The Fundamentals of Gardening

In gardening, simple wisdom is focusing on the fundamentals first and foremost. The core fundamentals of gardening are massive amounts of direct sunlight, correct amounts of water at the right times, and extremely healthy soil.

Sun, water, and healthy soil are for your plant like electricity is for our appliances. You wouldn’t run your vacuum around the living room when it’s unplugged and wonder why it’s not working—turning it over and tearing it apart to try to find what’s wrong with it. You wouldn’t, likewise, wonder why your lasagna isn’t done when the power is out, or wonder why your hair dryer doesn’t work if you didn’t turn it on. 

Think of it like food and sleep for a person. You wouldn’t wonder what’s wrong with your weakened son when he hasn’t eaten in three days, just like you wouldn’t be puzzled by your partner’s inability to fight off an otherwise relatively minor illness when she hasn’t been sleeping much for the past week. You wouldn’t switch around cause and effect, starting to diagnose symptoms as the cause: “Well, he is getting a cough. Maybe he’s looking so ragged because he’s getting a cold;” or “Oh, she has a flu. That’s why she looks so tired.” Instead, you’d know right away that his or her immune system is struggling because it’s weakened from lack of sleep or proper nutrition. 

However, we often see people do just this with their plants—especially among very traditional gardeners, those newer to gardening, and those who are overwhelmed with information yet failing to get desired result. Gardening literature often doesn’t help, as most gardening books do this as well. Sure, some might spend a little time mentioning proper sunlight, water, and soil in the very beginning, but they almost always give them short shrift, quickly moving on to what they clearly really want to get into, which is also almost always diagnosing symptoms and voluminous individual species accounts rather than getting at the true root causes. Guided by literature skewed in this way, many gardeners are led to skip over the most basic, major, obvious needs that aren’t being met and instead start trying to “fix” them by diagnosing the symptoms as the cause. 

Tons of direct sun, the proper amount of water, and deep, rich, loose soil are what powers your plant. Your plants need an immense amount of direct sunlight, a precise amount of water, and wonderful soil. If you give them that, in almost all cases, diseases, insect problems, leggy or stunted growth, …you name it, will take care of themselves, just like the cold and the flu will with your child if you get them some rest and proper nutrition, just like you’d know your stove or vacuum aren’t working because the key ingredient for it to work, electricity, isn’t there. Solve the big issues first, and it’s very likely your only remaining problems, if you have any, will be much smaller and easier to handle.

Before going any further, however, we might want to address an even bigger issue, one close to the heart of all who toil in the soil.

Why Garden?