YouTube gardening channels make gardening look easy. There is no shortage of perfect, organized gardens full of vibrant colors showcased in stunning 4K resolution on this platform. Here is the reality: gardening is hard. YouTuber’s gardens look great, because we control what we show. We can choose to point the camera at the most beautiful things while hiding the mistakes and failures. The truth is, I failed my garden in 2025. And, I failed my garden in 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020…
Today, I bear all the warts. This is everything I’ve failed at so far in 2025, whether it was my fault or out of my control. Why am I sharing this? Because I don’t want you to think you have to be perfect to garden. I don’t want you to fear failure. In fact, failure isn’t even bad. It’s the best way to learn, and there is nothing better than failing at something, picking ourselves back up, figuring out what went wrong, trying again and getting it right the second time. That is the sweetest reward of all. Even the best gardeners have things go wrong every year, myself included, and I am far from the best gardener. Come join me on my 2025 garden tour of failures! Remember, you only fail if you quit.
Protecting Fruit Trees From Cold: https://youtu.be/KRLBg7fjpeg?si=2ooWENXXcrPz7aHP
Fruit Tree Spraying Routine: https://youtu.be/haUOMt6hqzg?si=Ew6qFyphNUxi2IQI
I recommend the following products* for growing fruit trees and growing a vegetable garden:
Grow Bags (Many Sizes): https://amzn.to/4a0MHa5
Grafting Tool: https://amzn.to/42GZwFL
Parafilm Grafting Tape, 1/2-inch (featured): https://amzn.to/44SoHX7
Parafilm Grafting Tape, 1-inch: https://amzn.to/3SfD8gr
Watering Wand: https://amzn.to/3OkgnG5
Bypass Pruning Shears: https://amzn.to/49dGO9e
Japanese Pull Saw: https://amzn.to/494w5Om
Shade Cloth: https://amzn.to/49bqveh
Insect Netting: https://amzn.to/42tAzgZ
Weed Barrier: https://amzn.to/437HRHj
Espoma PlantTone Fertilizer [5-3-3] (36lb): https://amzn.to/4lgP9PW
Espoma PlantTone Fertilizer [5-3-3] (50lb): https://amzn.to/4lgPbr2
True Organic All Purpose Fertilizer [5-4-5] (4lb): https://amzn.to/4cN2Faq
Alaska Fish Fertilizer [5-1-1] (Gallon): https://amzn.to/4dMdOqV
Alaska Fish Fertilizer [5-1-1] (2PK, Gal): https://amzn.to/4lzxLGf
GrowCo Fish Fertilizer [2-3-1] (Gal): https://amzn.to/3RvRwRq
Espoma Bone Meal (10lb): https://amzn.to/4ieYapY
True Organic Blood Meal (3lbs): https://amzn.to/3DvlzVJ
Jack’s All Purpose [20-20-20] (1.5lb): https://amzn.to/4iRWtRc
Jack’s All Purpose [20-20-20] (25lb): https://amzn.to/3ZSJeGW
Full Amazon Store: https://www.amazon.com/shop/themillennialgardener
TABLE OF CONTENTS
0:00 How The Internet Lies To Us
2:19 Is Lazy Gardening Real?
4:40 High Maintenance Fruit Trees And Vegetables
6:33 Fruit Tree Failure #1
8:31 Fruit Tree Failure #2
9:43 Fruit Tree Failure #3
11:01 Where To Buy Fruit Trees
12:02 Replacing A Dead Fruit Tree
16:18 My Biggest Gardening Failure
18:36 Fixing A Failed Tree By Grafting
23:50 Vegetable Garden Mistakes
24:35 Is Gardening Worth It? My Real Life Advice
30:06 Adventures With Dale
If you have any questions about recovering from gardening mistakes, how to grow a vegetable garden, growing fruit trees or want to know about the things I grow in my raised bed vegetable garden and edible landscaping food forest, are looking for more gardening tips and tricks and garden hacks, have questions about vegetable gardening and organic gardening in general, or want to share some DIY and “how to” garden tips and gardening hacks of your own, please ask in the Comments below!
*******
VISIT MY AMAZON STOREFRONT FOR PRODUCTS I USE MOST OFTEN IN MY GARDEN*
https://www.amazon.com/shop/themillennialgardener
*******
VISIT MY MERCHANDISE STORE
https://shop.spreadshirt.com/themillennialgardener
*******
SUPPORT MY SECOND CHANNEL!
https://www.youtube.com/c/2MinuteGardenTips
*******
SOCIAL MEDIA
Follow Me on X (@NCGardening) https://x.com/NCGardening
Follow Me on INSTAGRAM https://www.instagram.com/millennialgardener/
*******
ABOUT MY GARDEN
Location: Southeastern NC, Brunswick County (Wilmington area)
34.1°N Latitude
Zone 8B
*******
*As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.
