It feels like everyone is gardening right now – celebs from Jennifer Garner to Pamela Anderson to the Beckhams seem to have elaborate garden setups that help them rest and recharge – and grow their own food.
But there’s a practical reason for this – gardening is good for your health – there’s something that happens when you put your hands in soil. Research consistently links time in the garden to lower cortisol levels, reduced negative symptoms, and a stronger sense of purpose. Why? Tending something living (even badly!) returns you to a pace your nervous system actually recognizes. Your abuela/bubbe/grandma probably didn’t call it mindfulness. She just called it going outside.
As for many other women, gardening became my hobby during the pandemic, and I’ve never put down my garden gloves. It’s been the most rewarding hobby I have ever picked up. But as enjoyable as it is, it’s also very hard and it usually takes a few tries (and a few seasons) to get things right.
What I’ve quietly discovered through the years is that there are a few simple things you should avoid to have the best possible experience in your gardening era. Here are just a few:
1. Making your vertical garden top-heavy
I learned this one the hard way. I filled my Greenstalk planter with strawberries, lettuce, and green beans — it looked beautiful — and left the bottom pockets empty because I hadn’t gotten around to planting them yet. The whole thing toppled over. Turns out a vertical garden with weight concentrated at the top and nothing anchoring the base is just a very pretty accident waiting to happen. Fill from the bottom up, always.
2. Skipping gopher wire under your garden bed
It doesn’t matter if you’re building a raised bed on a patio, a lawn, or what looks like perfectly innocent soil — you need gopher wire underneath. They will find it. Lay hardware cloth or gopher wire flat beneath the bed before you fill it with soil. This is a five-minute step that saves you an entire season.
3. Treating your garden like a slow cooker
You cannot set it and forget it. A daily walk-through — morning or evening, even just ten minutes — is what separates a thriving garden from a problem you discover too late. You’re watering but also catching the pest damage before it spreads, the wilting before it’s fatal, the disease before it jumps to the next plant. Consistency here is everything.
4. Relying on one layer of protection
Critters are persistent and creative, and a single fence is more of a suggestion than a barrier. I run three layers of protection around my beds — and I still check them. Think fencing at the perimeter, hardware cloth at the base, and something closer to the plants themselves. Whatever can get through one layer will find its way there eventually.
5. Planting once and expecting abundance
If you put in one pepper plant and call it a season, you’ll harvest one pepper. Succession planting is what actually fills your kitchen. The rule is simple: when something is harvested or dies, something new goes in its place. The goal is to always have something in the ground at every stage — just starting, mid-growth, ready to harvest. A garden that’s always producing requires a gardener who’s always planting. Layer it like a lasagna, and you’ll have a nice little harvest in the end.
Gardening is beneficial and could even improve your life. It’s easy to start, but challenging to get it just right. If you avoid a few mistakes, you’ll go a long way towards the perfect harvest.
Comments are closed.