What makes You an "Easy" Gardener?

[Marie2020]

I don't really mean a participant in TEG. Although, that should certainly lead to learning about others' successes (& stumbles) and guide our own direction in the garden.

I mean something like this: I want success. So, I like diversity -- how can the stellar performance of the tomatoes, the okay performance of the peppers, and the poor performance of the eggplant be anticipated? After decades of experience, I can't even be confident of a guess.

There are 4 or 5 varieties of eggplants, about that number of peppers, and about a dozen tomatoes. Not all of them in those groups did poor, okay, and stellar! For sure, the Apple Green eggplant did better than any season out of the last several. The Giant Marconi and Mucho Natcho did just fine. The 4 tomato plants in "the neighbor's" garden here at home probably rate a C-. (I don't expect stellar performance for the potted cherries at the foot of the backsteps but those other4 were in the ground 🙁.)

Something else that makes gardening easier for me under this heading I suppose is a wishy-washy attitude. Of course, I'd call it flexibility. I'm willing to try new things. That's an important reason for me to be on TEG . @Trish Stretton is a no-pesticide gardener. Well, I try not to be poisoning things out there and tried something that I thought was an interesting idea this year - deterence. So, composted mint tea was sprinkled on the cabbage instead of insecticidal soap or neem oil. Aphids have entirely ruined cabbage plants some years. They showed up but it has been a super cabbage year and they really got ahead of the bugs. Was it that compost tea ? Maybe so.

Well, that's a couple of personal quirks that make gardening easier for me ...

Steve

That's a very interesting idea. I will try this, I the year 20/22/24 when I finally get my make shift greenhouse and raised beds up and running 🤔

 

[Niele da Kine]

Really raised beds (they're actually terraces for a steep hillside) has made gardening sooo much easier! Waist high weeding is way better than weeds down at toe level. Now it's really easy to pick out tiny weeds before they have time to do much more than sprout.

The raised beds are lined with weed mat to begin with so that cuts down on weeds. Then filled with soil and the top six inches are topsoil mixed with 'bunny berries' (rabbit manure). There's oyster shell mixed in to sweeten our acidic soil (oyster shell is sold at the feed store to feed to hens for thicker eggshells) and crushed charcoal is added in to keep the nutrients from washing out due to our high rainfall. Other than adding a few more inches of bunny berries and mixing it into the topsoil when planting, there's not much more that we do to the garden when planting.

We also plant things that have worked well before. Actually, it's seeds from what did well before. After a few seasons, we end up with seed that is really happy in our area. Not that we still don't try things that are marginal for our area. I keep hoping for peaches, but we really don't have the chill for them. We get a few small apples from a special low chill variety, but they're not the best apples. I've now decided to give up on cold place fruit varieties and plant citrus. Then we will be planting things that do well around here so that should be even less work.