The Green Thumb is a Myth – Advice for Beginning Gardeners: Garden Fearlessly

I said something in a video this past Sunday, “You cannot screw up a garden.” This is so true! So many people are afraid to start because they have become intimidated believing they do not have this proverbial “green thumb.” Let me set the record straight. There is no such thing as a green thumb. There is knowledge, and there is ignorance. There is nurturing, and there is neglect. It is really that simple. When you know what to do, it takes the mystery out, and you are able to garden without fear and even to experiment with different methods to find one that works best for you where you are. Garden fearlessly! There are people who love their plants enough to nourish and nurture them, and there are people who forget about them or are overly attentive in that they over water and cause the roots to rot.

So, is there a fine line in caring for a garden?

No. There is no fine line in caring for a garden. You can neglect watering and not water enough or you can water too much and both are detrimental to the garden…This is true, but there is a HUGE gulf between those two extremes. You do not have to be a perfect gardener. As a matter of fact, you will not be a perfect gardener, no matter how much you try. Accept that now, and know that it is OK! You are going to make mistakes, but the most important thing is to learn from those mistakes and adjust what you are doing, continuing to learn and grow as a gardener.

What if I fail?

There are only two ways to fail: quit or not even try. We aren’t quitters, but there does come a time when you may need to step away and reassess how you have been doing things to come up with a plan and system that will work better. Three years ago, we had had two years of gardening and each year we had major setbacks. What we did is we took a break for one year to go back to the drawing board and figure out a system that would work better for us, for our particular challenges. When it gets too rough, when the challenges are more than you can handle at the time, it is OK to step back and reassess.

My motto is Work smarter, not harder!

My husband, Todd, other than growing mold in the refrigerator, did not have any growing experience prior to six years ago. However, I was raised in a garden, either my parents’ or my grandparents’, who were homesteaders before it was cool!

So, we came from different backgrounds, but we still had a learning curve. I should know everything I needed to know with that background, right? Nope. That is an ego trap. There is always something to learn, and there are always ways to improve on what you are doing to make the garden work for you instead of you being a slave to it. We have discovered that there have been improvements since my grandparents’ day that make growing so much easier and a better experience, the raised beds as an example. If my grandparents had known about that, they would absolutely have gardened in raised beds, especially with 12 children to feed and provide for. Also, until we started gardening six years ago, I had also never heard of

• succession planting
• Spring, Summer, and Fall planting times…multiple harvests in the same growing season? unheard of!
• permaculture gardening methods’ of naturalizing
• companion planting (even though I am descended from American Indians which the “three sisters” are a version of)
• square foot gardening method
• the Hugelkulture Method of filling raised garden beds
• and certainly not of raised beds other than the small border beds shown in this photo of Grandma and Grandpa.

All of these things are things that we have learned about over the last six years and incorporated into our gardening strategies and plans.

Six years ago, when we started growing together, we used raised beds, but they were very low, the height of landscaping timbers as shown above and frames made of pallets.

It looked beautiful for about half of the summer, then the challenges set in. We had deer, squirrel, and rabbits who would eat the produce. The rabbits took down every single stalk of corn just after the cobs started forming. The squirrels would dig up our plants, and we still have issues with them stealing the onion and garlic bulbs and replanting them in the yard. Yes, even living in the city we do have critter problems. We even have an occasional bear, fox, raccoon, and opossum. The carrots did not grow larger than two inches, and the centipedes destroyed the radishes. After two years of this, we decided to take a break, learn what we could from others and try out some different things.

There had to be a better way that was not so hard to maintain and protect.

Fast forward a year later, Todd had made eight square raised beds that were two foot tall and four foot by four foot in width.

Before the end of the growing season last year (2020) he had added four more the same size plus a long bed that was four foot wide by 20 foot long, although we did not get them filled and usable until this Spring. I also despised having to mow and weed-eat between the beds, not to mention the mud when it rained, so I got some rubber mats to lay down between the raised beds. I think that was one of the best ideas I have had to date! It also makes for a really nice surface to walk on when working in the garden.