© The Millennial Gardener
#gardening #garden #gardeningtips #vegetablegardening #vegetablegarden
What’s going on, gardeners? On today’s video, I want to level with you all. I recently made a video about some of the fallacies and pitfalls of organic gardening, and it led to a detailed discussion down in the comments. And a lot of those comments that I read deeply resonated with me because I saw a lot of emotion in the comments, and I see that a lot of people out there are struggling with their garden. So, on today’s video, I want to share this harsh reality. Gardening is hard. None of this is easy and even the best fail sometimes, myself included. So, on this video, I want to show you this harsh reality and share some of my biggest garden failures this year alone, how I intend to fix it, and why failure is actually the best part of gardening. If you’re new to the channel, please subscribe, hit the bell for notifications, and check out my Amazon store and Spreadshop links in the video description for everything I use in my garden and awesome custom apparel and gear. The internet in many ways has presented a false sense of what it truly takes to grow food. Big gardening channels here on YouTube proudly feature their beautiful gardens and lush fruit trees like there is nothing at all to this. Like all it takes is throwing down some compost and mulch. Beneficial insects come in and take care of all of our problems for us like magic. And all we really have to do is just b our time and wait for the big harvest to roll in. This image leads to so much disappointment and frustration. Expert gardeners make this look so easy. So, new gardeners become motivated to give this a try and they find out this isn’t easy at all. In fact, it is downright hard. In many cases, things don’t go according to plan. Failure ensues, dreams are shattered, and people give up. And that is the worst thing that can happen. The truth is, expert gardeners have lush, beautiful trees and gardens because they went through years of growing pains and learned lessons the hard way. They have suffered big crop losses. They have lost entire fruit trees. They have paid the price for bad decisions that they have made. But failure is a better teacher than success is. And they reach deep down into their souls. They access that tenacity that lives inside all of us. They pick themselves up off the ground. dusted themselves off and they tried again armed with the knowledge they learned from their past failures. Now, I’m not saying that you can’t be a lazy gardener. You can build yourself a very lowmaintenance garden and food forest. Here where I live in zone 8b in the Wilmington area of the southeastern coast of North Carolina, I could design myself an entire food forest of native species and crops that are well adapted to my climate. I could build a food forest of Asian pimmens, American pcimmens, pawpaws, fig trees, mulberries, blueberries, and blackberries. And basically, once I got those plants established, it would be very little work. Outside of placing compost and mulch and the annual pruning these plants require, well, once the plants got well rooted, they would become mostly self- sustaining. diseases wouldn’t be much of a concern where I live. And outside of things like squirrels, deer, possums, and raccoons, I wouldn’t have many animals to defend against. You can do this, too. You will just have to carefully research crops and trees that are native or well adapted to your area and thrive on neglect. If you do your homework, you can build yourself a lazy, lowmaintenance yard that feeds you and your family forever. But most of us aren’t growing purely native and naturalized or well-adapted species. For example, I’m growing citrus, avocados, apples, peaches, pluats, almonds, pomegranates, and pears. These plants technically don’t belong anywhere near the coastal Carolinas because they aren’t adapted to my climate. Bad weather, native bacteria, fungi, and insects will decimate them if I leave them unprotected. For example, I am growing two varieties of avocados and nine varieties of citrus in ground here in North Carolina. Imagine the minds that are blown when I tell people I’m growing citrus and avocados in ground in the Carolinas. But yet here they are thriving where they have been for 6, seven years now. The downside is my avocados and citrus need cold protection or eventually a bad winter like we had last winter will come along and kill them. But luckily, I have devised incredible ways to protect them. I’ll link to that video both above and down in the video description to show you how I do it. Protecting them from cold has been surprisingly easy. And thankfully, outside of winter, these trees are mostly problem free for me. You may be surprised to learn that it is actually more difficult for me to grow apples, pears, and stone fruits than avocados, and citrus here in North Carolina where I live. Apples, pears, peaches, and other stone fruits require weekly treatments of fungicide. Failure to do so will likely result in very ugly or inedible fruits, or they could be outright killed by diseases like fire blight. If you want to grow these fruits, you will almost certainly have to adopt a preventative spraying routine because they are not well adapted to almost anywhere in North America, especially in a place with humid summers. I mean, just the other week I shared with you Organic Gardening’s dirty little secret that they are almost all spraying their apple and stone fruit and pear trees and other diseaseprone trees with chemicals like copper and sulfur just to keep them alive, let alone productive and healthy. I’ll link to that video both above and down in the video description because it will shine a light on just how much work goes on in the background when the cameras are off. And if you are a longtime follower of mine, you have seen how hard I have worked over the years to learn how to grow tomatoes here in the coastal Carolas. Where I grew up in New Jersey, tomatoes were easy to grow. But it has taken me 7 years of figuring out how to mitigate the climate down here on the southeastern coast of North Carolina