Whether you’ve just been gardening for years or have just made the decision to get your hands a little dirty and plant your very first plant, you’re part of a life-long process of learning and relearning, connecting with plants and nature, and making mistakes along the way.
The following will explore a few things that can help any gardener accomplish their gardening goals.
Willingness To Adjust
Every plant species is different, and even among the same species, there are differences between plants. This means that to truly maintain a garden, you need to be willing to adjust.
If a plant is wilting, browning, growing slowly, or otherwise suffering, you need to be able to acknowledge that something isn’t working and make changes until you find what does work.
You can read all the gardening tips you want and spend hours watching reels and TikTok, but at the end of the day, you just have to try things out and see what happens.
An Understanding Of Native Plants
While you can plant non-native plants in your garden, you might not want to once you’ve done research on the impacts it can have. Not only are non-native plants sometimes overly competitive in an environment, but they can also cause problems for local bee and insect populations.
Beyond this, non-native plants have evolved to live in a different climate with different soil composition, meaning they tend to be a lot harder to keep alive and well. You can expect that most non-native plants will require a lot more work and effort than native plants.
Tools For Improving Soil Nutrition
The leaching of nutrients out of the soil is a huge problem for health. Humans are getting far less nutrition in each fruit or vegetable they eat than they would have in generations past.
Plants are likewise struggling to get everything they need. A gardener needs to take soil biology and makeup seriously, and this means a few different things.
Foremost, you want a testing kit that you can use to regularly test the condition of your soil. You’re going to want to get a composting system going and maybe find some accelerator for compost to speed things along. Finally, you might need to import worms or plant species of plants that can help improve the quality of your soil.
Non-Plastic Watering Can
If you’re gardening, you’re probably going to be watering plants from time to time. While plastic watering cans are incredibly inexpensive and popular, they’re a serious problem.
When water sits in plastic, especially if the plastic is heated by the sun or in warm weather, tiny flakes of plastic peel off and stay in the water.
This contributes to the very serious global problem of microplastics. There’s enough plastic in the environment without you pouring plastic water all over everything.
And yes, this information applies to water vessels you drink from as well. Make the switch to glass or stainless steel. BPA-free doesn’t mean toxic-chemical-free; it just means there’s a single chemical that isn’t present. All the other chemicals are still there.
Mulch Or Soil Cover
It turns out that leaving soil bare can cause a lot of soil problems, both on a global scale (soil erosion is at a crisis point) but also within your garden (uncovered soil bakes faster and receives water at a different rate, often drying out faster).
Find yourself an aesthetically pleasing soil cover like mulch or a ground-covering plant like clover to help keep your soil safe.
Not only will this help your plants grow healthy and strong because the soil conditions will be ideal for them, but it will also help you save money because your soil isn’t blowing away or washing away whenever there’s rain. Beyond this, mulch adds nutrients to the soil.
Rain Water Collection System
If you can find a way to harness the natural water, you’re being given by using a barrel to collect it. Using this water to tend to your plants can have some seriously positive effects.
Not only will the water be the right temperature (tap water can easily be too hot or too cold for your plants), but it will also be free of a lot of the contaminants that you find in city water.
Water for the masses needs to be kept clean, and this means that there are cleaning agents like chlorine used in small doses. If you’re using this water to support your garden, you need to understand that plants are small and thin and so a little bit of chlorine can actually do a lot of damage.
Further, the chlorine then settles in the soil, killing valuable microbiology that could be helping your plants thrive. If you have well water, you likely don’t have to worry about this point.
The above list should have given you an idea of a few vital things a gardener needs to help their flora and fauna thrive. It’s a good idea to study your garden carefully, taking note of when changes were made and what they were. This can help you figure out what’s working best for your plants.