Get your garden started | Part 1: the basics
Starting your garden: what you really need to know
This garden guide is the first in an 8-part series I will be releasing over the next month. It covers the essentials of starting a successful garden. The 8 guides will be available to all paying subscribers and members of the Wild Garden club, and there will be some previews and sneak peeks for free subscribers. Want to access all my garden guides, tours and recipes? Click the button below to upgrade your membership.
Hello, and welcome to the first in an 8-part series I will be sharing with you over the next month. Too often, I find that gardening advice tends to become convoluted and nit picky, which, in my opinion, often does more harm than good.
I have spoken to many well-intentioned people over the years who seem hellbent on making gardening out to be as challenging and complex as possible. And over the last few days I’ve been thinking about that, a bit. So by way of introduction to this 8-part (super simple) series, here are my thoughts on what it means to grow a garden.
Actually, let’s backtrack a mo.
Let me begin by saying I really don’t have a lot of official authority in this field. That’s a lie - I don’t have any! There are landscape designers, horticulturalists, botanists and plenty of people out there who have formally studied many of the intricacies of getting things to grow. I take my hat off to them. I’m just gardener. And it’s true that I have accumulated a fair bit of experiential knowledge about gardening over the last 10+ years. But I’ve now found my way into a peculiar position.
My gardening knowledge has largely been acquired through trial and error, chatting with other gardeners, and observing the way my own garden grows. Gardening and learning in this way has given my life so much colour, satisfaction, interest and joy. And it’s led me to a very strong conviction that no one should be deprived of the pleasures of growing things. And that no one really has the right to tell anyone else they can’t grow stuff, to discourage a beginner, or to criticise experimentation, play and ‘rule breaking’ when it comes from a place of sheer curiosity and joy.
This is why I try to give simple, fun and encouraging advice. To celebrate imperfection because - I think - no garden is perfect and any garden is better than astroturf. And because, provided you get out into your garden regularly, you are almost guaranteed to learn, to improve.
The other day, I read a post on Instagram from an Australian garden designer who creates gorgeous, naturalistic gardens. Images of his garden had been taken and plonked (without his permission) into a Better Homes and Gardens article about ‘Chaos Gardening’ - a gardening trend I’d celebrated in a previous newsletter myself. This garden designer was saying, quite rightly, that there is nothing chaotic about his gardens. They are very thoughtful, carefully planned, designed to have texture, movement and colour in every season. Underneath the post, a bunch of gardeners (or maybe landscape designers?) were commenting about what a stupid idea chaos gardening is, and how it diminishes the work of naturalistic garden designers to suggest that their gardens could be achieved simply by throwing a few packs of seeds around.
Then I went and read the Better Homes and Gardens article.
And ohhh, it was a load of drivel. See, I thought chaos gardening was just direct sowing a bunch of spring annuals, gardening at lightning speed when you’ve chanced upon a babysitter and accepting that you will likely always feel that your garden is a work in progress. This version of chaos gardening was just a recipe for a cluttered and half-dead garden.
(Ooooo drama!! I just went to find a link to the article to share here and discovered that it’s been removed!)
Anyway, I felt..weird. Stuck. I knew I didn't want to be in the camp of the garden designers, who - much as I love the gardens they create - often give the impression that growing a beautiful garden requires a university degree or many years working as a designer. An attitude that I think often intimidates beginners and prevents them from even starting a garden.
But on the flip side are the people who dole out overly simple, plain wrong garden advice designed to attract beginners but ultimately setting them up to fail. And there is so much of this online too (I chatted about some of it in my last newsletter).
So I dunno whose camp I’m in, but I know the kind of garden advice I think we all need. Especially in Perth. And that’s the kind of advice I want to work to provide you with each week. The kind of advice you get from your old neighbour, leant over the fence, who has been gardening their whole life and says, with a knowing wink, ‘son, your artichokes need a water - just look at the leaves’.
In short, advice that is simple and kind, but also correct.
So, if you are eager to start a garden but find yourself see-sawing endlessly between information that is convoluted, complex and overwhelming, and clickbait garden drivel telling you you can successfully grow an orchid in a gumboot, this 8-part gardening series is for you. These are the things I genuinely think are fundamental and fundamentally helpful when starting a garden, with (I hope) all of the superfluous bull removed.
I hope you like it. Let’s begin!
P.S. If you are not yet a paying subscriber and you want to access the full eight-part series as it comes out this month, click the button below to upgrade your subscription to paid.
Get your garden started | part one
So you wanna grow a garden? Good. Let’s start at the beginning. What are the fundamentals of starting a garden? What are the essentials? What do you really need to do and know? Buckle up buckaroo, here we go!
Starting your garden: what you need to know
There are a few basic fundamentals that are worth knowing when embarking on creating a garden. Distilling your gardening down to these fundamentals can make things feel less overwhelming.
Too often, the advice we get from nurseries, garden experts or on google leads us down rabbit holes that totally overcomplicate the process of starting a garden (and, worse still, can put many off even starting).
The truth is, for a healthy, thriving garden you really only need to follow a few simple guidelines; the rest is just fiddly, cherry-on-top-of-the-pudding stuff, which doesn't deserve a lot of your mental bandwidth.
Keep things simple.
You don't need piles of fancy soil amendments, you don't need a library of bug sprays, and you don't need to worry about a lot of things you might think are 'problems' in your garden (many of these resolve on their own anyway).
My advice? Keep things simple, keep your confidence up and keep buying truckloads of manure.
Where to focus
So, what's actually worth focusing on in your garden? It’s simple (yay!)
Plants need three things to survive
Good quality soil
Enough sunshine
Enough water
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