I Made Every Mistake as a Beginner Gardener

I know a lot about the many different mistakes you can make when you're getting started because I personally made just about every single one of them. After getting off to a rough start, I started helping others learn how to garden, and I watched countless students and garden coaching clients make the exact same mistakes.

Let's look at the 15 most common beginner gardener mistakes and what to do instead. If you take my advice today, I promise you will save a ton of time, money, and frustration when you're setting up and tending your first garden.

Starting at the Hardware Store

This was the first gardening mistake I ever made. I got into my minivan and drove to Home Depot the second I decided to start a garden. Cut to me spending way too much money on things I didn't need and plants that ended up dying.

Stores are set up to encourage us to make impulse purchases, and that's exactly what you're going to do if you start at the store. The real bummer here is that this mistake causes a lot of people to throw in the trowel before the end of their first season. Their plants die, and they assume it was their fault. You don't have to have a green thumb to start a garden. But you do need a plan.

What to Do Instead

Start at home, in your yard. Walk around and try to picture the type of garden you want to create. Come up with a plan. Do your research. Don't go to the store until you've got your future garden mapped out. You'll save a ton of money and a lot of frustration.

Learn more about how to start a garden.

Starting with Just One Plant

Most of the advice out there on the internet is to start small, with just one plant. But I think that's a recipe for quitting. In fact, I'd wager that most people who started with just one plant aren't gardening anymore. Why is that?

Well, because one plant is pretty boring. It won't do much over time, so you're going to be putting a lot of tending efforts in and getting few rewards out. You're also going to limit your learning potential. Instead of learning how to garden, you may learn how to not kill a patio tomato plant for a couple months.

What to Do Instead

Grow 3 to 5 different types of plants all together in a container garden. Having plants that are doing different things at different times will keep your little garden so much more interesting and exciting to care for. Bonus, these plants will actually work together to thrive in the space.

When you grow a wide variety of plants in your garden like leaves and roots and fruit all together, you get this magic combination that protects your soil, helps retain moisture, and gives you so much more to enjoy and learn from in just one season.

Buying Cheap

I know that many of us are motivated to start a garden so we can save money on groceries. But that doesn't mean we should opt for the cheapest version when we're setting up our garden. My grandpa always used to say, "The cheap pay twice." And that's definitely true when it comes to setting up your garden.

What to Do Instead

Instead of trying to buy the cheapest materials possible, get the best quality that you can afford. This should be the case for the raised bed, the soil, the trellises, and the seeds. That way, you'll get to enjoy your garden for years to come, and you don't have to keep buying the same cheap thing over and over again.

I once had a potential client reach out to me about upgrading their garden space. They'd built their raised beds out of pine because it was the cheapest wood option available to them. Pine, unfortunately, is not a durable wood, not when it's exposed to all the elements. These beds needed to be replaced after just one year of growing. Learn more about the best materials to use for raised garden beds.

Ordering Too Many Seeds

Oh my goodness, how many times have I done this? Every time a seed catalog comes in the mail or I head to the nursery, I want to buy every heirloom and cool hybrid I can find. But buying more seeds than you can reasonably grow in your garden leads to waste and overwhelm.

What to Do Instead

When you're buying your first sets of seeds, stick with things like salad greens and root crops (so radishes, carrots, and beets). You can grow a lot of these plants in a small space. I know that all those tomato and pepper seeds get you real excited, but they're hard to start, especially for a beginner gardener. If you really want to grow some fruiting plants, stick with peas and beans for now. That's it.

Hold yourself to these small purchases in the beginning. You'll have so much more success. You'll plant every seed that you buy — no money wasted. Learn more ways to be smart about seed buying.

Starting with Tomatoes

I made this mistake for several years in a row. Tomatoes are one of the most exciting things to grow in the garden, but they're also one of the hardest. Not only are they finicky, but they take a really long time to produce fruit. By the time my first tomato plants had a couple fruits ready to harvest, a squirrel came and took them all. (Looking back, it's pretty amazing I kept going after that.)

What to Do Instead

My first tomato-growing experience was so frustrating, I wrote a book about it. Seriously! It's called Leaves, Roots & Fruit. It covers my beginner gardener system of starting with leaves (think sprouts, microgreens, herbs, and salad greens) and then graduating to roots once you're starting to get a hang of this whole gardening thing. Only once you've mastered roots should you move on to the most demanding plants of all: fruiting crops.

