Gardening Overview

So you have decided this year you are going to finally take a stab at gardening. I salute your decision! As a professional landscaper and gardener myself, I am always excited when someone feels the need to let the Earth and Nature do what they do best. Gardening offers amazing satisfaction. It is healthy to weed, to work with the soil and develop it, to harvest and re-cultivate. These are all abundantly physical activities and none are backbreaking. You can expect any number of the wildest successes – many of which you did not include in your original hopes and expectations. The rewards from gardening are as diverse and even surprising as they are predictable and fact-based. You are entering Mystery, the nursing of a new family of friends and foes, of relationships and of complexity. Gardening has generated more poetry than anything short of love and death. You are about to see why.

I will speak of all these things as we go along. I will approach this entire series of articles and notes with the thought that whoever reads this is absolutely new to the Art of Gardening. The simple fact is, we all are – we are literally reborn in our garden - every single year. That is the beauty of the whole thing. Not only that, but every year we learn something absolutely new about the most basic elements, much less about more subtle and more advanced things. This is the profound secret of enjoying gardening. It is like raising a family, only you get lots of chances! You will love it and you will get mad at it. You’ll throw a hoe when some snail eats your best lettuces believe me. But you will also bite into one of those Yellow Grape Tomatoes and shine a smile that will curl the silver in your mirror. There has not been anything discovered yet to beat the glories of eating your own delicious food.

My best advice is to have fun and take it easy. Gardening is also not rocket science. It does not require a PhD or Mensal brainpower. Hardly. In fact of all the traits most applicable to being the best gardening traits, patience and resolve are the clear winners. Anyway, in that light, it never hurts to arrange and rearrange priorities from the top, including the planning aspect. A good garden can be chaotic and messy and still succeed magnificently. But a well-planned garden can be more productive and ten times easier to tend. You will save in labor and you will save in every energy involved as you will see. So I will begin with The Plan.