to get them to grow well. Over this time, I have learned how to be very successful at growing food where I live. But it’s because I put in the work and I’ve gone through the trials and tribulations. I’ve learned from my mistakes and I’ve grown as a person as a result. But these mistakes continue. Even after all of the things I’ve learned over the years, things still go wrong every single year. Today is only April 12th, and here are some of the things that have gone wrong for me already this year alone. Here lies my Arbasana olive tree, which I’ve had growing in ground for 2 years. This is supposed to be one of the most cold hearty olives in existence, but unfortunately it got killed this year. I had to cut it all the way back until the rootstock until I found some green left in the trunk. So unfortunately this thing has died back completely and I have to start all over again with a new tree. This variety of olive is advertised as being one of the most cold hearty olives in existence. Hardy all the way down to 5 to 10°. And this year we only got down to 17°. So well above its hardiness. Yet it still completely died. And here’s the kicker. The year before we got just as cold, if not a little bit colder, I think. And it did no damage to the tree at all on its very first year. So how did those temperatures in the teens do no damage its first year? But it died on me its second year when it should theoretically be stronger and more established. Well, I think the issue was we got some freezing rain along with those cold temperatures. And I’m guessing that for whatever reason, it did not like being iced over by the freezing rain. I did not know this. I thought we’re going to be about 10° above its maximum hardiness. There should be no reason to protect it, and it did just fine in the cold the previous year. But had I known, I would have thrown some kind of sheet or cover over it to keep the freezing rain off. Unfortunately, I had to learn this lesson the hard way because I had no other way of knowing. I’ve never grown olives before. So now I learned that lesson. If I’m ever going to get extreme cold with freezing rain, I’m going to have to cover my olive trees because even if they are super cold hearty, when they’re young like this, only a few years old, apparently they are still vulnerable. Even if it’s going to be 10° warmer than their advertised minimum hardiness. So now I’m going to have to buy a new tree and replace it. Lesson learned. learn the hard way. My fault, my bad. But this is how we learn, folks. This winter also did a number on several of my container figs. They took a lot of damage in those handful of nights in the teens when we had the freezing rain. Now, most of my figs did absolutely fine, but a few of them, for whatever reason, they took a lot of damage and have what appears to be total dieback. For example, this pirate jaw raada, well, this hasn’t done anything yet, and there’s a lot of dieback on the branches. However, I did the scratch test here on the bark, and I still see lots of green. So, this tree is fine in the main trunk. It was liignified enough to take it. I’m going to have to cut off these old branches, and this should butt out fairly quickly. In fact, I see a little bud that’s beginning to swell right here. My Poleier fig tree and my capper fig look like they took a whole lot more damage. In fact, it looks like the whole trees are going to be lost, and I’m going to have to get them to grow back from the roots. from the roots. I’m getting a green chute here and I’m getting two green shoots on the Pilia fig tree right here. But as for the actual trees themselves, I mean, I think they got pretty much smoked in the freezing rain. And unfortunately, this is just a harsh reality. Sometimes growing figs, sometimes in bad winters, they die back on you. But luckily, they almost always come back from the roots. So, keep an eye on that. Now, if you look in the back corner of my yard, you will see my wall of citrus trees. You’ll see way in the back in that raised bed is another avocado tree. Then you have a pomegranate tree. You have a plum cherry tree. You have a 4 in1 grafted plat tree. You have a pimmen tree. This is a coffee cake pimmen. And then next to it you will see a stake where nothing is growing. And what used to be there was a jujuby tree. Now, unfortunately, the death of this juju tree was completely out of my control. This was planted as a bare root tree in late winter. The roots were beginning to grab hold and it was starting to leaf out and everything was looking good. Then we had an absolutely nightmarish midsummer. We got so much rain that it completely drowned this tree because the first year your tree is trying to establish. So, if those roots just didn’t grab hold enough, it may not be able to survive and uh be able to breathe through really mucky soil, and that was the problem. Some of my other trees that I just showed you struggled as well, but luckily they were large enough at that point that they were able to fight it off and make a comeback. But this Juju Bee tree could not, and it died, and I had to rip it out. Luckily, I talked to my friends over at Rainree Nursery. They were able to provide me with a brand new Juju Bee tree. They provided me with a beautiful large honey jar jujubi tree and I’m really excited to get it. People ask me all the time where is a really good reputable online nursery to order fruit trees from. I highly recommend Rain Tree Nursery. My Betty Peach that I showed you earlier in this video actually came from them. And this Betty Peach right here, this is only after one year, actually less than one year in ground. And look at how big and beautiful it is. So, if you’re looking for a great place to get fruit trees, I highly recommend them. They have one of the biggest selections in the entire internet. And they’re actually located in the Pacific Northwest. So, if you live in the Pacific Northwest, well, obviously that’s a place you’d really want to give a look at. But even me down in the Southeast, I couldn’t have more of a different climate. Yet, they have a ton of awesome stuff that I can choose from that