Do Not Promise The Gardener An Easy Life

2024 Author: Gavin MacAdam | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:38

In recent years, there have been many catchy headlines of articles promising an easy life for the gardener. There is no need to dig up the earth, you should not fight weeds, water the beds a couple of times during the summer season and many more different pleasant fairy tales that promise a decent harvest with minimal time and effort. How much can you believe in these wonderful fairy tales, prompting you to immediately acquire your own piece of land? After all, it is so nice to cook a signature dish of vegetables grown with your minimal labor in summer cottages

Reading such articles, I always remember an old anecdote in which one billionaire shares his experience on how to become rich. He begins his story with how he bought one apple at the price of one dollar, and sold it for two dollars. With this proceeds, he was able to buy two apples already, having received a revenue of four dollars. So he gradually continued to increase his trade turnover, when suddenly a loving uncle decided to go to the "better world", leaving his only nephew with a solid capital. It was then that he became a billionaire!

Intrusive and tenacious weeds. Destroy or tame?

In a similar way, you can become a successful gardener, having once inherited from your ancestors a well-equipped summer cottage, where for decades they have carefully and carefully treated a living organism called "soil". But, it is worth not putting your own efforts for a year or two, as the garden will quickly overgrow with weeds, the seeds of which are just waiting for the moment of the summer resident's oversight. After all, insidious weeds can hide in the soil for years, waiting for a favorable situation; they are willingly carried on their paws and feathers by birds, even though sometimes they visit country estates; they can get to the beds with spring waters, with the planted seedlings of vegetables purchased from the market … There are dozens of ways that weeds use to prolong their existence on our wonderful planet, as if aiming to reduce the yield of cultivated plantings by fifty percent.

Since weeds do not have such guardians as vegetables grown by humans, they have to rely on their own strength, and therefore from year to year they improve their vital abilities, adapting to the most adverse conditions. A hardworking vegetable grower with a medical dropper in his hands walks along the beds, bending his back, dripping a poisonous mixture under each root of a dandelion that has appeared, and the plant again, here and there, smiles at him with its sunny inflorescences. By the way, it is impractical to completely destroy very cute plants. It is worth recalling that dandelions are very useful creatures of nature, especially where the summer is rather short and not every vegetable has time to grow to full maturity. The gas emitted by dandelions speeds up the ripening time of vegetables. For example, in the vicinity of dandelions, tomatoes will ripen successfully in an open garden, saving human labor and time. But, the summer resident himself will have to monitor the optimal ratio of the number of dandelions and cultivated plants.

To water less often, you need to cover with mulch

Observant people spied on the method of mulching the soil in the beds from nature itself. In general, in order to be a successful gardener, you can read useful, and often useless literature to replace your own observations of the nature that surrounds your particular land plot.

Cast a glance behind your own hedge, where nettles bush violently, and raspberries “escaped” from your own garden are abundantly reddened with large berries. This is because nature's experience of growing plants is much older and richer than your experience as a farmer. Feel free to adopt it.

So, soil mulching is an invention of nature. Plants that have served their life cover the surface of the earth with a loose layer of mulch, which freely allows air and life-giving drops of rain and dew to pass through, and also enriches the soil with useful substances secreted by the decaying parts of plants that they have accumulated in themselves during their earthly life. A real "perpetual motion machine" of terrestrial nature.

A summer resident, in order to improve the living conditions of his plants, needs to work a little, creating a similar layer of mulch in the beds. So, it will not work at all without difficulty:).