MYTHS of GARDENING

There are two myths of gardening.  First myth that gardening is easy.  The second myth that you save money growing your own.

Gardening is not easy.  It is not too difficult either but like all skills it takes time to develop enough knowledge to become a truly good gardener.  If it was so easy why would there be thousands of books written on the subject.  There are many specialties relating to gardening.  Different people and groups specialise in different types of plantings.  For example,  some people are vegetable enthusiasts and others camellias or gardenia's.

The most important thing in gardening is getting to know how to have good soil.  With the right soil you can grow anything.  So people starting out should concentrate on the plot or raised bed that they intend to grow plants in and prepare the soil.  It should be fed with manures and dolomite (if an alkaline soil is necessary), blood and bone, dynamic lifter and one or two manures.  Water this bed well and then mulch the soil using either lucerne  or sugar cane mulch.  I use both but not at the same time.  The mulch then should be well watered otherwise it will soak up all the water in the soil.  Leave this a couple of weeks and then grow plants or vegetables which are easy.

Easy plants are lettuce, silverbeet, beetroot and herbs.  Germinating your own seeds requires a fair bit of attention so I would advise buying seedlings, at first, of lettuce.  Buy the pick and come varieties eg. Baby Cos.   Beetroot have very large seeds so you can sow these where you want them to grow.  Beetroot are great and very generous.  Every seed producers two or three plants so when they are at a size where they are easy to handle you can separate them.  Silverbeet seedlings are good too.  You can keep picking the outside leaves and they seem to deliver forever.

You separate the mulch and pop the seedling in and and draw the mulch back close to the seedling.  Then water well.  The same with herbs.  Some herbs are easy to grow from seed others not.  Rocket grows from seed very easily and once established in the garden will be there forever.  The bees also love the Rocket flowers.  It is good to encourage bees into the garden and to this end poisons should be forbidden.  Continental parsley is also good to grow.  Buy a punnet of seedlings and you will have heaps of little plants.  Once this plant is in the garden it also will self seed if allowed to flower and you will have parsley continually.  I wait for the flower heads to dry and I pull away the seeds and scatter them every where.  Basil, coriander and spring onions grow easily from seed.

Enlarge this photo to see the seed pods developing in the mature spring onions

Once you have some success you will become more willing to experiment further.  Don't forget to fertilise your plants with a seaweed extract to keep them in top condition.  This is just touching on a few things you need to know but probably enough to get you going.

Rocket flowers and seed pods forming along the stem

Spring onions grown from seed

Enlarge photo to see the lemon thyme plant which self seeded next to the tank bed

Myth number two that growing your own is cheaper than buying vegetables.  As you can see from above that it is not cheap to make the soil good.  Fertilisers and mulches all cost money as does the buying of receptacles to make raised beds.   A cheap raised bed is an old plastic bath tub.  I found one of these in a street cleanup and it is a terrific bed.  I dont know how much they are in second hand material places.  I have heavy clay soil so I had to buy soil to fill the raised beds - this isn't cheap either but once you have it you can just keep topping it up with manures.

Punnets of seedlings are an added cost.  Lettuces cost about 45cents a seedling.  This is cheaper than buying one in the supermarket and you dont have to pull the whole thing up to have a salad.  Just pick the outside leaves.  Packets of lettuce seed are cheaper and with a packet of 150 - 250 seeds you can plan succession plantings.   That is growing new seedlings before the lettuces in your garden mature and go to seed.

You also need gardening tools and watering cans and hoses.  These only need to be bought once but the initial layout can be costly.

GROWING YOUR OWN though is not about saving money but about having the freshest vegetables when you need them.  Nothing nicer than going out to the garden and picking lemons, herbs, lettuce, and parsley for dinner or lunch.