works in my climate as well. So, great place to look. So, now I’m finally going to replace that dead juuji tree. Now, you may have noticed that when I first opened that package, I took out this bare root fruit tree and I put it in a 5gallon bucket full of water. When you buy a bare root tree, it was a tree that was actively growing the previous season and then they dug it up in either late fall or early winter after it went completely dormant. And then they took it, removed all of the soil, and put it in basically cold storage in a root cellar, like a really chilly basement that’s above freezing. and that keeps it dormant for the winter until they can ship it in late winter, early spring. So, as a result, the tree may be fairly dry. So, you always want to unwrap your tree and soak it in a bucket of water for at least an hour. A few hours is better to give it a chance to rehydrate. And what you want to do is you want to prepare your planting hole and allow it to sit in that bucket of water and rehydrate the entire time until you finally put it back in ground. So, the way I like to plant my fruit trees is I like to pull back all of the mulch and expose the soil. Then, I like to dig a shallow planting hole because I’m going to plant this fruit tree high on a mound. I learned the hard way that the ground here tends to hold water if we get very heavy rain. So, if I plant this tree deeply, it can sit in saturated soil. So, that’s why I’m going to plant it on a mound. This time I’m going to hill it up so the excess water can run off since I don’t want this tree to fail as well. So after digging that planting hole and investigating the soil, I determined that that soil is too heavy to plant that tree in. So if I just plant it the same way I did before, it’s probably going to get root rot and die again. If you make a mistake once, it is a learning experience. But if you repeat that mistake, well, that is not good at all. So, what I decided I’m going to do is I’m going to take this 7gallon planting container and then I cut the bottom off and I’m going to basically plant it in a raised bed of sorts using the top half of this old container that I’m doing nothing with. And what this will allow me to do is truly plant the tree up on a hill of sorts so all the water drains away and those initial surface roots can establish before it taps down deeper into the soil. So basically, my tree can get established in an area where it drains away very well, and then a year or two later after that tap routt digs down deeper. Well, it will be more likely that it’ll be able to tolerate that wet soil because the roots will be much more established. So, what I will do is lightly sink this container into the ground a little bit and then pull out some of the initial soil to give me about an inch or two of depth. Then I’m going to center the new root ball inside the container and I’m going to orient the roots so they’re not all knotted up. Some of the larger roots are going to have to be pulled underneath the container because the container isn’t large enough to accommodate them, but they will effectively lay across the surface of the ground and then I’ll bury them in some compost to give them protection. So now all the roots have been oriented and the tree is tied to the steak straight. So, what I’m going to do is I’m going to take a little hand t that is full of a blend of granular organic fertilizer and bone meal and I’m going to dust the roots and the root area a little bit with this fertilizer. Now, we don’t want to overfertilize this tree too much because it is still dormant. The goal here is to give them a little bit of food from for when they wake up from dormcy because this organic fertilizer is going to take a few weeks to begin breaking down. Then I’m going to take a bag of Calmanor compost and I’m going to dump it around the sunken container and fill the sunken container with the finished compost. This is going to both bury the root ball that is above grade inside the sunken container and keep it permanently elevated above the ground so all that excess water that I may get from rainfall washes away while also burying any of the surface roots that I had to feed under that container and protect them. So sometimes the best thing you can do is change the plan based on the environmental conditions and trust yourself when making these decisions. In this case, the extra four or 5 in of height that I get from this sunken container may very well be the difference between this tree’s life and this tree’s death. And the ultimate irony is the biggest gardening mistake that I have ever made in my entire life boils down to growing the one fruit tree in my yard and garden that is actually native to where I live. This fruit tree is native not only to my state but my very county. So it should be in theory the easiest thing that I am growing in my yard and garden. But it is my biggest failure ever. And that is my pawpaw tree. Now, I have two different pawpaw trees growing here. I have a variety called Prima and a variety called Naomi’s Delicious. And you need two pawpaw trees because virtually all of them are self-ststerile. You need a minimum two different varieties to get cross-pollination. Now, unfortunately for me, through no fault of my own, I got a dud tree, and it took years for the problem to manifest. Pawpaws are some of the slowest to grow, flower, and fruit trees that you can get. Even if you buy grafted paw paws, they often take anywhere from four to five years to start flowering on you, more than double the time of most of your grafted fruit trees. And like I said, unfortunately, these trees require cross-pollination. So, you need two good trees to get any kind of fruit. I have been waiting over four years for a harvest off of these trees. and they were finally at the point where they were flowering, but I lost this tree at the end of last year. Here’s what I think happened. When my Naomi’s Delicious tree was grafted back at the nursery, I’m guessing there was a tiny minute air gap somewhere in that graft. It wasn’t a perfectly seated or mated graft. And over time, internally, it probably slowly