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.

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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.

If you are eager to start a garden but find yourself see-sawing endlessly between information that is overcomplicated and overwhelming, to 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

When you bump up against problems in your patch, it’s usually because one of these things is not optimised for whatever plant you’re trying to grow. Plants that aren’t happy about the soil they’re in, or the sunshine and water they’re getting will be more prone to diseases and bug attack, so it pays to make sure you’re growing plants that are happy with the environmental conditions you’re able to provide.

Get these three things right and you will grow a healthier garden with wayyy fewer struggles and setbacks (not zero setbacks, mind you - remember all gardeners kill plants!)

Make it easy

How can you make the process of growing a garden even easier for yourself? Select plants that want to thrive.

Different plants have different needs. The key to growing a garden successfully is identifying those needs for each of your plants and creating an environment that matches those needs. This can either be very difficult or very easy, depending on what plants you select.

You might select plants that don't really want to thrive in your garden environment, in which case giving them what they need will always be an uphill battle. If, on the other hand, you choose plants that are already predisposed to like the specific conditions of your garden, things will be easy and more satisfying from the get-go.

I am a big advocate of growing plants that like your garden and want to grow in it for this very reason.

The easiest conditions to grow a wide variety of plants in are (generally) full sun, with good quality rich, free draining soil (more on that later) and plenty of water. Now, some plants don't like these specific conditions - there are plants that like shade, plants that don't appreciate soil that is choc-full of manure, and plants that thrive in dry conditions. But for the beginner gardener, starting with a sunny position, good soil and plenty of water will mean you can grow many of the traditional flowers and veggies with success.

We’ll cover soil improvement and sunshine in more depth soon. For now, just know that understanding sun, soil and water in your garden is really important, and that it pays to pay attention to these three factors whenever you pop a new plant in the ground.

Match the right plant to the right environment and growing will be easy.

Start small

Finally (for now), I find it's best to keep your gardening simple. Start small. Especially at the beginning.

It's really easy to bite off more than you can chew - to decide to overhaul your whole garden in one go, or to step back, look at all the work that lies ahead of you and feel totally overwhelmed. In the long run, slow and steady wins the race (and is a lot more fun and relaxing). So, avoid the impulse to improve everything all at once and instead pick one spot in your garden that you'll work on initially.

Use what you've got on hand - you can repurpose old bricks to create new beds, you can lay salvaged pavers to create tentative paths through your garden before shelling out for the final thing, you can even start your garden in pots if that's easier (we'll talk more about growing in pots soon, too).

When I started my garden, I began with a few flowers in pots. Then I planted just one bed with a little crop of veggies. Over the years my husband and I have removed grass, added garden beds, built paths, archways and trees.

But it has taken time.

My garden, summer 2014

My garden, spring 2021

My garden, spring 2023 (photo by Michelle Troop)

The trick is in taking on just enough that you can still love the process. That way, every new change you make feels like an exciting and satisfying adventure, rather than a chore.

The last reason to take things slowly is that, by setting your own relaxed speed, your gardening skills will grow and develop at the same pace as your garden. You learn so much by doing out there, and doing everything all at once is a surefire way to miss a lot of the important lessons you'll gain from gradually building on your garden, season after season.

Remember, there's no rush, no end goal, just a lifetime of enjoyable pottering.

~ I’ll see you on Monday for part two!

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Thank you for reading! See you next time for more Lo fi life!

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