The Four Main Needs of All Garden Plants

Plants’ Four Main Needs

All plants everywhere have four main needs. They need a certain

1. soil type,
2. amount of direct sunlight,
3. soil moisture,
4. and growing temperature.

That’s it. 

Thrive In Correct Combination

And each plant on earth thrives in a different combination of those four:

• from super nutrient-deficient soils, like peatland soils, to the super-rich soil you’d find under tall-grass prairies (with four plus feet of topsoil), in many alluvial plains (like the Nile delta, or the fertile crescent of the Tigris and Euphrates), or on Mississippi bottomland soils; 

• from direct sunlight all day like you’d find on an open prairie to the dense shade of a rainforest understory;

• from the dry soil of deserts to growing in water;

• and from the cold of the tundra and the poles to the steady warmth of the equator.

And everything in between.

So a certain…

• soil type
• amount of direct sunlight
• and soil moisture
• and growing temperature.

If plants get what they way they need each, they’re healthy. 

If they get each of those four to the utmost, they will be at their absolute peak of health and productivity. 

It’s that simple.

Why This is Easy for Garden Plants

To make it even easier, although they each differ a little, none of our garden plants need extreme differences like desert conditions for their soil moisture or the deep shade of a rainforest understory. Instead, all of them fit fairly closely in terms of what they need for each of those four, which makes it much easier for you to create an environment that hits this general range and have great success. Then, as you gain more experience and are more comfortable years later, you can make a few more minor adjustments to create a bit of a micro-climate for each species and have even greater success. (I have more on this micro-climate stuff in the mulch and temperature sections.)

Garden Plants’ Needs

For vegetable garden plants to be healthy and productive, they need

1. super-rich soil compared to other plants, 
2. immense amounts of sunlight compared to other plants, likely vastly more than just about any ornamental plant you have in your landscaping,
3. moderate soil moisture,
4. and a temperature range between 40 and 90 degrees F (5-32°C).

Sure, there’s a little more detail and nuance to each of those four—and that eventually becomes the fun part instead of the overwhelming part…and we’ll get to all of that—but, if you always start with and come back to those four most powerful needs of your vegetable garden plants, they will burst forth with growth and health, and they’ll be incredibly productive. 

If They Get It, They Won’t Need Chemicals

Additionally, if your plants get all four of these needs met reasonably well, not even to the utmost, they will be so healthy and productive you won’t even need to dump a bunch of chemicals on them to protect them from diseases or pests because they’ll grow so quickly and have so many of their own defenses that the bit of extra help they get naturally from beneficial insects and arachnids is enough to keep them not just surviving but thriving. And if your plants get those four to the utmost, they’ll be at their absolute peak of growth, health, and productivity.

Makes It Easy to Problem Solve

Plus, since these four form the real core of what plants need, if there’s ever a problem, it’s much easier to problem-solve: Like a mechanic diagnoses a motor that won’t run by knowing it only needs fuel, air, compression, and spark to work—so can go through each of those four like a checklist to see which one it’s not getting and solve it—or a parent figures out the root cause of their child’s recent illness as either lack of sleep, not eating well, running around that hazmat zone we call a daycare, or some combination of all three, if there’s a problem, gardeners can work through each of those four basic needs of their plants to figure out the root cause and easily figure out a solution.

Learning Gardening within the Context of Plants’ Four Needs

For all of these reasons, it makes sense when learning gardening to start with the four things plants really need and learn the thousand tasks of gardening as just part of them. Plus, it has several other benefits: 

1. It’s an easy way to start. It’s easy to understand, and it’s easy to do. And since these four have, by far, the biggest impact on plants’ growth and health, it’s easy to have great success right away by addressing them.

2. Plus, they provide a really good framework to understand all of the smaller steps and pieces, so it’s not a thousand separate ideas and steps one needs to hold in their head at one time. 

3. Even better, once you understand and appreciate them, you’ll find yourself starting to problem-solve on your own, just because you know what your plants need.

4. Finally, since they are the core of what plants need, starting with them not only as a framework for understanding your garden but also as a foundation for all of your garden decisions, makes sure that each of those thousand steps a) makes sense and b) it built on giving your plants what they truly need for maximum growth and health, so you’re ensuring your plants are strong, healthy, and productive because you’re starting with a focus on that in everything you do.

We Start with Our Plants’ Needs

Therefore, we’ll start there, and look first at why our garden plants need such amazingly rich soil and so much sunlight compared to other plants,—so you truly understand it—and give a multitude of methods for achieving each, from easy as pie to the most involved and impactful you can imagine. 

Then we’ll do the same with soil moisture and planting and growing temperature. 

As we go along, I’ll explain the thousand tasks and all of the nuances of gardening that are often overwhelming to newcomers as simply different ways to meet these same four main needs of your plants. We’ll also add two others—garden layout and spacing and companion planting—that are extremely helpful but not quite as critical as the core four. Focusing on each of these and learning why they’re so important for your plants will make you much more successful whether you’re a long-time veteran gardener or an absolute newb.

Let’s Get Started

If you’ve wanted to get started but haven’t because it seemed too complicated, if you’ve become frustrated with gardening but the passion for it still burns in your soul, or if you’ve given up on gardening because you found it overwhelming, thinking you just have a brown thumb, but you still long to do it, you can do it. Everyone can. It’s not that hard. I’ll show you the way.

And even if you’ve been doing it for 30 years and have been successful, this focus will make you even better.

Here is an overview of how to relatively easily meet each of your plants’ four main needs: How to Meet Your Plants’ Main Needs.