10 Gardening Tips For Absolute Beginners

 

So you’ve decided to start gardening: hooray! We are so excited to travel along this botanical journey with you! Gardening has so many incredible benefits including an improvement in physical and mental wellbeing, an improvement in health and nutrition (if you opt to grow your own tasty produce at home!), and a feeling of community!

Today we wanted to give 10 tips on how you can start your gardening journey on the right foot in case you are a true beginner and you really don’t know where to begin, everybody has to start somewhere so why not start here?

1. Plan Ahead

When it comes to gardening, it’s always a good idea to have a rough guideline of what you are looking to achieve. Throwing a handful of seeds at some untilled soil is one way of going about things, but we would highly recommend doing some research into the climate where you live, the plants that can thrive there, and the tools and materials that you will need to succeed. If you try to start cultivating tropical plants in the Arctic Tundra chances are you won’t see a lot of success, and nobody wants to feel like a failure!

2. Understand The Space You Are Working With

If you are short on space or are opting to garden with a raised garden bed or planter box it is a fantastic idea to measure your area ahead of time (with an actual measuring tape, not just eyeballing it!)! This way you won’t accidentally buy 45 boxwood shrubs when you really only have room for three!

3. Ensure You Have Water Readily Available

Whether you have access to a mainline water supply, a local natural water source, or simply the kitchen tap, water is the key to your gardening success so be sure to garden in an area with readily available water.

 

4. Purchase Reputable Seeds

This may sound like unusual advice but trust us: not everybody in the world of gardening has your best interests at heart, and sadly this is applicable to those in the world of seed sales! Make sure you purchase your seeds and plants from a reputable source (such as a garden center or directly from a manufacturer) instead of from a mysterious online source or a random person, you want to be able to guarantee the quality (and type!) of the plant that you are growing!

5. Improve Your Soil

Adding organic matter such as compost and mulch is the easiest way to improve the quality and composition of your soil! By adding organic matter to your soil you can expect your clay soil to be softer and easier to drain, and you can expect your sandy soil to retain more nutrients and moisture by holding together better! It’s truly the perfect solution to improve your garden while simultaneously helping to reduce organic material ending up in a landfill unnecessarily!

6. Decide If You Want To Be A Seed Or Plant Gardener

When it comes to seeds, many gardeners don’t have the patience for the lengthy “seed phase” and there is no shame in this! If you are a beginner gardener, it can be daunting to attempt to grow seeds all the way from the packet to the soil, so instead of feeling overwhelmed and giving up: plant juvenile plants! You can purchase plants at the garden center that are already ready to be transplanted directly into the yard, why don’t you give this a try while you are getting started and then in the years to come if you decide that gardening is the right hobby for you, become a seed gardener!

7. Remember Where You Are Growing!

We touched on this a little bit earlier on, but it truly deserves its own category! Understanding your climate and the gardening limitations that come along with it is incredibly important! If you live in a region that does not support certain types of plants (such as succulents or palms) then you are setting yourself up for disappointment when your hard work inevitably fails! You are better off doing some research on the plants that thrive in your region (and the soil/upkeep required to help them reach their full potential) before you even break ground!

8. Consider Raised Bed Gardening

If you love the idea of gardening but you hate the idea of an aching back or an overwhelming task, then consider checking out Cedar Planters beautiful Western Red Cedar raised garden beds and planter boxes! With raised bed gardening you can garden comfortably in a finite area that is protected from pests, drowned roots (with their built-in drainage system), and the aches and pains that come from bending over a traditional garden bed!

9. Feed Your Plants Regularly

Mulching and feeding your plants is essential for success! Plants need to pull nutrients from soil in order to succeed, they do not make their own food in the traditional sense, so with this in mind we have to ensure that our soil (and plants) are getting all of the nutrients that they need from mulch, compost, and fertilizers!  Ensuring that your plants are fed is especially essential for vegetable gardening, you want to guarantee that your produce will be as delicious and nutritious as possible!

10. Ask For Help!

There is no shame in asking for help from the gardening community! As a general rule, gardeners are a friendly bunch who love to talk about all things garden and also help out their green-thumbed friends! There are also plenty of community garden programs and local gardening groups dotted across the country, so do some research into whether there is a local group that you can join to get some tips and make some new friends while you are at it!

We hope that you have found some inspiration from our list of gardening tips for beginners! Are there any tips that you think we could add to the list as a gardener yourself? Please let us know!