35 Years of Gardening Lessons in 10 Minutes

Ben has been gardening since he was 8 years old and started his own vegetable garden aged 11. In this week’s episode, Ben lists 10 things he wishes he’d known when he first started out. Learn from his mistakes instead of making your own!

Ben gets our creative juices flowing with a back-to-basics look at vegetable garden planning, including practical considerations behind positioning a new garden, and how and where to locate crops within it. Get your garden off to a flying start this growing season!

Want to set up raised beds like Ben’s. Check out this video:

Planning a bigger plot? You might find this video helpful:

For how to use grass clippings as mulch watch this next:

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I’ve always had an interest in plants and broke ground on my first  vegetable garden aged 11. it was incredibly exciting but my goodness, was there a lot to learn. I made a lot of mistakes, attempting to dig with a hand fork for example. So here are my top 10 keys to success

For a really productive garden. Some might say it’s far from sexy but I reckon rich, healthy soil has most definitely got it going on. Soil is the starting point for everything we do and the basis for a healthy garden. This here is a beautiful jar of homemade kimchi,

I’m really rather pleased with it. It tastes great but more importantly it’s absolutely loaded with beneficial bacteria. When I consume this it’s going to really help my gut biome, creating a healthier environment in there and a happier me and it’s exactly the same with our soil.

Look after it and it will look after your plants. And the best way to do that is to top it up regularly  with lovely organic matter. Well rotted manure, garden compost, leaf mold, these can all be added to naturally feed your soil and the life within it while improving its structure and performance.

I like to add organic matter at least once a year, usually in the winter to build soil for the coming growing season, but really it can be added  at any time of the year, whenever beds are empty or even added around existing crops.

Starting a new garden or  even a new growing season is, let’s be honest, absolutely thrilling. It’s an incredibly exciting time, but it’s this that can lead  to a scattergun approach and that can cause issues such as sowing at the wrong time, overcrowding or choosing the wrong crop  for your climate or soil.

So it’s better to take a little bit of time now to work out what you’ll be growing. It might seem obvious but it’s worth growing what you like to eat, plus either what costs more  money to buy in the shops or what might give the biggest  yield for the space you have.

Think of it like writing a shopping  list before you go food shopping. And take your time on deciding  what variety of each crop to grow. If you’re starting out it’s worth looking for pest or disease resistant crops like these tomatoes here. These guys are resistant to blight or for example these spinach seedlings.

This variety here is slow to bolt, which means it won’t flower as quickly, which means I can pick more of those lovely leaves before I need to pull up the plant. Enjoy pouring over the seed catalogs, take your time to ponder and dream,

It’s one of the most satisfying  moments of the gardening year. Once you know what you want to grow you’ll then need to work  out when to sow or plant it and when you can expect to harvest it. The best gardens have  something going in every month to keep the harvests coming.

Many crops are quick growers or will be out of the ground by midsummer like these early onions for example. Now am I going to leave the  soil then bare until spring? Not on your Nelly. I will have something else  waiting ready to go in after them like for example winter cabbages

Or a final sowing of say main crop carrots. Taking the time to plan  what goes in when like this can make the most of the ground you have. I love using the Garden  Planner for this sort of thing. You can set when crops are in the ground,

Then view your plan month by month to see when and where gaps appear. The best thing is that the Plant List, which all automatically updates as crops are added will show you when to sow, plant and harvest, making planning your next crop super easy.

If you want to make the most from your garden then taking the time to research what will be in the ground when can really help. Don’t forget that you can grow upwards too, cramming even more into the space that you’ve got. As a gardener you quickly realize  that you need even more space

And it doesn’t matter how big your garden is. But by growing upwards we  can squeeze even more in. These are my bean arches, which transform from their  naked form at this time of year to fully cloaked, dangling with beanie  goodness in just a few months time.

You don’t need to spend loads  on arches or supports either. You can make them from natural  materials such as branches and I reckon they look really  beautiful like this anyway. Many supports can be be sourced for free or even grown yourself like these  lovely upright hazel stems here.

These would be perfect for bean poles or you could grow your own bamboo  canes like these for example. Make use of walls too. Attach pots and tubs to vertical  surfaces to create a real wow factor, or how about stepping up pots on a simple step ladder type of arangement.

If you’re starting out don’t fret about purchasing ready to go plug plants or  young plants like these. I will let you into a little secret, I buy them all the time. It saves valuable time and space and it avoids those early  precarious stages of growth, so why not give yourself the same advantage?

