Gardening ‘rules’ that were made to be broken
Because why should any of us do as we're told??
I’m going to begin today’s newsletter with a little reminder: ‘gardening’ is a made-up human construct. We made it up. It isn’t a thing, at least, not really.
Yes, humans have nurtured and propagated plants for thousands of years. There is even archeological evidence that as far back as 23 000 BCE, humans in Israel were intentionally growing things like lentils and grapes. But gardening in a modern sense; getting seedlings in neat little punnets from plant nurseries, driving them home, spritzing their leaves with seaweed-soaked water, plopping them in garden beds filled with animal manure that we bought in big plastic bags and then obsessively checking them for signs of bugs? Yeah, that’s pretty new.
For the vast majority of human history, ‘gardening’ wasn’t a thing because everyone did it. It wasn’t called gardening, it was called ‘making sure you don’t starve’, and there were no seedlings in punnets, no ‘eco sprays’, no grow lights and no self-watering pots.
Notes:
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Today I’m talking about my two least favourite (and most common) gardening ‘rules’ and why I think you should break them.
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Things are different now. The agricultural revolution has given us unprecedented access to farm-grown food, while simultaneously leaving us entirely bewildered by the idea of growing anything ourselves. It’s at this point that the ‘garden gurus’ appear and begin to gently drown us in a sea of products that have sprung up to fill the gaps between our plant-knowledge and our garden aspirations.
And yes, I know I’m yet another one of those know-it-alls proffering plant advice (I’m sorry!), but please, stick with me a mo. Because it’s not the advice that I have a problem with. Every gardener I talk to always teaches me something. There’s always a nifty trick to learn, a new plant to add to my patch.
It’s the fear mongering. It’s the ‘you need product x if you wan’t to succeed’. Most of all, it’s the idea that there’s a ‘right way’ to do something and a ‘wrong way’. It’s making everyone with aphids, dead plants or shitty soil feel like a failure and it’s the arrogance of acting like the sole arbiter of plant knowledge, when every single one of us has ancestors for whom growing things was second nature.
Don’t let them suck you in!
You don’t need half of what they’re selling and, what’s more, you don’t need to do what they say. Gardening ‘rules’ are a load of bunkum and most of them are not there to improve your garden, but to sell a set of specific products. Because you won’t buy their products if you don’t think you have a problem that needs solving. It’s classic fear-based marketing and it has no place in your garden.
What they don’t want to tell you - because it earns them no money - is that you will learn more by simply gardening than they’ll ever teach you, that there are only a handful of things you actually need to grow healthy plants (and most of them are just different types of animal poo), and that all their ‘rules’ about gardening were made to be broken.
To get the ball rolling, here are my two biggest gardening rules that are made to be broken. In my humble opinion, following these rules is boring, pointless, anxiety-inducing, and saps the fun out of gardening faster than paint thinner strips varnish off wood.
Rule 1: Remove your weeds
I don’t weed my garden. Why? Because weeding is deathly boring. It also happens to be largely pointless. Yes, I will admit there are a few plants that are so determined to spread that it probably is better to dig them out. Top of that list is couch grass. But there are a HEAP of other plants that people call ‘weeds’ which are relatively benign, hardly spread and can actually be beneficial in your patch. Some are even quite beautiful.
Let me pause, for a moment, to tell you about a few beautiful plants I’m growing in my garden. Once is a spring bulb. It has white, bell shaped flowers that are lightly fragrant. It’s edible too - the leaves and flowers are great in soups, flash-fried in stir-fries or tossed through salads. It is a tough, hardy plant and you can toss it around your garden to fill empty spaces with delicate, white spring blooms.
Another plant I love is one of the few things that flowers in my garden this time of year. Bright pink pops of colour carpet patches of lawn and grow underneath my roses. It’s a close relative of some plants you might have seen popping up at garden nurseries recently for a pretty penny - they have purple, heart shaped leaves and lilac flowers on tall stems and sell for $39 a pot!
Yeah, I’m talking about onion grass and oxalis.
See, much like the idea of ‘gardening’ is a human invention, so is the idea of a ‘weed’. Weeds are really just introduced species of plant that do particularly well in our climate and tend to take over a garden. But that doesn’t mean you need to freak out about them! When handled well, they perform a really useful role. These are the plants that will flower when the rest of the garden is bare, they will grow in regions with poor soil (because they’re so vigorous), and they’ll allow you to totally manhandle them and still pop up happily every spring.
Instead of changing our gardens, instead of battling these plants relentlessly, we can do two things. First, we can reframe the way we view ‘weeds’. Weeds are vigorous plants that often have pollinator-attracting flowers, can help direct water down into the soil in previously bare beds and can help shade your soil in summer, protecting the microorganisms that live within it.
Second, we can do a few simple things to keep the ‘weeds’ in a healthy balance in our gardens. Because they really only become annoying when they start to turn your garden into one big monoculture. I almost never weed my garden because I put all my energy into two things: mulching regularly and filling the garden with the plants I do want to grow. Mulch helps suppress weed seeds, so you get far fewer germinating. The worst thing you can do if you don’t like weeds is to regularly turn your soil. This brings weed seeds to the top of the soil, where they’ll germinate. Filling my garden beds up with other plants also helps suppress weeds, because they have more competition and less chance to take over.
And yeah, sometimes I get the odd dandelion, but who cares? They’re great for the bees! And honestly? The oxalis flowers really are BEAUTIFUL. The onion weeds pop up for about a month in early spring and make a lovely cut flower and handy cooking ingredient (just make sure they definitely are the edible kind of onion weed before eating them!).
If you want to grow a garden that looks perfect and pristine I suppose you might still take issue with weeds. But if you’ve followed along with my gardening rants this far, I suspect your goals are the same as mine - you want gardening to bring you happiness. Fretting about weeds isn’t going to make you feel happier, so free yourself from the burden of others’ expectations, and learn to work with your weeds instead.
Rule 2: Kill your pests
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