Better Gardening Through Experimentation

I wrote the following eight years ago and found it again yesterday. It still holds up!

Have you ever read through a gardening book and decided to do what it said… only to have everything fall apart?

Your raised beds are too dry, your carefully transplanted tomatoes are devoured by insects and your cucumbers are freakish little yellow things with bumpy green nipples.

That’s the way it goes in the real world, isn’t it? I’m almost convinced that the pictures in gardening books are completely created pixel by pixel by crack teams of graphic designers, just to mess with us.

If you press on despite your failures, however, and keep gardening from year to year, learning as you go – things will change. I’ve shared my thoughts here before on the value of experimentation… but today I’m doing it again!

I started gardening when I was six and killed most of what I planted. By the time I was a teenager, I knew pretty well what I could grow and what I couldn’t. By the time I was in my thirties, I was an expert and felt the time had come to start writing gardening books and sharing what I had learned.

Hardly a year has passed in my life where I didn’t have at least one garden. Even in college I was teased by my friends for bringing home-grown icicle radishes to class.

Yet though I’m a “good” gardener now, I still have failures in every year’s garden. Not only do I expect them – I actively encourage those failures!

No, I’m not pouring rock salt into my beds or trying to grow alpine species in a tropical climate (yet), but I do plant new things all the time just to see what happens. I also plant reliable crops in new ways to see if it will help or hinder their growth.

One year I buried slaughter wastes and raw manure into pits and planted squashes on top of them. (Success: the vines grew like crazy and needed no additional fertilizing.) Another year I tried grafting fig scions onto my mulberry tree. (Fail: though the species are related, they wouldn’t take.) At another point, I decided to mix raw manure, compost and weeds together in a barrel of water to rot for a few months, and then use that anaerobic “tea” to water my greenhouse plants. (Success: nothing was burned and their growth was rich and green.)

These experiments lead to other experiments and sometimes some amazing successes. I’ve managed to grow Key limes, coffee and black pepper vines outdoors in North Florida on the south-facing wall of my house. I’ve also successfully grafted peaches, Japanese plums and nectarines onto wild Florida Chickasaw plums and gotten great fruit.

On the other hand, I killed a few almond and sweet cherry trees I was trying to grow in the Ocala area. I burned my kale badly by side-dressing with hot chicken manure. And my attempt to grow dent corn in the front lawn without fertilizer? Nope!

The best way to become a better gardener is to… garden! Garden with exuberance, not fear. Know that God designed nature as a complex machine and we can only steer it a little bit. The sun, the rain (or lack thereof), the insects, the weeds – many of these are outside our control.

Yet if we learn a little more each year, we’ll get better and our “luck” will improve. Some plants just aren’t suited to Florida and take a lot of work (hello, beefsteaks!). Others grow like weeds, such as the amazing “yard-long bean” from Southeast Asia.

If you try planting pumpkins one year and they don’t work out, don’t give up. There’s always a new variety or species you can try. You might have planted them too early or too late. The soil may have been too sandy or filled with nematodes. That year may have been a bad one for bugs.

What I do is plant a bunch of different things and then see what does well. If a plant fails the first year, I don’t necessarily give up on it. I might try again. If it fails the next year as well, I’m putting it aside for a while. If a plant does great the first year, I’ll definitely plant it again. And I also look for relatives that might do well. If you’re having good luck with kohlrabi, why not try some cabbages too? If you get great cherry tomatoes, plant some peppers the same way!

Experiment. Watch. Learn. Try again.

You CAN have a green thumb. It might take killing a lot of plants first, but you’ll get there. Eventually you’ll be harvesting plenty for the table… and people will be asking you what to grow.

Don’t give up. If you need encouragement, stop by my website or look up “David The Good” to see my entertaining gardening videos on YouTube. I share my successes and my failures almost every day. If I can go from killing almost everything to being a garden author, you can certainly beat the odds and feed your family good produce from a backyard plot.

Spring is on the way – get that garden growing.