to use is known as surround kale and clay.

If you didn’t do a good job protecting your plants, there are always some ways to deal with the pests after they’ve arrived. For instance, if you want to deal with something like worms, say cabbage worms, or even tomato hornworms, Bt and spinosad are great options for that. If some of your issues are like soft bodied insects, like white flies or aphids, then something like the safer soap is a great choice and so is the neem oil. So there are plenty of organic options to manage some pests when they come in. Just have a pest management plan and some ideas going into the scenario instead of having to rush around to try to find a way to resolve an issue. If you can though, prevention is always the best.

Grow Plants Vertically

Another mistake new gardeners make is allowing plants like tomatoes and peppers to sprawl along the ground instead of growing them vertically up a trellis. Growing up a trellis not only makes plants easier to harvest and manage, it also allows the plants to get more airflow and more light penetration, which leads to less disease issues.

Mulch Your Plants

When the summer heat comes, keeping up on watering can be especially tough if you make the mistake of not mulching your plants. Something as simple as a diced leaf mulch or any natural mulch around the plants will help retain moisture and keep the soil cool, which will reduce the stress in your plants. So they can focus on growth and production.

Harvest on Time

The next mistake you don’t want to make is failing to harvest your crop before it goes to seed. For example, when you see  yucca savoy starting to bolt. That means go to seed. When these kinds of plants go to seed, then they get bitter and they don’t taste as good as when they’re young. So you don’t wanna make the mistake of letting these go to seed before you grab them. 

As for spinach when it starts to get larger, pick up a bunch of this stuff and continue to harvest it. It will just continue to grow and you’ll be able to make sure you get consistent harvests from it instead of just coming out one day, the whole thing’s bolted and you’ve kind of lost your opportunity to get a good harvest.

Plant Flowers for Pollinators

When I first started gardening, I made the mistake of not adding a bunch of different kinds of flowers to bring in pollinators and beneficial insects. I thought if I wanna get a big harvest, then I should just plant cabbages and broccoli and lettuce and tomatoes, things that produce a harvest. I didn’t realize how important flowers are for your overall system harvest. Like the flowers help support some of the other plants, so they end up increasing the harvest even though they might take up a little bit of space.

So plants like a chamomile are really nice. It actually gives you a yield, but it does bring in a good amount of pollinators. So adding flowers brings in pollinators and beneficial insects, which will actually increase the yield when it comes down to it.

Don’t Overdo It in the First Year

The next mistake is probably one that almost all of us have been guilty of when we first started, and that’s trying to do too much the first year. For instance, when you first get started, you don’t have to buy your seed, start your plants from seed, transplant them out, save the seed, and just do everything the first year. If you want, when you’re just getting started, you can start with a small raised bed, go to the store, get some hybrid plants that have already started, like the juliet tomato is a good one, and plant that out. Just try to make it relatively easy on yourself and try to make it so you can get some good harvest when you’re first starting. Like I mentioned before, that will build momentum and you’ll learn a lot even from just doing that. Every year, you’ll pick up more and more.

Think Long-Term

You don’t want to approach gardening with an annual mindset. You wanna approach it with a perennial mindset. That’s why you don’t wanna start too big. You could start small, you could expand, but knowledge compounds, and your harvest will compound too. So you have to think of gardening in a perennial mindset. It’s like a tree. I planted an apple tree, and I didn’t get a harvest till about the fourth year.

So if you think of gardening in like a three, four, five-year mindset, then you’re gonna continue to expand, you’re gonna grow more and more food, it’s going to be encouraging, you’re gonna really, really enjoy it, and your harvests are just gonna be absolutely massive.

Avoid Invasive Species

Here is a mistake that I made that I hope you do not make. And I made the mistake of planting an invasive species in the ground. Mint is one of them. Mint is super invasive. It’s taking over this whole section of my garden. So you wanna make sure you’re not planting invasive species into the ground. The best thing to do would be to plant mint in a pot.

You get all the advantages of it. You can move the pot in different spots when the mint starts to flower, bringing in all the pollinators, but just make sure you’re not planting invasive species in the garden. It ends up being a headache trying to get rid of them.

Final Thought

That’s today’s video, growers. Thanks for reading. We hope you enjoyed it. We hope you got something out of it. We hope that you take some of the advice and avoid these mistakes, especially when you’re new to gardening. I know how motivated and how excited you are when you first get into gardening. 

So just make sure you start slow. It’ll make a massive difference and it’ll just make gardening more fun for you overall

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