It can make good sense to grow warm season crops like tomatoes and peppers  from young plants for example. It means you can grow lots of different varieties without having to sow little pinches of seeds from many different packets. Having young plants in an instant

Also gets you that much closer  to harvest time too of course. Check plants are strong and  healthy before you buy them and prioritize higher value veggies. I’ve seen carrots, individual ones, sold in plugs, which when you do the sums  is just insanely expensive. When I started I would sow absolutely everything

Directly into the soil where it’s to grow. Now there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that and in fact it’s the best way of starting off root crops like carrots or say parsnips, but there’s also a very good reason why it’s sometimes worth sowing into plugs or pots and then transplanting plants in later days.

Germination is often more reliable  in a controlled environment, away from slugs and other pests, whether that be a greenhouse, a cold frame or even just indoors on your window sill. By sowing into plug trays or pots like this I can plant out my plants in  exactly the right spacing,

Using really sturdy healthy little seedlings. It also means I can start something  off while there’s no room outside, so that these can be growing on and  once the earlier crop is finished they’ll be ready to go out.

And it means I can enjoy and earlier start the  growing season by starting them off in the warm. Now then, I would strongly recommend that you get yourselves some really  solid sturdy trays like these. These will last for absolute decades. As gardeners we need the  three Ps by the shovel load:

Patience, Positivity and Pragmatism. You see, little knocks and setbacks  aren’t just likely to happen, they’re almost certain to. Weeds will always be there, you can never hope to eradicate them. But slow and steady weeding will  help to keep you on the forward foot.

A few minutes of weeding by hand or hoe every week should help to keep you on top of those weeds. And bear in mind that many weeds  are really valuable for wildlife, so don’t sweat it if it’s a bit  weedy towards the edge of your plot. That’s my excuse anyway.

In the same vein, pests are part  and parcel of gardening life. Slugs, aphids, leaf miners, pigeons, they’re all out there waiting for you  to head indoors and turn your back so they can get onto your crops. But don’t try and annihilate them. Instead just put into place sensible precautions

Like slug traps and netting to keep them off. And bear in mind that many  pests are invaluable food source for the sorts of beneficial bugs and  birds that we do want in our gardens. And never, ever use artificial  pesticides or weed killers. It’s just not cool. There will be setbacks,

There’ll be downright failures too, but embrace each failure as an  opportunity to learn for next time, like these massacred brassicas. The lesson learned: put covers  on properly much earlier. If there’s one piece of growing season advice that’s incredibly low tech but  stunningly effective, it’s to mulch.

Mulching is when you lay down materials  over the soil surface to cover it and the best mulches are natural and organic. My favorite mulch is grass clippings, which can be scattered around crops here  and there throughout the growing season.

And if you’d like a video on that  well I’ll pop a link to it down below. In nature soil doesn’t stay bare for long and in the absence of permanent ground cover mulching can do a lot to keep the soil happy.

It will shade it from the hot sun so that  soil moisture stays in there for longer, it will help to give weeds a  really tough time pushing through and as it decomposes it will help to  build your soils fertility and structure.

Mulching can dramatically cut down on  your workload for all the above reasons. Straw, compost, wood chips, leaves all of these will help and my suggestion is to use whatever you can  produce in your own garden or find locally.

And on that note, bear in mind that gardening  needn’t cost loads if you don’t want it to. For many of us the whole point of growing  our own is to save a little bit of money. You can often find seeds very cheaply  or for free at local seed swaps.

You can repurpose lots of old containers like yogurt pots or mushroom trays  and so on as cheap containers and if you’re willing to put in the effort you you can find organic matter to nourish   your soil for free if you’re  willing to go and collect it.

Many things in gardening that cost a bit have   an alternative that’s either  free or at least very cheap. Here are some ideas to get  your creative juices flowing. Experiment, try new things, push the boundaries. This is good life advice generally,

But when it comes to gardening it  is what helps to keep things fresh. You never know, you might discover  a new vegetable that you love or perhaps a new growing method that  transforms the way you do things. Honestly as a gardener the  more I learn the more I realize

There’s still so much more to learn and I love that. If you’re looking to start a completely  new garden then check out this video next, where I discuss practicalities such as  sunlight, shelter and water collection, all the vital stuff. In the meantime, comment below on what  you’re hoping to grow this season.

I’ll catch you next time.