We went with the two-foot-tall raised beds, because it makes the work easier as we are getting older (unfortunately we do not get younger and our bodies do not increase their ability to manual labor). Raised beds make planting, weeding, cleaning, harvesting ans so much much….EASIER. Raised beds are even handicap accessible, so people in wheelchairs are able to enjoy the benefits of gardening as well. These are four foot wide, because that allows for 16 square foot of growing room, and using the square foot gardening concept we are able to plant more in a smaller footprint which is important when you are growing food in the city on a very limited 0.23 acres of land that includes what the house is on.

These raised beds have the added benefit of self-fertilizing to an extent. Due to the open bottom being exposed to the bare ground, worms are able to go up into the bed and leave their poop, also called worm castings, which is very high in nutrients that benefit the plants, and there are other synergistic relationships between the worms and the plants. In this, the worms are doing part of your work for you, and they love to do it!

The garden is a living breathing BEAST!

The garden is a living breathing BEAST! Just like a spouse or a child, you cannot neglect it and expect it to thrive. You have to give it the care and attention it needs. I even talk to, sing to, and touch them. What does a garden need to thrive? There are seven basic things that a garden needs to thrive:

1-sun for photosynthesis

2-water for hydration and nutrient uptake

3-nutrients for growth and fruiting

4-air/gases for respiration

5-correct temperatures

6-time to grow

7-soil-except in the case of hydroponics

One thing that we have noticed makes a major difference in the quality and quantity of the produce, and that is praying over our garden and asking Yahuah for guidance, protection, and His bounteous blessings. He does guide. He does protect. He does give bounteous blessings. Prayer makes a difference!!!

There is a lot of advice out there for new gardeners and seasoned gardeners (because you never stop learning and adjusting). You do not have to take all the advice proffered. I love to listen to other gardeners and hear them tell what works for them. However, everything that works for them may not necessarily work for me. Why? They have different growing conditions, different climates, different weather, different critter challenges, different local ordinances that can limit or exclude what you would like to do, etc.

To give an example, there are so many people who recommend topping the peppers (cutting the tops off them) to give bigger yields. However, we have discovered topping peppers actually gives us less yield, whereas letting them grow as they will, they were loaded and continuously gave their fruit. Another example is the “Trellis to make you jealous” method of string tying tomatoes.

Many gardeners rave about this method and would not trellis their tomatoes any other way. However, we tried it last year, and it worked, but I did not personally care for it. I prefer tying them to a trellis like a cattle panel. The point being that even though the method works and even worked for me, it was not my preferred way of trellising tomatoes. It did not work for me as well as tying to a cattle panel or other type of wire trellis support.

There are some things that will work for others, and not work for you. That is OK also. It is not a bad thing to try out the recommendations of other seasoned gardeners, but don’t feel like you have done something wrong if it doesn’t work for you or that you are the odd man out if you don’t like using a particular method. There are people who can use the landscape timber for raised bed growing, but it did not work for us due to our critter issues and crabgrass would take over regardless of how much weeding we did. My advice to you fellow gardeners and would-be-gardeners is to listen to the advice of seasoned gardeners, and I would encourage you to try their advice if you believe it may work for your particular circumstances. But don’t take anything as Gospel, because there are so many variables in growing, that the success of one particular thing is not guaranteed. While in life, this is discouraged, however, in the garden, I would even encourage you to break the gardening “rules” to see how far you can push the boundaries.

The main piece of advice I would give you is to Garden Fearlessly! Don’t let fear of failure, fear of not having the mythical green thumb, fear of things you don’t know…don’t let fear keep you from growing, because growing your own food is so rewarding! There are very few things better than walking out of your house with your harvest basket in hand and gathering your dinner right off of your own land and from the work of your own hands. It is beyond description!   

Grow fearlessly! Garden Fearlessly!

If you would like to watch the video I recorded on this subject, you can find it here.