Beginners

Based on #3 on the introductory post, I'd like to expand a bit, and this is aimed at those who have little or no previous experience in gardening, want to start, and see it as a great mystery, some sort of arcane art.

Well, it isn't. It's actually all very easy. If you have a piece of waste ground, even if it's nasty clay, building rubble and so on, it will cover itself in greenness in a very quick time. The more rain you get the faster this will happen. Seeds will arrive on the breeze, or dropped by birds, and stuff will grow. If you have a piece of land, or even a bucket of dirt, just WAIT and it will give forth vegetation.

OK, you say, but that's weeds.

Let's define what a weed is. It's anything growing where you don't want it. If you were to find a blueberry bush while you were walking in the woods, you'd be pleased. You'd take yummy blueberries home. That bush is wild, but you wouldn't call it a weed. On the other hand, one of the main "weeds" in my vegetable garden, and sometimes elsewhere, is tomato plants. There are seeds in ten-year-old compost that germinate all over the place. I'm forever pulling them out.

Weeds therefore, are a matter of opinion. The point is, that they grow without any help from humans. Plants you choose do grow will need a bit more help, but it's not difficult. Life has an urge. Seeds want to germinate. Plants want to grow. OK, maybe not exactly, but you know what I mean.

What is needed to grow anything can be reduced to:

1. Light.
2. Water.
3. Nutrients.
4. Warmth.

As much of a plant's growth occurs due to photosynthesis, #1 and #3 have some overlap, but you also need soil, of some sort. Soil varies but anything that has a basic organic component to it can support green life. There are people who use newspapers, for example. If you do not have ready access to ordinary soil, you can buy all sorts of "growing mediums" (soil substitutes) such as peat moss and so on. When I say soil, really I mean soil, the stuff that you find in nature, but you can think of purchased soil substitutes if you need to.

There is this idea of "bad" soil, and "good" soil and that's reasonable. Some people have sand or clay which is lacking in organic material and/or has a structure that doesn't hold water, or holds too much, and you can improve it by adding stuff to it. The easiest way to do this is to add compost from kitchen waste, but it takes time to make, so right at the start you'll probably have to buy some.

I am fortunate to have a good deep topsoil of loam, which is the ideal soil. Where I live was mixed forest until about 150 years ago, when it was cleared for farming, and it has changed quite a bit during the time since then, from having been used as pasture/meadow. I've also improved my actual vegetable garden area myself by running pigs on it. But if you don't have loam, don't despair. There are whole websites dedicated to soil improvement, and I'm not going to bother going into detail here, just to say, it's really NOT DIFFICULT. You don't need a horticulture degree. Mix what soil you have got with some good organic something or other, and stuff will grow. Trust me.

The most important thing, and the thing beginners get wrong the most, is water. It ought to be obvious, but if anyone is going to start a garden and then drop the ball, it is from forgetting to keep the plants moist. The hotter it is, the more they need. Also, plants in containers dry out faster than plants in the ground, so if you use containers you will need to water a lot, several times a day in hot weather. I should also remind anyone who likes the idea of raised beds that they have higher water needs. We grow strawberries in a raised bed, to enable us to grow it in an area that would otherwise be TOO wet, i.e. by raising it up we improve drainage. But I'm forever watering the damn thing.

Watch rain. Stand in it and watch. Watch how big the droplets are, how much they saturate in a given time, how long a shower has to be to get down deep where the roots are. Watch how quickly the soil dries out again after rain, firstly at the surface, then lower down. When you are providing supplementary water you have to provide it like rain. It's no good sprinkling a bit and calling it "watered". It has to go DOWN. Watering almost always takes longer than you think it needs.

For this reason I love sprinklers and "soaker" hoses, where I can turn them on and do something else while they work for me. If you have limited water, bear that in mind. What you really don't want to do is grow a container garden in a hot summer when there's a hosepipe ban. So think about that before you plant, plan ahead a bit, just in case. Saving rain in buckets when it does rain might help if you only have a small garden. My in-laws saved their bathwater for years to compensate for British droughts. A bit eccentric, but it worked.

Light matters. When you look at a tree growing out of a rock, albeit stunted, you may wonder where it gets its nutrition from. The vast majority comes out of the air. It's complicated, but basically plants are able to get carbon out of the atmosphere in a chemical process using light. If you like science, read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthesis
Otherwise just take my word for it. Some plants have evolved to thrive in shade, but most food plants, for example, need plenty of sunlight.

Seedlings started in insufficient light will go looking for it. They will grow tall and gangly very fast, "reaching" for light, and these usually don't do well as mature plants. That's why starting plants on a window ledge indoors is a bit hit and miss. If you are lucky to have a beautiful south-facing bay window, you may do quite well. In my house there are only two windows with adequate light to start seeds, you may be luckier.

Warmth is vital to successful germination of seeds, and subsequent growth. The reason we are able to grow as much as we do this far north, with our short season, is that plants "catch up" during our hot summer. I have more success with certain plants, for example, in a 3-month growing season here, than I did in a much longer one in my much cooler English garden. I could never get peppers to full size outdoors there, but they grow easily in the field here. So it's a balance. The time from seed to harvest is totally affected by temperature, therefore, and you can buy varieties developed for your zone, such as 60 day corn.

So let's simplify that again. If you plant it in good soil, when the weather is warm enough, and water it regularly, it will grow. Each plant has specific needs, some require other attention such as pinching bits off. But that's the basics of it. It needs what you need. Food, water, shelter, warmth, and maybe a bit of love.