Common Sense Makes a Gardener

I find gardening the most mystifying and yet gratifying activity out there.  It is mystifying because you can't know it all.  Gardening involves many scientific  disciplines like soil science, botany, biology, hydrology, entymology. Who has time to master all these things?  But, if you learn a little about these things and apply a little common sense with it, you will be a fine gardener.....perhaps an outstanding gardener. Here are a 5 common sense rules to strive for:

Gardening Common Sense Rule #1 - Begin somewhere. Experience is the great teacher. I began years ago with African violets grown indoors. Got them at the local grocery store. Maybe you can begin with planting a package of zinnias?  They're very easy to grow and if you don't have a sunny patch somewhere, consider guerrila gardening them. Yea, that's right....sneak a few zinnia seeds onto some sunny, patch of land anywhere and watch them grow.  If growing flowers without permission is the worse thing we ever do, the world will be a much better place. 

Gardening Common Sense Rule #2 - Plants grow with soil, water and light.  Get this in your head before you extrapolate out all the finer points of growing.  Soil. Water. Light. 

Gardening Common Sense Rule #3 - You can't ignore it. Definition of weed:  a plant that can be totally ignored and yet still take over an entire neighborhood.  Cultivated plants - our edibles, our house plants, pretty flowers, shrubs and trees we like to have in the yard - they require our attention, at least at first. And edibles require our attention constantly. There is no getting away from this. 

Gardening Common Sense Rule #4 - Get a basic, and I mean basic, book on gardening and refer to it. Good example:  Month by Month Gardening in Georgia (revised edition) by Reeves and Glasener.   

Gardening Common Sense Rule #5 - Get a pen and paper (or just use your calendar) and write down what you do and when. You won't believe how much this will teach you and help you year by year. 

The picture accompanying this blog is of Mike and Debbi Molletta, two new gardeners at the Alpharetta Community Garden, who started gardening without a whole lot of experience or knowledge, but just jumped right in. They have an awesome vegetable garden and I attribute this to the fact that they have all the common sense rules down. You can too.