Mistakes I’ve made. 

When it comes to gardening mistakes can happen all the time I know I make my own mistakes both in the garden and out. Learning from the mistakes we have made or seen other make can shorten our learning time. I am grateful to those who share their garden mistakes in the hopes that I will remember them and avoid the mistakes too. Today I am sharing a few of the mistakes that I have made in the garden. 

• Not Having A Plan – For many years at the beginning of my garden journey I did not implement any sort of planning for the garden. I would just go by what ever I felt like doing. Luckily I was lucky for the most part, but some things didn’t do their best because I was not growing them at the best time for their needs. Now I teach every person who comes to me for garden coaching the importance of making a plan for each season. Knowing what you are planting, where and when is key. It’s also key to know how long they’ll be taking up that space so you can be prepared with new crops to take their spot. 
• Watering Wrong – I have been on both sides of watering wrongly.  There were times where I was busy and forgot to water and everything was wilted and stressed out when I remembered it. Or I  waited too long between watering. Now I can easily tell when my plants need water. I have also watered too much, particularly with seedlings when I first started growing from seed. Little tiny seeds only need such a small amount of moisture. If you want a physical way to know if your plants need water, stick your finger about 2 inches I. To the soil. If it’s moist, you can wait another day or two, if it’s dry, it’s time to water. I always recommend to water deeply and at soil level. 
• Over Feeding – Always read the packaging and follow directions for feeding your plants. You can quickly over feed them and disastrous results can happen. This is not a situation where “Just a little more won’t hurt.” You may not even need to feed your plants depending on your soil conditions, whether or not you add compost as mulch and the pants specific requirements.
• Waiting Too Long To Harvest – Something to get used to with the home kitchen garden is that a lot for your crops will want to be harvested at a size that is smaller than what you are used to from the grocery store. Waiting too long can make certain plants bitter or have an off texture/taste. Harvest often and learn what the average size for any given plant should be. I often see people grow a garden then they don’t harvest anything, which seems pointless to me, make sure that you are harvesting often. Plants are trying to produce ripe seeds, so when you harvest it tells the plant to make more fruiting bodies for more seed production. (This is true for cut and come again varieties, indeterminate varieties, but determinate varieties or root crops, etc.)
• Following Seed Packet Spacing Guidelines – Before I learned to plant intensively using square foot gardening techniques, I blindly followed seed packet spacing guidelines. (This is back before there was much information on the web.) I always ran out of room quickly in my small garden. I felt the empty spaces were sad unused space that could have been used better. They always ended up being weedy messes that were a total pain to deal with. I am grateful for learning about square foot gardening and intensive planting because I now fit so much more into my garden beds, making it that much easier to grow an abundance of food for my family.

There are many more gardening mistakes I have made through the years, no doubt I will make more and will learn from them. It is through these mistakes that I have learned the most. There is that saying that good gardeners are those who have killed lots of plants, made lots of mistakes and learned from those experiences. That is my aim every season, to learn something from anything that may go wrong. I do learn from trying new techniques or experiments, but for some reason those do not teach me as much as the bigger mistakes that I have made. Those stick with me more and I take that knowledge to every future season. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes, learn from them and grow with your garden!