Whether you are new to gardening or experienced, you will make some mistakes. Get over it and learn from it. That’s the most important thing. Your garden is not going to be perfect and there is nothing wrong with that. Here are 6 gardening mistakes that I’ve made and I’ll continue to make more:
- Food scraps in the compost bin. Putting way too many food scraps into my kitchen compost bin was one of the first and smelliest mistakes that I made. Fortunate for me it didn’t lead to other immediate failures. I can say that the smell in my apartment was horrible for a few days though.
- Upside down herb gardening. At first this seemed like an ingenious idea. Then it failed multiple times. It took about four rounds of them dying for me to realize I should grow the herbs out of the top, not the bottom…duh.
- Cherry tomato doesn’t mean small plant. The fact that I could get cherry tomatoes from my fire escape was great. The fact that it grew larger than me wasn’t, especially for such a small space.
- Plant fewer or single plants in each container. I learned this on several accounts. First off, I packed way too many celery plants into a small container. Also I had combined herbs into containers, which stunted the growth of some of them. It was just a case of me being greedy and trying to plant as much as I could.
- Worm composting fail. In my bouts with worm composting, I had failed many times. Not once. Not twice. But three times. What can I say? I’m a worm serial killer. It was a major fail.
- Plants and weather. Once the winter came in NYC, I quickly learned that basil did not like the cold weather…at all. Recently I learned that spinach does not do well in the heat and will bolt pretty quickly.
These are some of my garden failures and I’m sure that there will be plenty more. The thing that matters most is that I’ve learned from these mistakes and continue on. What are some gardening mistakes that you’ve learned from?
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