Leaves are the easiest plants to grow, and you can get your first harvests in just 30 days (5 days if you're growing sprouts!). Why spend months waiting for your first fruit harvest, when you can be harvesting basketfuls of leaves each week?

So grower beware: if you start with tomatoes, you're probably going to end up feeling frustrated, and you may give up on gardening entirely. You might blame the squirrels, but the real problem was starting with the wrong plants. Leaves are the first step on your path to success.

Growing in Pots

I've heard so many people say, "Oh, Nicole, I'll never learn how to garden. I can't even keep things in a pot alive." And I'm like, "Me neither!"

The hardest kind of plant to keep alive is one that's growing in a pot or too-small container. That's because there's nothing from nature that's working for you. The whole system is dependent on you. You've got to fill the pot with the right soil. You've got to water it (and it'll dry out super fast). And you've got to make sure there are nutrients readily available because the plant doesn't have any room to reach out for more when it's hungry.

Basically, you've got to babysit this thing to keep it alive, and that's really hard for a gardener of any level.

What to Do Instead

Start in a small raised bed, a large container, or directly in the ground. Grow several different types of plants together instead of sticking everything in its own pot. Like I said before, plants can actually help each other out. They like having friends nearby. They'll also have more room to send their roots down deep and search for nutrients and water when they need more.

Whatever you do, don't judge your gardening abilities on whether or not a plant in a tiny pot lives or dies! Setup really matters.

Expecting Perfection

I can't tell you how many students and clients I've had get upset when things don't work out exactly how they wanted. Maybe their harvest doesn't look like the grocery store produce they're used to, or their raised beds don't grow in picture perfect.

But listen, the garden is the best way to experience nature. And what is the most magical part about nature? It's unpredictability.

Why do we love playing games and taking risks? It's because something inside us actually loves the unknown. Something inside us craves the possibility that we could wake up tomorrow and be surprised. And that's exactly what you get in the garden.

What to Do Instead

Perfection is out! If you can expect your garden to be one thing, it's dynamic. And to me, that's so much more exciting.

Not Tying Gardening to Your Daily Schedule

Imagine getting yourself a new puppy and not figuring out how you're going to have time to walk it or feed it or play with it. That puppy would be pretty unhappy, and so would you after just a few days. 

And the same is true with your garden. Plants are living things. They need your time and attention. They don't ask for much, but they do thrive when you fit their care into your daily routine.

What to Do Instead

Fit gardening into your schedule right next to an existing habit. I love to use the phrase "don't go inside yet." Whenever I'm returning from a walk or coming back from picking up my kids, I head out to my garden for about 5 minutes instead of going straight inside. That's how I make sure that my garden continues to grow and thrive, even when I don't have a lot of time.

It took me a while to figure out how to fit the garden into my own busy life as a mom of four and a business owner, but once I figured out the system, I decided to write a book about it. It's called The 5-Minute Gardener. It'll help you work gardening into your busy life, in just 5 minutes at a time.

Not Thinking About Your Meals

How many of us decide what we're going to grow in our gardens without ever considering what we actually like to eat? (*Raises hand*)

When you plan your garden based on fun seeds you find online or whatever plants are available at the nursery, you end up harvesting a bunch of stuff you don't know how to use up in your kitchen.

What to Do Instead

Before you come up with a planting plan, take some time to think through the things your household loves eating. Look at the recipes you love to throw together and dishes you make over and over. Think about the ingredients involved and then consider which of those you could actually grow.

Maybe you need basil for pizza night or peppers for the homemade hot sauce your husband loves. Maybe you use up a ton of garlic when you're making your grandmother's old recipes. There are so many plants that are super simple to grow and that provide harvests you can use in so many different ways in the kitchen. We often overlook these plants when we're buying seeds or plants, even though we use them in the kitchen all the time.

Not Prioritizing Your Soil

I have seen so many people spend a ton of money and time on their raised beds and trellises and then throw all kinds of crazy things — huge logs, plastic bottles — into their beds to fill space and create soil.

Listen, the soil is the most important part of your garden. Everything you see on top (healthy plant growth and production) is a reflection of what's happening underneath.

What to Do Instead

If you've only got time and money to prioritize one thing when it comes to setting up your garden, let it be the soil. Build your own soil blend using only natural materials. Learn more about the best soil for raised beds.

And by the way, I recommend filling the entire bed with great soil, but if you need to cut costs a bit, you can fill the bottom with leaf mulch.

