5 Common Mistakes Organic Gardeners Make
All gardeners make mistakes.
It could be planting all your seeds at once – who has time to plant them while remembering where the seeds are hiding in the soil? Or the fault may be beyond your control, such as not preparing your garden for days of rain, incessant hail, or severe drought. Even a swarm of leaf-eating insects can do a lot of damage overnight while you sleep.
Nature always keeps you on your toes. Yet, we must eat to live, and we want to eat well. Therefore, if we want to thrive, we must learn to work with nature rather than against it.
Where am I going with all this? Chemicals.
ie chemicals in food production. It is difficult to understand, but the use of synthetic pesticides began in the United States in the 1930s. It pollutes the soil for almost 90 years. We often like to think that our grandparents, great-grandparents, and the like were high-end eaters. In a way, they did. The raw materials were of much better quality than many products produced today. The truth is that food has been evolving for much longer than we think.
Don't despair. There is a way out of this mess. This is called regenerative agriculture. When we do no harm to the land and instead focus on improving the soil and the earth, the end result is a nutrient-dense diet. It all starts with organic gardening.
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1. Non-planning before planting
Gardeners are at all levels of learning. One thing is for sure, from novice to the beginner, we all have the potential to make mistakes. Some produce large, others small, some are harmful, and others do not hurt a fly.
Elizabeth makes 30 vegetable garden mistakes gardeners make all the time. Whether you consider yourself a conventional gardener, an organic gardener, or find yourself somewhere in between, it's worth reading. You may find yourself choosing the wrong seeds - for your garden's soil, amount of sun/shade, climate, etc.
It is entirely possible to choose the wrong growing medium for starting seeds, plant seeds too deep, or sow at the wrong time. What I'm really trying to say here is that planning your organic garden comes with experience. Knowing which plants can tolerate shade and which do best in full sun. You need to know your soil type and what you can grow in it.
Knowing when to plant is essential. Which comes first - cabbage seeds or garlic? It all depends on what season you are in. Regardless of the style of your garden, you should start thinking with a cyclical nature. For example, garlic can be planted in the fall. When it comes to spring, we know where to plant your kale, broccoli, or carrots. Make a garden sketch and try to do it, but leave plenty of room for other plants to make it in real life.
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2. Fighting to get rid of pests
We all make mistakes. Even university graduates with degrees in horticulture and environmental protection. Yes, it is my husband and me respectively. During our first year in Hungary, we woke up one morning to a large black moving beast, literally thousands of black, spiky caterpillars devouring a large nettle plant in the back garden. Assuming they would quickly make their way to the vegetable garden or our beloved mulberry trees, my husband cut the nettle stems with a scythe and trampled them to death.
Remember, this was pre-internet days, so a quick reference wasn't handy. When we discovered what we had done to destroy the potential for hundreds of European peacock butterflies to emerge, we felt bad. We must remember that all insects are beneficial, each in its own way. Who are we to control their numbers?
At the same time, as insect populations decline, we must do everything we can to make our gardens insect-friendly. It should, by extension, not spray anything harmful. You can rewild your garden, and attract lacewings or plant flowers and perennials to attract bees, butterflies, and other key insects. Whatever you do, be patient with all insects. Most of them stay for a very short time and then they go away until the next year or emerge after 17 years. Not every time they severely damage your crops. If they do, you can take a small loss in favor of increasing global insect populations. It's about finding balance.
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3. Purchase quick solutions to deal with plant pests and diseases
I understand. It's easier to look for an "organic" version of the same bug-killing chemical than to deal with the real problem of figuring out why there's an insect infestation in the first place. It's like someone on a gluten-free diet wanting to lose weight and buying gluten-free bread and other pastries (assuming they're better than the gluten-free versions) instead of cutting back on carb intake. You cannot substitute a chemical for a safer chemical. In the world of organic gardening, you need to get past the quick fix to get to the bottom of the matter. Something often overlooked, like soil quality, your neighbors' gardening habits, or too much rain - hello mildew!
Even pesticides approved for use in organic farming can harm bees and other beneficial insects. Read that last sentence again. And let that sink in. Pesticides do exactly what they say, they kill insects. They bring down the total number of other creatures along with it. To be successful in organic gardening, you must remember that plants are most resilient when they are happy and healthy. If your tomatoes are stressed, it's only natural that certain diseases can sweep them off their feet. If you've successfully grown tomatoes before, you know that tomatoes can have a lot of problems.
Organic pest control starts with planting in the right spot, in sun or shade, depending on the growing vegetable, rather than picking out a spray bottle in alarm first. It starts with the quality of soil, mulch, compost, etc. The same considerations apply to fertilizers. Use only natural fertilizers in your organic garden.
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4. Rejecting the subjunctive as a question
Here at people garden, we've published a growing collection of articles on companion planting. If you're new to the concept of companion planting, you should do more than enough reading to get you started. We hope it makes you think there must be something real to it. In organic gardening, as we have already mentioned, your plants should be healthy, strong, beautiful, and tasty. You can't throw several batches of random seeds into the garden (unless you're planting a messy garden!) and hope for the best. No, you actually have to work.
The benefits of companion planting, in summary, include:
Plants save space when neatly arranged
Reduces pest problems
Attracts pollinators and beneficial insects
Improves soil over time
Nature provides a trellis, for example when pole beans climb corn - the three sisters technique.
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5. Wrestling with nature rather than cooperating with it
Most of us are ready to put up a good fight, especially when it's time to harvest a bumper crop of tomatoes. But it doesn't have to be that way. As we begin to understand the language of plants, we can become more attuned to their needs. In turn, this collaboration applies to us as well. It's quite simple, actually. Let's use tomatoes as an example.
Tomatoes love full sun. There is no good reason to plant them in full shade and expect bountiful harvests. Knowing the needs of a particular plant is a simple matter. In the tomato "family," there are more than 10,000 varieties to choose from. If you plant tomatoes that are known to thrive in your growing area, your chances of success are much better. If you live with a short growing season, but choose a 100-day-mature tomato variety, unless you use a greenhouse, you've greatly reduced your chances of a ripe harvest.
Here's a final example that nearly every tomato grower will encounter at least once in their lifetime: tomato hornworms. Their unexpected appearance can be a bit unsettling, but there's no need to trip over them. Sometimes nature comes to your rescue in the form of braconid wasps. Perhaps some ladybugs, lacewings, or even birds may be involved in temporary hornworm population control.
But we must consider that they are considered pests only in the caterpillar stage. As they grow and spread their wings they become the five-spotted hawkmoth. The process takes only three to four weeks. In the grand scheme of things, can't we figure out letting a beautiful beneficial creature eat a few tomato leaves from our garden before moving on?
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