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Hello and welcome to the second instalment of Crap Garden Advice You Should Ignore. In Part 1 I only got as far as a rant about roses, but now I’m back to share a few more things that irritate me every time I hear them recommended.
Gardening is a funny industry. It’s a bit like nutrition. It’s a truly difficult subject because it deals with a whole lot of complex, interrelated and dynamic systems. And, as in the nutrition industry, when you go looking for advice you are typically met with one of these 4 types of information:
Academic advice (& crop rotation)
This advice usually isn’t advice, but rather reports of findings from highly specific scientific studies, typically looking at what works in large scale agriculture, where plants need to grow optimally, en masse, with no unexpected plagues or diseases.
I like reading this stuff, but as a lay person, I find it very hard to extract any salient information that is actually worth applying to a home garden.
Here’s an example: crop rotation. On a large, agricultural scale it might be very useful - if you grow only one monoculture intensively in a field for decades you probably are depleting the soil of a specific set of minerals and creating a magnet for certain bugs and diseases that come back year after year. I can totally see that happening. But we take this advice and apply it to home gardens, where our plot of corn ‘rotates’ from one patch to another approximately 2m away every year.
Hundreds of blogs and gardening websites tout the. importance of crop rotation in the home garden, but let’s unpick what’s going on.
Nutrient depletion
Are your three zucchinis really depleting the soil of specific nutrients to the extent that you’ll need to sub them out for beans next year to fix it? Is a complicated crop rotation roster really the solution, or could you simplify everything, relax a little and decide to just add a bit more cow poo to your patch instead?
Our soil is sand and rubble. If you want to make the biggest difference to the nutrients in your soil, add animal manure, compost and a mulch like lupin or pea straw as often as you can.
Pests
There may be some rationale to rotate your crops to combat soil borne pests, like nematodes. If you wanna go down this route though, that also means keeping pretty pristine garden hygiene, as you’ll undo your efforts pretty fast if you use the same shovel across all your beds, transferring the soil borne pests/diseases from one patch to another.
This is not me giving you advice to ramp up your garden hygiene. This is me giving you advice to stop worrying about it altogether. Healthy, well fed, well watered plants, growing in their preferred amount of sunlight can often protect themselves pretty well against pests and diseases. I put my efforts into sun, soil and water and the closest I get to garden hygiene is very occasionally wearing gloves.
Crop rotation is something so many gardeners swear by but I just don’t buy it. Do it if you get a kick out of it. But if you are busy/stressed/overworked/under-slept, reassure yourself in the knowledge that it probably doesn’t make a scrap of difference. And an imperfectly planted, unplanned garden is far better than the perfect garden you never actually get around to growing.
Don’t believe me? Check out this awesome article that goes into more depth on the subject.
Old wives’ tales (& companion planting)
Gardening myths and old wives tales are regurgitated by every man and his dog. But that doesn’t make them true - or worth your time. One of the most common of these is companion planting. I get why it’s popular - it’s such a romantic idea. But, if you ask me (and I know technically you didn’t but I’m still ranting and you’re still reading) the concept of companion planting somehow manages to both oversimplify and overcomplicate things.
Our plants grow well or poorly because of so many factors, and yet people will tell you with great conviction that planting tomatoes alongside basil will lead to tastier tomatoes. Why? Because they taste good together on pizza? Tomatoes and basil didn’t even originate in the same continent - tomatoes come from South America and basil is native to India and Southeast Asia. Why would planting them nearby do anything to change their flavour?
This is the sort of hyper specific, romantic advice that I am always dubious of. It is peppered through so much online gardening content, it appears in books, it’s talked about on podcasts. I’m pretty sure it’s nonsense.
Where I do see companion planting working is when we look at the obvious, structural characteristics of the plants we grow. This isn’t the wistful, romantic kind of companion planting - it’s utilitarian and pragmatic. Chilli bushes grow tall and cast dappled shade so are a good companion for a summer crop of lettuce that would otherwise wilt in full sun. Sweetcorn grows up and pumpkins grow rambling across the ground, so you can interplant them without the plants competing too much for space. Broccoli is slow-growing and radishes are fast growing, so you can sow radish seeds around your immature broccoli to fill the space, harvesting your radishes just as the broccoli plants start to leaf out and take up more room.
These are useful tactics that, by the way, you can also totally ignore if you lack the time/energy/inclination. The biggest, best thing that I think companion planting advice achieves is it encourages gardeners to plant more diverse gardens, which really does help boost insect diversity and leads to an all-round healthier garden. And you can achieve that just by flinging seeds randomly all over the place!
Content creators’ advice (& unbearable boredom)
I’m aware I might be digging my own grave here, but let it be known my aim is always, always to avoid writing the kind of advice I am about to criticise. Have you noticed that, in the last 5-10 years, the internet has become so much more boring? Or, maybe not the internet, but Google certainly has. These days, the top ten search results on a google page are very often carbon copies of each other. The same, basic, boring as batshit ‘listicles’ everywhere you go. “Ten jobs for your garden this autumn” and every blogger has somehow dreamt up the same ones.