healed over. So the tree grew fine for a matter of 3 or 4 years until eventually that graft got cut off at which point the main trunk started shriveling up. It lost all of its water. It couldn’t get transpiration and it completely died back. So now I have basically no paw paws at all. These are just rootstock suckers that are coming up. And then my prima over there that was flowering, well it has no cross-pollination companion. So basically over four years, close to 5 years, I’ve wasted and I have no pawpaw trees, which is the ultimate irony since they are the only truly native fruit tree that I’m growing. And it’s been my biggest failure. So I initially thought to myself, great, now I’m going to have to go out and buy another pawpaw tree. It’s going to take another four to 5 years to establish and flower. So I’m another four to 5 years away before I get to try my first pawpaw fruit. But then it hit me. I had a really nice established root structure underground that’s been growing for four to five years. There’s a big root ball under there and the root ball was sending up three nice suckers from the ground. So, I thought to myself, why don’t I just go out and get some cutings and graft new cutings onto the old root ball. So, I went out and I got myself two Naomi’s Delicious cutings and a couple from a variety called Maria’s Joy. And I’m going to graft them onto the three suckers and hopefully something will take. In a perfect world, they all take and I can actually turn my tree into a twoin- one tree and I’ll have a Naomi’s Delicious and a Maria’s Joy growing next to the Prima. So now I’ll have three pawpaw trees instead of two. Now, unfortunately for me, I am not a good gfter at all. It has always been a challenge for me. So I like actually using one of these grafting tools to help me get the job done because I don’t make very good cuts. What I need to do first is I need to line up my scion wood and match up to the point where the rootstock is ever so slightly thicker than the scion, which is the cutting. They look pretty close right there. So, I want to head this pawpaw tree right about there. And then I want to make an indentation in that roottock. And I want to make it so it’s kind of like a cup because I want to make the pointy part in the scion itself. So then I’m going to make the indentation in the scion wood so it points down. And that’s exactly what I did there. And hopefully see you have to get the green cambium layer that you see right there to match up. The cambium layers have to touch in order for your graft union to take. So you have to make sure that they really get in there nice and cleanly. Like I said, I am not a good gfter. Although I have had some success with it. I did graft my Asian pears. So I think those cambium layers are touching in the front right there. That looks like I have some solid contact. So now I’m going to take some paraffilm grafting tape and I’m going to start from the bottom because that is where it is the most stable and begin wrapping the paraffilm up until it securely holds the graft in. Making sure that I do not dislodge that graft or it will not it will not take. So, you have to be firm, but you can’t be so hard that you dislodge the graft. And that’s why this to me is so nerve-wracking. You really need a steady hand to be a good gfter, which is something that I unfortunately was not blessed with. Now I’m going to go up here and I’m going to cut that because I don’t want it to be so heavy that wind can dislodge it. I’m going to put just a little bit more paraffilm over that graft just to give it a little bit more structural integrity. Being so careful not to dislodge it. And then the last thing I’m going to do is take some aluminum foil because the actual strength of the sun itself, if it hits that graft, it’ll dry it out. So you need to completely enclose this gently in foil. And because it’s spring, this is the best time to graft. The best time to graft is when sapflow is starting to return. And that is right now. So again, we want to be very, very ginger with this. And a little Marianne. And then I’m going to take Hey, they actually sent me one little plant label because I don’t want to get these mixed up. So, that one is a Naomi’s Delicious. And then I have to do the same thing to this one. And we’ll put the Maria’s Joy on this one because I got larger, fatter cutings of the Maria’s Joy. So, I’ll pair the fatter cutings with the fatter trunk. So, those are my three incredibly amateur-ish graphs. We’ll check back in 3 or 4 months and hopefully something will take. Grafting the pawpaw trees instead of simply replacing it is a big risk because if I did those graphs wrong, well then I lose a whole another season because it’s going to take three or four months before I can even check if the grass have taken. And if they don’t, well, at that point it’ll be too late to find another pawpaw tree and plant it. But if it does work out for me, I should be able to get fruit in only about a year or two because I have those big roots underground that I’m taking advantage of. And those Maria’s Joy cutings that I had, well, they were so mature, they were actually starting to form little flowers on the cutting wood themselves. So that means they are capable of fruiting right away. So if this takes, I will get a big reward for the big risk. These struggles just aren’t limited to fruit trees. I had some of my early tomato plants get whipped badly by a windstorm and I had to replace a few because they got damaged. Strong gusty thunderstorms where warm and cold fronts meet are a reality of spring weather for the overwhelming majority of us. And unfortunately, summers where I live are too hot for tomato pollination. So, we have no choice but to plant our tomatoes early in spring and cross our fingers here. So, I learned to always start some extra plants and have backups on hand because we always invariably lose a few of the first tomato plants that we put out every year. Always grow more plants than you need so you can replace any early casualties. So, that’s the real truth. Gardening is hard. Even the best, most expert gardeners have losses every