This video shares 5 terrible pieces of gardening advice new gardeners should ignore! Starting a garden can be intimidating, and advice expert gardeners give to new gardeners can be confusing and even harmful! If you’re gardening in 2023 for the first time, or if you’re new to growing food, dispelling these myths will help you make more progress doing less work and keep things simple!
TABLE OF CONTENTS
0:00 Vegetable Gardening For Beginners Intro
1:20 Bad Advice #1: Organic Gardening
2:45 Bad Advice #2: Soluble Fertilizers
6:20 Bad Advice #3: Crop Diversity
7:16 A Beginner Garden Plan
7:59 Bad Advice #4: Composting
10:23 Bad Advice #5: Research
11:35 BONUS Garden Tip
13:44 Adventures With Dale
If you have any questions about beginner gardening and how to start a vegetable garden, have questions about 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!
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41 Comments
If you enjoyed this video, please “Like” and share to help increase its reach! Thanks for watching😊TIMESTAMPS for convenience:
0:00 Vegetable Gardening For Beginners Intro
1:20 Bad Advice #1: Organic Gardening
2:45 Bad Advice #2: Soluble Fertilizers
6:20 Bad Advice #3: Crop Diversity
7:16 A Beginner Garden Plan
7:59 Bad Advice #4: Composting
10:23 Bad Advice #5: Research
11:35 BONUS Garden Tip
13:44 Adventures With Dale
I love this video! Finally, I can focus on my raised beds as a beginner who after years has had poor success in growing because my approach was all over the map- must be organic, only fertilize (if at all) with compost, no pest control beyond companion planting and hand picking. This restores my hope to growing my own veggies. Thank you!!!👏👏
This is unrelated, but I was looking up Mycorrhizal fungi and thought of you. A quick search didn't show any experiments by you. Have you tried working with it?
H²O is a chemical last I looked what is organic
I totally agree. I have been a professional horticulturist for 50 years and that is great advice for new gardeners.
If it helps me grow food and successfully I will use whatever I can. The point is to grow food to offset the high prices at the grocers.
This is great advice and I agree with all of these points.
Not surprisingly, the 100% ORGANIC ONLY crowd is a bit wound up about number 1-2 and continue to spout off garden myths. The Millennial Gardener covered it more in depth in another video, but adding one tablespoon per gallon of synthetic fertilizer every week or two does not damage the soil and plants. This is not like living next to the bay and coating your lawn in high nitrogen granular synthetic fertilizer-some of which literally gets spread right into the water. Here is in MA one of the biggest farm polluters was an organic facility that accepted a lot of manure and it leeched into nearby wells. We need to stop the thinking that everything synthetic is somehow 100% evil and that organics can do no harm. An ion of nitrogen from Miracle Grow and from Espoma Blood Meal is the same.
The latest university studies show the highest yields come from a combination of synthetic and organics.
And this video was about advice for a first year gardener. We want to encourage more people to get into gardening and keeping it simple early on encourages that. Pontificating that all must be 100% organic only from year one works against that goal.
Tip #1: Do not over-fertilize.
Tip #2 Do not over-water.
Tip #3 Avoid killing the wild pollinators with pesticide.
Tip #4 Be aware of the sun, shade, and heat requirements of your chosen crops.
Tip #5 Universities are great resources, and usually reliable.
Five more bad tips, lol.
Omg…I love this video. My first garden last year was huge and fed every insect and rodent for miles around. We only got about 4 grocery bags worth of produce. Arrgh.
But the worst advice I used was to bury tomato and pepper plants 2/3 of its height deep. It took them twice as long to catch up , and the frost killed them off when they hit their delayed peak.
Another wonderful video. I've been gardening for almost 5 years and I still need to hear these things! I now have the big garden overflowing with produce, but the guilt I can feel for using synthetic fertilizers when a crop is failing, or not making all my own compost is SILLY. Progress, not perfection.
I read adding espon salt is a great option as well
What's your opinion on bagged mushroom compost? I've seen so many different opinions both good and bad
Thank you.. my first gardening project, everything died by the fungus and bugs
My family has grown vegetables and trees for over 100 years I totally agree with you on many points. I don't care for the word organic in the way that it is now used I'm organic your organic any living cell is we always called it natural growing and still do. Also rather your fertilizer is organic or synthetic they both have there own chemical compounds.
all good advice. organic is just a option, nearly impossible. don't worry about it, unless you like slugs with your cabbage.
if you keep your soil alive and healthy, the plants will automatically do their thing.
After many years of gardening, I finally admitted to myself that I didn't enjoy growing food half as much as I enjoyed digging beds and building a compost pile!
I've been gardening for over 20 years and I can't believe how much there is to learn and know. This year I did my first fall/ winter garden of cabbage, brussel sprouts, green onions, leeks, elephant garlic, collard greens, spinach , beets, bok choy, and I love it ! I also grow all my herbs and fruit trees. I'm in NC and in summer there are bugs bugs amore bugs and you have to water almost everyday ! Not in the winter it's great ! This summer I will do just plant red, yellow, green bell peppers, jalepenos, chives, basil, squash, cucumbers tomatoes, and hot cayenne peppers. You must grow those because they repel bugs. I put them all over my garden as a repellant. I have gone to organic on my food plants but flowers not so much. These tips he gives advice is excellent .
