5 Worst Beginning Gardener Mistakes

My family started a little backyard garden last year. We were excited about the prospect of growing our own vegetables and learned a lot during our first year as gardeners. Here are some mistakes we made and how you can avoid them.

Planting Too Close Together

Our broccoli plants did not do as well as they could have since they were planted too close together. Our garden is fairly small so we wanted to try to get as many plants in it as possible. As we found out, some of those plants can get pretty big. Next year we’ll follow the planting recommendations on the seed packets to make sure everything has enough room to grow.

Not Cutting Vegetables in Time
With some of our plants we learned the hard way that if you don’t pick the vegetables at their peak, you end up with vegetables that don’t taste quite right. The leaf lettuce ended up getting spikes on the underside of the leaves. It actually hurt to eat it. Next year, we know to harvest the leaf lettuce when it has full soft leaves.

Compost Too Near the Garden
We put our compost bin in a back corner of the garden. While there are many different types of bugs that are beneficial to composting, there are many of those same bugs that are not a friend to live plants. We ended up attracting a few too many bugs into the garden area and had to spray some of our plants to get rid of the bugs. Next year, we are planning to move our compost bin out of the garden.

Plants Getting Too Much Shade
Our poor pepper plants got planted between our tomato and broccoli plants. Both of those two plants ended up getting much bigger than we anticipated. This ended up meaning that the pepper plants got shaded in the morning and the afternoon which left them as rather small plants. Next year we’ll plant the peppers in front of the tomato plants so they get plenty of sunshine.

Uneven Soil
We have a raised bed garden that we filled with soil. It ended up being a little higher on one side than the other so the water tended to drain off to one side. This ended up creating problems with some of our plants since they did not get enough water. We’ll take care to even out the soil for next year so that all of the plants get enough water.


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