single year. So, if you are a new gardener, you are definitely going to suffer losses at some point. And it’s going to happen over and over again to some capacity every single year if you are truly serious about growing more than a small handful of plants. So that begs the question, why even bother doing this? Why go through all of this trouble and hard work when it is inevitable that there will be so many failures? Well, that is a question that you are going to have to ask yourself. Take a look at the world around us. Would you say that everyone is doing great? Would you say that humanity as a whole is at the peak of its mental and physical health? Or would you say that we are living through a worldwide mental and physical health crisis? Well, life isn’t black and white and the answer is somewhere in between of those two things. But I think as a whole, many people are struggling right now. I’m not going to sit here and pretend like I know why this is happening. I can only give you my unique perspective. And I think the core of our societal problems stem from a lack of fulfillment and purpose. I think most people don’t get a lot of fulfillment out of their day job and they are literally counting the minutes until they can clock out of work each day. And I also think the instantaneousness of social media and streaming services that have everything instantly at the palm of everyone’s hands has eroded our patience and our attention span. And the workplace in general, well, it has shifted so much over the last few generations. It used to be that most jobs required some amount of physical labor, and now most do not at all. So, our society has largely lost those physical jobs that were very hard work, but you could physically see the progress you made at the end of every day and be proud of what you accomplished for jobs that are largely intangible. And you can’t physically see progress at the end of the day. I mean, if you have an office job, sometimes you’re like, “What did I even accomplish today? I I can’t see anything that I did. What was it all for?” I know that feeling. And the instantaneousness of social media and streaming services has taken away the most fulfilling emotion that a human being can possibly experience. Delayed gratification. In my experience, and take it for what it’s worth, I mean, I’m just one man, but gardening ties all of this together. Yes, it requires hard physical work, but when you’re done, you can literally see the progress that you made for all of your efforts. And gardening doesn’t provide instant results. You have to wait, stay vigilant, and be patient. Annual vegetables like these, well, they take months to bear harvest. And fruit trees, well, they take years. And when there are problems, sometimes it requires that we start all over again. You have to invest so much time, energy, physicality, and emotion into this. But then something magical happens. It starts paying off. And that is the delayed gratification. After months of anticipation, your crops bear a harvest. After years of patience, your fruit trees bloom, bear, and ripen fruit. Your persistence finally paid off, and it is the most gratifying thing that you have ever experienced. Gardening teaches us that investments that take years to pay off are so much more fulfilling than some instantaneous ondemand dopamine hit. This is real fulfillment, real gratitude, and what it truly means to be human. Forget happiness. Happiness is a fleeting emotion that goes away as fast as it came. This is real satisfaction and purpose. At least it has been for me and I think it will be for you, too. Because we are all human. We are all connected to nature. That is why I make these videos. I want to share all of this with you and inspire you because I truly believe it is the secret to life, at least one of them. And that secret is the harder it is for you to succeed at something, the more rewarding it is when you finally do. Gardening teaches us that, maybe better than anything else, at least that I found. So, I wanted to take this time and give you all a peak behind the curtain and give you a real reality check. Gardening is not easy. It is quite difficult. It is a lot of work to make this all come together and it didn’t happen overnight. So many things go wrong along the way and they still go wrong even after I’ve been doing this for well really the majority of my life. I still make plenty of mistakes and every time you plant something new well you roll the dice because you may learn the hard way that what you did didn’t work and that is okay. I want you to know that even the experts, even the best gardeners out there make mistakes all the time. So don’t feel bad if you weren’t successful your first time. So everybody, I sure hope you found this video helpful. If you did, please leave a comment below. I would love to get some feedback from you. Was this video helpful? Was it motivating? After all, I make these videos for you all. So, I really want to hear what you have to say, and your feedback is greatly appreciated. If you’re curious about any of the tools that I used in this video, like the grafting tools or any of those things, because you’re interested in something like that, I will place direct links down to them in the video description if you are curious. for everything else I use in real life in my garden. That is all linked in my Amazon storefront down in the video description. So, expand the video description, click on the Amazon storefront link, you’ll see everything I use in my garden in real life. While you’re down there, also please consider checking out my spreadshop for custom merch if you want to support the channel. Thank you all so much for watching and I hope to see all of you again on the next video. Oh my goodness gracious. Oh my goodness gracious. Dale, that looks so uncomfortable. You’re literally resting your head up against your toy box. Isn’t there somewhere else you’d rather lay? No, you’re okay. You’re perfectly comfortable. You’ll rest your head anywhere, huh? Okay, buddy. I’ll let you get back to whatever it is that Dale does. You look very comfortable, you silly boy.
