Gardening for Beginners: 3 Simple Tips

If you’ve decided that you want to try your hand at gardening then you’ve picked a fantastic hobby. Gardening will help you grow physically and mentally and it’s ripe with benefits. Puns aside, there really is a ton of good reasons to start gardening.

It’s good to get out into the fresh air and take in some nature and it can be surprisingly good exercise. It’s also one of the more rewarding activities that you can do at home because you can see the results of your hard work actually growing.

And you can use this as an opportunity to take control of your diet and your health by growing your own food. So it’s just an all-around great hobby, that pretty much anyone can pick up at any age.

But that doesn’t mean that it’s going to easy, especially not for beginners. There’s a lot of obvious tips out there that you should pick up pretty easily, so instead of going over the basics, here are some lesser-known, but important things that you should know before you get started.

Evaluate Your Soil

Not all soil is created equally. As explained by gardening experts from Sweet New Earth, there are different types depending on the area, and sometimes, you might not have the most optimal soil in your garden. For the most part, there are three distinct types and your soil is probably among them.

We’ve got:

• Sand: Generally quite weak in terms of holding moisture or nutrients and doesn’t hold up well against erosion or wind damage. Would require frequent fertilization.

• Clay: Soil that’s on the heavier side and as a result it can be quite slow to drain. It also takes time to warm up in the spring, which makes it pretty inefficient for fast-growing.

• Loam: A mixture of the previous two with some organic matter present too. This is the type of soil that you want. It drains fast and holds water and nutrients well.

You can usually evaluate the soil by hand to determine which type you’ve got. Sand will crumble and fall apart if you squeeze a handful of it, clay will form a sticky, hard mass and loam will maintain its shape. 

As you can tell, loam is what you want and if your garden is not that way inclined, you don’t need to worry. It’s a fixable problem, and you’re just going to need to do a bit of extra work and treat the soil yourself.  

This is where soil amendments will come in. There’s a variety of different products you can get which are like health supplements for your soil, and will help ensure that you’ve got the right environment for growing all the plants that you want.

Without the right soil, your gardening endeavor won’t even get off the ground, so make sure that you focus on this before you get started.

Keep a Journal

All this needs to be is a simple notebook that you keep on hand while you’re gardening and scribble down some stuff during or after you work. It doesn’t have to be a complete, in-depth recap of what you did in your garden that day, just some notes to help you keep track.

As we all know when we’re working on something that takes a lot of time and effort, we often lose track of what we’ve done already and it can slow us down or cause mistakes. Having a journal eliminates this problem.

Write down what kinds of stuff you’ve planted, what you need to do to take care of them and if you have a little bit more time, you could even draw a rough diagram of your garden so you can mark off where everything is. 

A journal is also good for writing down your overall goals and what you hope to achieve, as well as keeping a note of plants that you’ve heard about which you might be interested in incorporating into your garden the following year. 

It would be useful to have a diary too so that you can look ahead on the calendar and keep track of what days you will need to target specific plants. Without a journal, you’re going to have to store everything in your head and unless you’ve got an incredible memory, that’s just going to get frustrating.

Learn About the Hardiness Zones

If you’re just starting out, then you’ve probably never heard of this before. It’s something that even seasoned gardeners, especially those outside of the United States, might not be too familiar with, but it’s definitely something that’s worth knowing and it will help your garden a lot.

It was the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) who determined that the country could be divided into 11 different climate zones, which are the hardiness zones, and different kinds of plants will thrive in each of the different zones.

There’s a handy map on their website which covers these and you could keep this on hand to ensure that you are taking full advantage of the zone that you live in. For example, zones 6 and 7 are the ideal place to have vegetable gardens because the temperature is optimal for it in 3 out of the 4 seasons.

If you’re in zone 2 or 3, you should focus on plants that can withstand harsh winter temperatures and then it’s the opposite in zones 10 and 11. That’s where humidity can be a big problem and you should be wary not to plant things like lettuce or radishes which can’t deal with the heat.

If you know about these zones and you educate yourself on the specific zone that you’re in, then you can ensure that your garden thrives year-round.

Of course, there is a lot more than you are going to learn along the way, but these are the sort of ideas that you should get a handle on early so that you can ensure a smooth transition into your gardening pursuits. Good luck!