All gardeners like top tips so here are my top 3.
Number 1 Set a realistic expectation matching your time and resources to a viable outcome.
Number 2 Effective watering that makes water available to the plant as it is require , rather than a quantity and frequency.
Number 3 And finally, show some patience, give your plants time to grow. Three years is the magic number.
link to building your own planter https://youtu.be/QlhU1yDSwro
Welcome to Planted. My name is Ian. In this video, I’m going to share with you three top secrets that can help you improve having plants with success. Uh, this is a theme that I realize runs through all of my videos. And I really want to make this little short video so that you can take on these three points and really have success. Um the first one is the ability to match your expectations, your probably romantic notion to reality. We can look in magazines, we can watch television, we can go to beautiful gardens and we can really easily set ourselves up for failure because our romantic notion takes over and we think that we should have everything in flower all the time and do no work to achieve it. It’s just not real. So, what you have to do, and this will have a profound effect on you this time next year, is match the amount of time you have a week and a little bucket of money. Match those two to your expectation. Um, if you have an hour a week, then your work needs to be an hour a week. There’s no point having 10 hours a week and you not being able to keep up with it. this little courtyard I have here. When I first started it many years ago, I was a little bit disappointed. I wanted more space and I wanted it to be bigger and I could have more plants. But it’s taken me a few years to realize that this is the perfect size because I can come out here for a very short period of time, do some pruning, do some weeding, throw it away, maybe half an hour, and then stop. If I were to do nothing in this garden for 10 days or 14 days, it will be all right. I could easily come back and catch up. It wouldn’t get out of hand. Um, but many many people start to do large plantings, uh, hedges, maybe meadows, fruit trees, a whole range of stuff. And if you as the homeowner are not going to take care of it, then you need to find somebody that can. So, you absolutely have to match your timing and available resources to the outcome that you want. You need to come up with 10 items that your garden’s got. 10 items that you enjoy, that you think are important. Uh, and divide those into three, a four, and a three. Top three are your absolute favorite that are non-negotiable. You know you’re going to keep them, and they will make up uh they’ll give you a huge amount of reward. The bottom three you get rid of. Doesn’t matter what they are, you don’t spend any more time on it. And of the middle four, you choose the best two. So what you’ve done now is you’ve identified your garden into 10 points. You’ve got rid of five and now you’ve kept five. And that’s where you should put your focus. And then next year you do that same practice again, but this time still 10. Keep the best five. Let me put it this way. I really like gardening. I like the act of gardening. I like choosing plants. I like propagating plants. I like pruning. I like weeding. And I like creating uh a beautiful environment. All of that is very very enjoyable. But I also want to have plenty of time every week just to sit outside and watch the world go by. Watch the hummingbirds, smell the fragrance, look at the flowers. If you’re not doing that, then all of that horiculture and plant can get a little bit burdensome and then you won’t be happy. Let me share with you two more practices that I think will make a profound difference. The next insight I want to share with you is that of patience. Now, if you speak to any gardeners that have been growing plants for many years, all of them at some point will talk about patience and just letting the plant go through the process of establishing itself. And to demonstrate that, I have behind me a fig tree. And this is a fig called Brooklyn White. I got the a cutting of this plant online and I grew it three, four maybe I grew it 5 years ago for me and then my friends good friends wanted a cutting for their yard and four years ago I took a cutting from my cutting wanted it rooted and um you take them in late winter so December January time it puts on roots you grow it for 3 or 4 months let it get established it was planted in this spot about 4 years ago. Now, why is that significant? Well, actually, it’s had three summers. So, this is the third summer and then two more before that. It was planted out uh midmay. Um I reminded my friends whose garden this is to make sure it doesn’t dry out, particularly in that first year. The first year from May, June, July, August, September, it must not dry out. Uh and what you can see behind me now is a three-year-old plant covered in figs, looking very, very healthy. And this last year its growth rate has been quite substantial. And that’s because it’s had uh two summers prior and also this summer good sunshine, good conditions, but the root system has a chance to establish itself. So the roots on this plant are quite substantial. Uh there’s lots of space around me where it can grow and it’s in full sunshine. So by giving the plant the conditions that it wants, planting it at the right time, uh making sure that in that first summer it doesn’t dry out, this is what you can look forward to. So why does this matter? Why is this important? Well, I think too many gardeners expect too much in their first year. What you have to do is take a step back. And I think that three years is a a really good um time scale to have in mind for you to see success. So if you’re planting in the fall now or you’re planting next spring, don’t think what I’m going to get next