Letting Pests Surprise You

Ten years ago, a single but very determined squirrel almost ruined my garden journey before it ever really began. And now, I field so many calls from friends, clients, and students about squirrels, deer, groundhogs, rabbits, aphids, caterpillars — you name it. New gardeners are always completely shocked and horrified that there's wildlife that wants to eat their plants, too.

Listen, the wildlife surrounding your new garden has only had grass to eat up until now. Of course they're going to be interested in all the things that you're putting into your garden!

What to Do Instead

Don't be surprised by pests. They're just part of the garden experience. Knowing this, the time to think about pests is now, when you're setting up your garden, not after. There are simple steps you can take to deny pests access to your garden, like placing hardware cloth under your raised beds if you know burrowing animals are an issue where you live. Save yourself a bunch of surprise and a lot of disappointment.

Learn more ways to control pests organically.

Using Synthetic Fertilizer in Your Garden

This is a mistake that both beginner and longtime gardeners make. They reach for that blue stuff called Miracle-Gro. Synthetic fertilizers promise quick results, but they work at the cost of your soil health. (And remember how I said soil is the most important thing in your garden?)

Synthetic fertilizers also create runoff that's bad news for the environment. Plus, their production is bad for human and planet health.

But perhaps the most important thing to know as a beginner gardener is that Miracle-Gro stresses out your plants. It asks them to grow really big too fast, and they lose their natural ability to fight off pests and disease. The healthiest plants are ones that have never been exposed to synthetic fertilizers in the first place. Read more about why I don't recommend using synthetic fertilizers.

What to Do Instead

Instead of spraying your plants, focus on the soil. (Are you noticing a theme here?) If you build great organic and nutrient-rich soil, your plants are going to grow strong and produce for you without the fertilizer. It's not a miracle — it's just nature. Here are three things you can add to your soil that will build soil health naturally.

Covering Your Garden with Mulch

I know, I know, all the other gardeners tell you to do this, but trust me. Mulch is a waste of money and space. It also causes more problems than it solves. It's a hiding place for pests, it pulls nitrogen from your soil as it breaks down, and it takes up valuable planting space.

What to Do Instead

Instead of mulching around your plants, use what's called "living mulch." Basically, plant a lot of leafy greens by seed around your existing plants. These little guys will shade the soil, help with water retention, and give you something you can actually harvest. My goal is to not be able to see any soil 4 to 6 weeks after planting up a garden for the season.

Why waste your time and effort spreading mulch around your plants when you could be growing tons of arugula, spinach, and lettuces underneath your plants instead?

Learn more about gardening without mulch.

Using Pesticides in Your Garden

Listen, there's actually no such thing as a pesticide. As Andrew Kimbrell writes in his article "They Are Biocides, Not Pesticides -- And They Are Creating an Ecocide":

"Using the word pest-icide gives the impression that all these chemicals do is kill 'pests,' whether insects, plant, or fungi pests. The neonicotinoids killing bees and song birds puts that delusion to rest. The bee is an insect but not a pest and the song bird is neither an insect nor a pest."

Put simply, every time you spray something to kill pests, you're not just killing the "bad" bugs. You're killing the good ones too.

I've seen so many of my students freak out when they see the first sign of a bug in their garden and reach instantly for the chemical sprays. As a result, their whole garden suffers, and lots of innocent bugs die in the process.

What to Do Instead

You don't need to spray for pests. Instead, learn how to control them organically.

Searching YouTube for Answers About Your Garden Problems

I say this last one as a gardener who posts videos on YouTube, so trust me, I see the irony.

But here's the thing: if you spend hours watching YouTube videos, you end up with something we call analysis paralysis. That's because you're going to get way more information than you need, some of it conflicting, leaving you feeling dazed and confused... and not one step closer to solving your problem.

What to Do Instead

You don't need hundreds of gardeners telling you what to do. You just need one experienced gardener who knows your local climate and who has a great garden system they can teach to you.

We believe local coaches are so important we train garden consultants around the world. To find a consultant in your area, go here and we'll match you with an expert who knows your climate and how to garden in the exact place where you're trying to grow.

Start Your Garden the Right Way

Hopefully these beginner gardening tips will help save you so much time, money, and frustration when you're ready to set up your garden. If you're wondering where to start, check out our "How to Start a Garden" series for step-by-step guidance. I walk you through picking the best location for your garden, sourcing the right materials, building your raised beds, and so much more!

Source:

Huff Post, "They Are Biocides, Not Pesticides -- And They Are Creating an Ecocide"