I’ll tell you what’s going on because I grappled with it for a while. These lists are reverse engineered by SEO (search engine optimisation) strategists who have looked to see what kinds of questions people most often search for on Google. You base your entire blog on whatever people are googling the most this month, peppering your writing with nonsensical, repetitive phrases that hit all the keywords you need to make sure that your blog is the one that rises to the top. It’s just another version of playing the Instagram algorithm and it has made the internet boring and formulaic. And it means that people learning to garden see the same bits of advice everywhere they go.
My main gripe with this advice is it’s just so deadeningly dull.
Trim your hedges, clean your shed, do some lawn maintenance, pull your weeds. No wonder people think gardening is monotonous hard work!! I don’t think you should do any of those jobs (unless you like them). I think you should stop googling jobs for your garden, close your computer, throw away your phone and just go hang out in your garden. You’ll find something out there to do, I guarantee it. And it will be more interesting than lawn care.
Salesperson’s advice (& pest control)
Still here? You mean you didn’t follow my advice to stop reading advice and just go outside?
You rebel. I like it.
I have one last one for you then: the last kind of garden advice that I hate (maybe the most of all) is the advice that comes from someone who is trying to sell you something. Have you SEEN how much garden detritus is out there lining every nursery shelf? Foliar sprays, soil acidifiers, ‘eco’ poisons, compostable seed punnets (ha!), trowels of all shapes and sizes, hanging baskets that fall apart the moment you look at them sideways and aisle after aisle of strange substances claiming to feed you plants and fix your soil.
Here’s what you really need: a spade, a trowel (your bare hands will also suffice), some secateurs, clay if your soil is sandy, compost or animal manure, mulch, water …and PLANTS.
Be very skeptical of anything else someone may try to sell you that isn’t on that list. It is probably superfluous. It may or may not work. It’s almost certainly a waste of your money.
I used to buy that stuff. It took me one go to realise that ‘compostable’ seedling punnets never decompose. It took me a year or two to chuck out all my dog friendly snail pellets and ‘neem oil’ an all that pesticide crap masquerading as animal-friendly material. I already rant enough about how various so-called ‘pests’ (aphids, caterpillars, slugs, snails, slaters) aren’t actually bad for your garden at all, and how allowing them into your garden will, long term, lead to greater insect diversity and fewer bug problems, so I won’t say anymore about that here.
I will say this though: keep gardening simple and it will be so much more fun.
I have had less time to garden this year than ever before. I wondered how tough gardening would be with a baby, and turns out it is pretty hard. It’s still nice, but it’s hard. Standards have dropped, things have been rushed, or delayed, or forgotten.
All of the ‘advice’ I have listed today irritates me most of all because it usually sets us up to fail when life gets busy. It holds us to standards that are just impossible for most people who aren’t professional farmers. Or it makes us feel like we are already failures in order to sell us the next product designed to ‘fix’ our gardens.
Make gardening simple, easy and focus on what is fun. Let yourself off the hook. Add as much animal manure to your beds as you can. Grow what you like to grow. Find the beauty and joy in the things that work, and allow yourself the opportunity to ‘fail’ regularly, because most gardeners do, all the time.
Fling some seeds into an empty patch of earth and see if they sprout. Plant a tree that your kids can play under as it grows. Fill your garden with plants that you love, and let your observations of them teach you what they like and need. Take a break when you need to. Get back into it when you feel enthused.
And if ever a plant dies in your garden and you start to feel like you don’t know what you’re doing, remember this: there is almost certainly a dead plant in my garden right now, keeping it company.
Thank you for reading! See you next time for more Lo fi life!
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I think this is my favourite article of yours yet!!
I can feel the weight of superfluous advice and unnecessary or dubiously beneficial tasks melting away off my shoulders!
You’re the rebel! And I love it!
Thank you for giving me permission to put the joy back into gardening and for sifting through all the BS on my behalf, so I have more time to just play and create in my patch.
You’ve also helped me silence the OCD/perfectionist side of me that ponders for hours on how to accurately rotate her 4 small beds of veggies and herbs. Stuff it! From now on I’m building up my soil and planting where I like the look of things 🤭 scorching Perth sun being the only variable taken into consideration…obviously.
I totally agree. I have learnt to just go out into my garden and do the things that bring me joy.
Most of my plants have found their happy place and hey if one decides to snuff it, it’s a good excuse to buy another plant!😀
My garden is my sanctuary and it’s also home to lots of different little critters. They are all welcome and they seem to create a good balance.
I don’t like to overthink my garden. I kind of just let it do it’s thing.
Love your writing and your humour by the way.🌺🥦🌺🥦🌺