I have a question clarify your Grow Bag #7. Is this the 7LBs bag.?
Good tips… I mean bad tips…You know what I mean.
I’m sorry I was mistaken. Scott’s products are wonderful. Again I’m sorry I was given false information ❤
I've grown everything under the sun, but my problem is that I love plants…and grow things I don't even eat. So last year I got serious and made a list of what I am actually going to cook and eat. The list was not long: Potatoes, sweet potatoes, butternut squash, beets, carrots, garlic. I'm saving onions for later. For fermenting, nappa cabbage and daikon radishes. You have to consider what you will eat, and what you can store. (Can't believe I put so much time and energy into okra!! I didn't even know what it tasted like, let alone now to cook it. But the plants were spectacular!)
Addendum: You are a great teacher. You are succinct, energetic, honest, enthusiastic, and smart. Last piece of advice was the truest. I would add: "Failure is success if you learn from it" — Malcolm Forbes
A lot of truth here.
I'm a beginner gardener but for me plant diversity and trying to plant "everything" saved me a lot of heartache. If I had only stuck with the classics like peppers, tomatoes, and cucumbers it wouldn't of brought me much joy because those plants got wiped out by diesease or produced very little in my hands. However my watermelons, lettuce, kale, and strawberries grew well with little effort. I like to have a garden that can practically take care of itself and some plants are really difficult to grow depending where you live.
Have you ever tried growing a sugar apple fruit tree in your area?. They are delicious.
I truly believe you have peoples best interests at heart. That said, I’m so glad I started organic and stayed organic. I’d rather fail completely than destroy my soil life with nasty chemicals.
Good job very good advice
i absolutely loved this video .. i wish i had seen it last year before we started our first garden .. it was pretty much a fail but the temps here in my area were horrible, as was for most people last year .. this year i was going to go in all gun-ho and blow it out of the water .. but then i realized i needed to concentrate on what i thought i could get put up in my pantry by canning or even freezing this year .. this is what helped me to lower my total goals .. i loved the number 3 advice so much .. this video is truly the best advice out there for a new gardener .. bless you and thank you for doing this video .. i made sure to share it
Wow, I like this!
Ten years ago when I was a new gardener and I was learning about composting, I watched one YT video showing a composting method that required turning the pile every second or third day to have it broken down in about 16 days. That's when it dawned on me that no matter how they are positively touted, some gardening methods are just not practical if I don't have that kind of time.
not a beginner but i always believed that stuff about miracle grow thanks for the explanations!
Thank you! My sentiments exactly.
I know a lot of people who treat Miracle Grow as poison, but I've never seen it that way. I see it as more like McDonald's: fast, easy, and better than going hungry. It's not the healthiest thing you can choose, but it is better than nothing. The fact that it's especially formulated to be easy to use just makes it even better for someone new. It helps you get an easier win, which grants confidence, which encourages you to keep going. Yes, there are better options, but when you know better you do better, but you still have to prioritize. You can't do better I'd you can't do anything, so learn to do the thing the easy way, then learn to do it the better way.
I've always liked how you present your information. Great stuff here, too, and you've got extra passion. It's like you're pleading with newbies to Keep It Simple lest they lose out on a lifetime of gardening pleasure.
Thanks!
Great video!! I always enjoy the Dale videos. Keep up the good work
Those rain water collection barrels you have would get you a large fine here in Oregon. (I guess the state thinks they own Gods rain)
Excellent video, couldn't agree with you more. Well done.
Excellent video
I'm growing garlic indoors but I take then outside when the weather is cooler but I do get the little bugs when I bring them in the house how do I get rid of them
That first one is a big one I tried but being in florida it was a nightmare. I lost almost all my crops to pests the neem oil and natural organic things couldn't keep up with. Florida is FILLED with pest pressure and being the only gardener in miles meant my place was an oasis to all the pests. This year I finally bit the bullet and went to non organic sprays and solutions and I'm harvesting more than ever. I hope my peaches that get decimated by fruit flies I'll actually get to try after 6 years because I'm using a non organic spray meant for them. I do wish I could avoid them but sometimes you really don't have a choice. Actually getting harvests to feed myself and store up for the year is a thousand times better than trying to keep organic here, sadly.
Monoculture got me too, although three sisters still works well. I've learned to only do things like basil and marigolds between my tomatoes and fast growing things like radishes between rows of corn, kale, and other slower growing veggies only. Because before the bigger plants are large enough to compete the radishes are gone.
Other thing I'd bring up is square foot gardening and high intensity gardening which I heard a LOT on gardening channels and books! I've learned better spacing and how to get better sized and tasting harvests by experimenting after those didn't work out at ALL. You can stuff more in a square foot but unless you are able to super babysit AND have the exact right soil and nutrients you'll end up losing more than not using the intensity methods. Only high intensity I've gotten to work well is MIgardener's high intensity lettuce with cut and come again only, and bush beans. Even the beats and radishes suffered with square foot! They still produced but were small and woody. This year with more space I'm getting huge radishes almost a foot long in some cases that taste wonderful AND I'm getting more of them AND larger greens on top!
Thank you so much for your common sense advise. I really appreciate it. I’m in Virginia and in my second year of “serious gardening.” Your videos have helped me so much.