38 Comments
If you enjoyed this video, please LIKE it and share it with family and friends! Thanks for watching 🙂 TIMESTAMPS for convenience:
0:00 How The Internet Lies To Us
2:19 Is Lazy Gardening Real?
4:40 High Maintenance Fruit Trees And Vegetables
6:33 Fruit Tree Failure #1
8:31 Fruit Tree Failure #2
9:43 Fruit Tree Failure #3
11:01 Where To Buy Fruit Trees
12:02 Replacing A Dead Fruit Tree
16:18 My Biggest Gardening Failure
18:36 Fixing A Failed Tree By Grafting
23:50 Vegetable Garden Mistakes
24:35 Is Gardening Worth It? My Real Life Advice
30:06 Adventures With Dale
Thank you for being real about gardening! I started off really small with plants from Lidl and Aldi. Some plants worked out great and others did not. But it gave me an oportunity to experiment with plants figure out what I like and what works. Later on I started buying bigger trees and my garden started to fill up. Now it is becoming more of a garden but I keep adding and taking plants. I try to manure when needed but I mostly used fish emulsion this year to see how that works out 💖
Fantastic ! Love your detailed honesty
Thank you !!
I'm a first time gardener. I grew up with grandparent who grew vegetables but never saw myself attempting to grow my own garden. I am so happy I found your channel. We are also in an 8b zone. I live in Battle Ground, Washington.
I really appreciated this video. Just this week I had planted seeds in a tray and things we looking great and then we had a really cool night and most of them didn't make it. Before I watched this video I was feeling pretty defeated. I've pulled myself together and I'm going to wait a week and start over. I'm looking forward to learning more from your videos.
Love the end bit of the video, gardening has been one of the things that’s really gotten me mentally better since I started last year. I got 4 raised beds, filled them up wrong, and payed the price lol. Planted too late, did a lot or things wrong. But learned so much, and this year I feel so much more confident, especially after watching your video on raised bed soil! You were the first person to actually explain why topsoil is supposed to be in raised beds, and this year my beds with topsoil are working so much better! Failing up 👍🏼
We live in zone 9, Florida. But nearer to the coast. We have had great successes and fails. We enjoy our "hobby" no matter. We learn all the time. We learn so much from your informative videos. Thank you for your honesty and integrity.
"Faliure is a better teacher than sucess" – once you embrace this, and "practice makes better" setbacks are not as hard to tackle mentally.
Im happy to see you planting jujube trees. Originally from Kentucky and now living in the middle east i see jujubes all the time. They produce so much delicious fruit its great
I love your idea for planting your tree above the surface with the old plant bucket. I love your channel. I am learning the secrets to a fulfilling garden life.
Gardening has really bummed me out this year(in my third year). I don't know if I can continue with it. So much work and money has gone into it already, and I am looking at 2 more years of expansion still. I just feel so defeated… 🙁
"And a little Marianne" 😅 Does that me don't Gilligan it?
Thanks for speaking our reality! I'm a new gardener–first time last year. I learned a lot from past mistakes and making quite a few already this season. That is how you learn! I just wish it didn't involve wasting money! But from that I'm getting very resourceful–finding uses for stuff I have laying around. And I get the joy of sharing my harvests with neighbors and family. We get huge amounts of birds and bees and butterflies. Beautiful flowers and delicious produce. I never knew I was a gardener!
My scope has narrowed to just your channel, Organic Gardening, Homesteading and Woodworking, as well as a local gardener The Beginning Gardner. The truth, honesty and no ‘journeys’ just real gardening entertaining style. Thanks for being such a blessing.
Like you, I’m from the north east and moved to Wilmington. I came down here and thought I was just going to have a very long tomato season, little did I know. Getting a little better every year. Question about your peach trees. You said that you spray them weekly, what do you spray them with? I sprayed the with cooper earlier in the season, what should I continue with?
Great reality check about gardening – I couldn’t agree more!
i garden big time for mental health. It gets me away from social media. My job is very mentally taxing and physical as well. Gardening allows me to do something at my own pace.