year. Go much much further down the line and start looking at right, this is this summer, uh the end of this summer, beginning of the fall. We’ve got next year, another year, and then the year after that. And that’s when you can start to expect your plant to take off. And if you can grasp that concept, it also means that you’ll give your plants a lot more space because you are looking 3 years down the road. Uh I do see people continuously plant too close together and then in year two things are overcrowded. But if you’re planting for year three, you’ll give them space. They’ll have sunlight. they won’t be fighting for nutrients, fighting for water from other plants planted too close. So, this serves as an example to plant it, have patience, and just see how it grows. And it won’t be long before these figs are ripe, and my good friend that’s got them can start to uh share them with his friends and eat them himself, of course. So, have some patience. This next practice is something that I get asked all the time and that is how much water do you give a plant and I think what people want is a quantity and a frequency and that’s it. It’s a static calculation. But what you have to remember is that water demand is not static. The water you need in April and May is very different from the water you need later in the summer. As the day length increases and the temperature also increases, you also get wind speed. water is being sucked out of that plant. So this dynamic nature means that having a flat quantity and frequency doesn’t work. The easiest way to describe this and explain it to you is that it’s not the amount of water that you give to the plant. It’s the amount of water that is available to the plant. And these are two very different things. U all of us have used a watering can on many many occasions and all of us have done this. We’ve tipped water, we’ve slushed it over the leaves, and everything looks wet. We might give our plant 2 gallons, but only a very small amount of that actually becomes available to the plant. When you apply water to your plants in the ground, um, a proportion of it will undoubtedly get to the roots of that plant. Any of the water that is on the surface of a plant will evaporate and that is lost to the plant. And any water that falls on a slope can also run away or even pool and stay on the surface, further aiding evaporation. If you see somebody out there with a hose just waving it around and making everything wet, that might count as your uh quantity of water and your frequency, but the water is not available to the plant. That’s my point. If I had a really dry plant, I could water it with just a glass of water and I could be sure that all of that water would get taken up into that root ball. So, it’s not quantity here, it’s quality essentially. It’s where that water is and its ability to be stored by that. I’ve showed you this before. This is a a horse trough bucket. It does not have poles in. It’s slightly flexible and I use this to water so many of my plants. Anytime you’re putting in a new plant, you absolutely must submerge it. Now, you take your glass of water and you pour all of it inside, not very much. And then you place your plant in that pot and just let it stand there. The water inside here can’t evaporate, can’t run away, and it will be taken up into that root ball. So, what we’re doing here is we’re making a very small amount of water in that glass available to the plant and plants in pots. Um, the pot is essentially uh a storage system for water. Now, you think, well, what’s the big idea? I I All right, you’ve got to make sure that the plant gets water, but it’s the quantity of water. You can use less water and it’d be much more effective. Behind me I have this very large pot and there will be a link in the description. This is a pot I made out of uh highdensity polyethylene and it spans two steps. By having it span two steps means that I can have an awful lot more potting mix that can store soil. What it means is that when I water this, more of the water can be absorbed into the mix and made available to the plant. There’s a lot of growth up there. This plant dries out very quick. So let me put this another way. If you were very very thirsty and I gave you three cups each filled with water and you could have one every 15 minutes. So to say that all of that water would be available to you, you could drink it all. If I gave you the same volume of water as three cups, but in one cup and I handed it to you and I gave you uh 15 seconds to drink it, you you would not be able to drink it all. Better still, if I gave you one cup with three times the volume of this and I threw it at you. I’m physically giving you the water, but it’s not in a way that you can use it. So, be really mindful of when you’re adding water to plants. What are you wasting? Um, can it be stored in the pot? Can it be stored in the ground? And most importantly, is it available to the plant? Cuz if it’s not, it counts for nothing. Just as me throwing water over your head is not available to you, um most of the water that you put uh through a hose or a watering can evaporates and is not available to the plant. So bear that in mind. So those are the three practices. Um the first is you have to match your available resources and time to uh a reliable expectation. If you’ve got 1 hour a week, don’t have a garden that requires 10. And if you can’t do the work yourself, you better find somebody that can do it and also do it to a high standard. Uh the next is watering. It’s not frequency and quantity. It’s the amount of water that’s available to a plant. If you’re adding water and it’s evaporating, it’s not available to your plant. Then finally, some patience. You saw the fig tree there. 3 years in, looking pretty good. You can do this.
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