Light a Fire Under Your Gardening Plans
...with this preview of my Top Ten Tips
It’s mid-January in New England, and a handsome one at that. Occasional snow and temperatures hovering below freezing have brought on a stretch of hypnotically wintry weather, calm and steel-blue during the day, lit silver by a waxing moon at night. It’s the sort of season that makes me stand on my porch each evening in my slippers, sniffing the sharp air and listening for the hungry sounds of owls in the white-clad branches.
And as I wrote last week, it’s also prime time for garden planning. It therefore feels like a good moment to remind you all about our Referral Rewards Program. Remember: despite numerous generous pledges, this newsletter charges no fees and makes no money. The content here is freely given and, I hope, useful. Thus, I’m not offering referral rewards to push profit margins: only as a way of spreading the word so that more families and schools can do what we’re doing.
So far, though, not a single person has collected any of these rewards. As a reminder, you get my “Starting a School Garden” PDF for five referrals, my “Top Ten Gardening Tips” PDF for ten referrals, and my “At-Home Composting Guide” PDF for twenty-five. All you have to do is click the “Refer a Friend” button at the bottom of the newsletter and, when your wise associates subscribe, you’ll start to climb the ladder. Simple, yes?
These guides consolidate quite a bit of the knowledge and strategies you’ve seen here on the newsletter into easy, readable documents you can save or print. And to whet your appetite this week, I’m including a preview of the “Top Ten Gardening Tips” PDF. If you like what you’re seeing here, then spread the word!
Thanks again, and enjoy.
1. Know Your Soil
Beth Chatto’s famous advice rings as true now as it ever did: “Right plant, right place.” No matter how much love you lavish on your thyme plants, they simply aren’t going to do well in soggy soil. But put them in stony quick-draining conditions and voila, they’ll thrive. It’s therefore vital that, right from the outset, you understand the soil conditions in your growing space.
If you’re container gardening, you have more or less absolute control over these conditions, though I’d encourage you to do your research and avoid compost that contains peat, for a variety of reasons. But if you’re planting in the ground, you’ll want to get to know your soil first. The easiest way to do this―I think it was in Mondy Don’s superb book The Complete Gardener that I learned this―is simply to go outside and squeeze some of it in your hand. If it clumps together and holds its shape, it’s clay. This means it’s full of nutrition but dense. It will need the addition of organic material like compost, which gradually breaks down and opens the soil up, introducing what gardeners call good “structure.” If it falls apart and looks brownish, it is loamy, meaning it’s probably a mixture of sand, silt, and clay. It will be easy to work but probably lacking nutrition―you’ll want to dig in some mature to hold moisture and add nutrients. If it falls apart and looks sandy, it’s…sandy. It lacks nutrition and can’t support some of the classic cottage-garden favorites, but many plants can and will thrive in such conditions, such as Mediterranean herbs, irises, and Lady’s Mantles.
You can never truly alter your soil conditions, but you can tweak them in your favor if you understand them. Many companies will conduct mail-in soil tests for cheap―look up your local agricultural associations and even your city government, especially if you’re growing edibles and worried about contamination. But, whatever you do, don’t try to fight against those conditions. It’s a special thing to learn what plants harmonize with your particular environment, to negotiate and converse with the soil instead of wrestling with it. Adopt this approach from the outset and you’ll have far more success. There’s no such thing as perfect conditions for a garden but, conversely, impossible conditions are also very rare. No matter what kind of soil you have, there are some plants that will thrive in it. Starting literally from the ground up is the best way to identify these plants quickly, pick the ones you like, and set out from a position of strength.
2. Know Your Sun
Just as thyme won’t thrive in wet conditions, irises won’t bloom if there’s no sun baking their roots. And though a clematis loves to have its head in the sunshine, as the old saying goes, it needs its feet in the shade. Though we’ve bred many of them into strange and exaggerated shapes, all plants have evolved to flourish in certain amounts of sunlight. You cannot give such plants what they need unless you understand how much light your growing space receives, and when.
Understanding these conditions isn’t just a matter of poking your head out of the window one afternoon in May. You need to walk around your garden at several times of year and many times of day. What direction does your growing space face? Is it south, west, north? If it’s getting decently good sun on January afternoons, is there a tree filtering the light that will leaf in and block it all come April? Though you don’t need to understand everything to begin with, you’ll ideally want to know the angle and intensity of the sunlight that strikes your garden throughout the year. There’s no way to understand this except to take your time and observe.
A good principle to start with, though, is that for vegetables, you’ll want to cultivate a space that gets at least eight hours of direct sunlight from spring through fall. This may mean, if your potential in-ground growing space is north or east-facing, that a container garden on the back porch would be better than an in-ground affair out front. And that’s just fine: you can use the front for some shade-loving flowers.
For flower gardening, as long as your space gets even a little filtered sun, there will be plants for you. But you’ll find that a muggy, shady garden will wilt most roses when it would do perfectly for toad lilies. Indeed, even within a single yard or garden, there are likely to be different zones or areas of light. In my own back yard, there’s a huge maple tree that allows plenty of light below during winter and early spring but casts dense shade once the leaves come in from April to October. Primroses and hellebores are therefore the right choice, since they only want the sun during their springtime surge of growth and bloom.
Don’t be discouraged if you can’t absorb and apply all the requisite knowledge at once. Keep engaging, keep observing, keep attempting. Over time, you’ll develop an intuitive understanding of what plants fit where in your garden…