Purchasing Zone 10 plants in Zone 8b only to watch them die-Check
Not reading the labels on fertilizer and killing my plants-Check
Buying snake oil soil instead of using native soil-Check
Planting a plant in full sun versus shade and vice versa (not reading again)-Check
Over or under watering-Check
Re-Doing a yard project over and over again-Check
Not understanding indeterminate vs determinate tomatoes-Check
Spending money in the name of gardening and getting thrown out of the house (temporarily)…CHECK
Listen. I didn't have freezing rain and lost my olive
Years and years and years! It's so worth it ❤
I don't know where the scions are sold or traded. 😢
It is nice to see others struggle and fail sometimes too. Real life!! Thank you for this video and you hit on something at the end that had not occurred to me. I now spend almost all of my work hours behind a desk. I think you are right on spot with the need to see physical results of your work. To suffer failure and learn, then celebrate and enjoy when we succeed. That is what my garden is doing for me!! Fulfillment and satisfaction. Great video and your opinion on the benefits of gardening are spot on!!! Thank you!!
I brought my first home in QLD, Australia 4 years ago.
I built 4 raised beds and started gardening with limited knowledge. Ive battled the following:
1. Blossom End Rot
2. White Moth
3. QLD Fruit Fly
4. Slatters
5. Caterpillars
6. Multiple failed attempts at seed starting
7. Over fertilising
8. Under fertilising
I think Ive had maybe 2 successful crops in the time Ive spent gardening. The trick is to learn, persist and enjoy otherwise whats the point.
This year it is my first year planting bareroot, i bough a little farm. I planted them 2 weeks ago, and they are already waking up. I planted 4 grapes, 3 kiwi (1 male), 3 raspberry, 5 apple trees and 36 strawberry. I have an other shipment in coming of 9 rasberry, 6 blueberry, 3 haskap and 2 blackberry. I want to find peach and pear too, but did not find any variaty enought cold hardy for my region. I am on the hedge of zone 3 and 4, in canada.
Their is already a pear (but no self polinated), the apple tree the graft had died. The plum tree is huge (same age as the other) and their is like 7 cherry tree. The past owner really like cherry i think.
😅
I appreciate your message in today’s episode. Great work!
Thank you so much for sharing. This was super helpful and actually reassuring. I just had a similar situation. My husband brought home and planted a peach tree a few years ago. aaaand it came with leaf curl that I could not shake. This year all it did was curl eevery single leave it bloomed. So so sad. I did cut it down and i'm going to find a different peach tree. Im in Washington in zone 8b, do you have any input on which type of peach tree would be best?
Love the cat air freshener 😂
I hope the grafts take! I’ve been looking into doing this myself. This is my 5th gardening season. My soil is clay and I’ve amended about 60% of my yard by mulching and sand along with composting. My chickens and goats help. I try and always add a few more additions every year with loss and I enjoy the challenge.
I like your knowledge, and I appreciate learning from your experiences. I’ve been gardening a long time, (50+yrs)I learn something new everyday, with every weather forecast. So by watching others I learn ( shortcuts) that may save a plant 🌱
Ty for your channel🙏😎
I planted lettuce, eggplant and corn. The lettuce and eggplant totally failed. I had 75% germination of corn I guess that’s ok. My pear trees fruited and appear to be very good. 7 of my apple trees fruited nicely the other 3 didn’t fruit set at all.
Ive got 7 tomato plants that are actually producing this year, and several other types of vegetables growing this year and they're actually healthy (knock on wood). I'm out here every morning visually inspecting all of them for pests and diesease. It's definitely not lazy, but it's manageable. Thanks for your advice and helpful videos.
What a great message you have shared for gardeners! Your message is spot on and encouraging. Also, love the Gilligan's Island reference! 😊
“Thrive on neglect “ the story of my life 😂😂😂
Couldn't agree more with your philosophy on unfulfillment. Instant gratification is just s coping measure to handle that missing component.
Just dont spend a lot of money..
This was the video I needed this morning! This is my first year really doing my own seed starting and I’ve probably lost 70% of them. I have a few going strong but it’s been a trial. I’m a teacher and I always tell my students “you can’t learn if you don’t fail along the way” and it was nice to hear you say something similar. Sometimes you just need to hear someone else to say it instead of taking your own advice. Great video!
Thanks for sharing this. I have a part of my backyard that I am struggling with and not know what to do with it. Gardening is time consuming and needs constant attention and maintenance. I would love to have a couple of fruit trees in my garden and backyard.
Thanks, that’s encouraging. I just moved to a new growing zone and it’s like starting completely over.
I garden, get excited for the harvest to come in and ripen only for the possums and native animals to enjoy my hard work. Cannot wait for my order of copper roll, bin baskets and greenhouse plastic to arrive 🙏then we start again.