The art ofbuild a garden requires respecting a few ground rules. However, there is no need to have extensive experience in the field of landscaping to create a beautiful ornamental garden conducive to rest, or even a vegetable garden and an orchard where vegetables and fruits grow in abundance. When you start gardening, you just need avoid making mistakes, some of which may be difficult or impossible to catch up with, others resulting in excessive expense or wasted effort. Of course, you learn from your mistakes, but if you can avoid them, that’s even better. Here are the 10 most common mistakes made by novice gardeners and their consequences.
1 – Tighten your plants too much
In order to have more flowers or more vegetables, the beginner gardener tends to plant as tightly as possible in their beds, their planters as well as in the vegetable patch. But it is counter productive. All plants need space to breathe, grow, stay healthy. The more they are stuck together, the greater the risk of disease. They vegetate and some of them end up choking to death.
It is very important to respect planting distances for each variety that you want to sow or plant, and the advice also applies to shrubs and trees. These distances are generally listed on the labels but they can also be communicated to the gardener by an adviser when choosing plants in the garden centre.
2 – Sow or plant anytime
We don’t sow and plant when we feel like it, but only when it’s the right time, weather permitting. We don’t take it not too soon in the spring and not too late in autumn because it is necessary at all costs to avoid that the seedlings and/or plantations undergo a strong blow of frost. The Ice Saints (May 11, 12 and 13) are dreaded by gardeners because it is still possible to see the mercury drop below 0°C during these three days. Beyond that, the risks of frost are generally ruled out.
Outside regions with a particularly mild climate, it may be desirable to use a frame or one tunnel in order to protect your plants because even if the sun is very present in April, we can still expect a good late cold snap as devastating for the seedlings as for the seedlings in pots and even for the plants which are budding.
3 – Take your potted plants out too early
The beginning gardener often commits this big mistake with its frost-resistant plants grown in pots or trays to be sheltered in winter so that they escape the negative temperatures that they could not bear. However, do not let yourself be trapped by the very first days of sunshine, the risk of frost not yet being ruled out.
At most you can put out a few potted plants for two or three hours when the weather is very nice, but not before March/April, and provided that they are well sheltered from drafts. don’t forget to bring them in before the end of the afternoon because the temperatures are starting to drop.
4 – Always plant the same vegetables in the same place
Growing the same family of vegetables on the same bed, year after year, promotes cryptogamic diseases and the establishment of pests. And if they are the most greedy plants, this also has the consequence ofimpoverish the soilwhich will affect productivity in subsequent years.
To overcome these drawbacks, the gardener has every interest in opting for rotation des culturesa process as old as the world which consists in changing every year, on the same plot, the type of vegetable plants and for some of them, it is preferable not to cultivate them before 5 or 6 years where they had already been installed.
However, there is no need to worry if you have a very small vegetable garden, that is to say less than 150 m². In this case, crop rotation is not really essential when you plant many different species. Nothing to do with these huge plots where we cultivate the same species as far as the eye can see…
In a small garden, at most one must every year change cabbage and carrots because they are very greedy in nutrients. But nothing prevents you from dividing your vegetable garden into four or five zones in order to learn how to gradually apply crop rotation, the fundamental principle of permaculture.
5 – Cut the leaves of bulbous plants when they are green
This is the surest way to ensure that bulbous plants do not bloom again the following year. This mistake is recurrent among beginner gardeners who can be blamed for overfishing. To keep the garden spotless, they don’t let anything stick out. This is how they cut back the foliage of all spring-flowering bulbous plants such as irises, tulips, crocuses, hyacinths and narcissus, among others, far too early, then are surprised the following year not to see bloom again.
Or, leaves of these plants should be kept until they are completely dry because they are the ones that ensure the replenishment of reserves in the bulbs so that the following spring, each plant can produce new flowers.
To be able to leave the leaves all the time to dry without complaining about this unattractive spectacle, it is enough to associate the spring-flowering bulbs with other plants, some with decorative foliage, others with later flowering which will take over from the bulbous plants and hide them in a very pretty way.
6 – Skip the watering of the plants you have just planted
It is not enough to deposit a seed or a seedling in the ground for it to grow. However, the beginner gardener, because of his inexperience and his lack of knowledge in the field of plants, thinks that this is enough to have a beautiful pleasure garden or a productive vegetable garden. Not watering its new plantations amounts to condemning them to death.
Pour allow rooting then Development of a plant, it is absolutely mandatory to water as soon as the planting hole has been filled. It is therefore in stride that it is necessary to give enough water to the plant, whether the weather is dry or it rains. It’s necessary keep watering regularly for several weeks, especially if it does not rain, since the young roots are still unable to fetch water from deep down.
7 – Cultivate plants not adapted to the geographical area
If there is one mistake that novice gardeners frequently make, it is that of fall for plants unsuited to the climate of their region. Admittedly, it is easy to be tempted by a sumptuous orange tree, an oleander in bud, a majestic bird-of-paradise and even by eggplant plants and other sunny vegetables since all the garden centers sell them, whatever regardless of the climatic zone in which they are located.
Whether ornamental plants, vegetables or fruits, these chilly plants must be protected a minima by a winter sail or, better, stored in a sheltered room even a tight (cold or hot depending on the species) before the first autumn frosts and until all risk of frost has passed, that is to say until April or May. The gardener who has no possibility ofwinterize your plants has no interest in buying cash at all. And you also have to be careful if you want to grow green beans, tomatoes, peppers and eggplants in a harsh climate.
8 – Never empty the saucers of potted plants
Whether out of laziness or ignorance, the result is the same: leaving water in flowerpots and saucers is one of the worst mistakes that novice gardeners commit. In addition to encouraging mosquito infestations, this leads to theroot asphyxiation in very little time. Gardening experts say that a plant dies more quickly from too much water than from a lack of it.
To preserve the life of his potted plants, the gardener must compel himself to empty saucers and flowerpots within half an hour of a watering session or a good rainfall.
9 – Make compositions of plants that do not have the same requirements
By associating plants without taking their needs into account, whether in a pot, in beds or in the vegetable garden, it is theguaranteed failure. We all tend to make this mistake when we start gardening, but we usually do not take long to make all the necessary corrections.
Plant requirements should of course be identified at the time of purchase whether in terms of brightnessd’sunshineof heatd’wateringbut also of soil quality. Thus we do not associate plants for dry land with water-intensive plants, nor even shade plants with exotic species that only tolerate full sun. It is also necessary to separate the plants of heather soil from those which thrive only in alkaline soil, hence the interest of analyzing the soil of your garden before planning your plantations to know its nature.
10 – Distributing too much fertilizer to your plants
When you start gardening, you tend to want to do too well. Many inexperienced gardeners are heavy-handed when it comes to distributing fertilizer, resulting in the plant dieback due to a too much fertilizer concentration in the culture medium.
It is therefore necessary to avoid over-fertilization because it prevents the plants from absorbing the water which is essential to them and makes them very vulnerable to pests and diseases. In fact, as surprising as it may seem for a beginner in gardening, excess fertilization leads to deficiencies…