I love visiting Quora.com and answering people’s questions on gardening, landscaping and trees. I do it when time permits and, if the new coronavirus gets worse, I might have a lot of free time soon.
The question
I pick questions I like and can answer properly; I don’t really have time to do heavy research for other people. And so, this past February I answered what I considered to be a simple question:
“What’s the first lesson in gardening?”
Quora has since edited the question to “What is gardening?’ but you get the idea. So, I grabbed my mobile phone and blasted out a quick answer, hoping to encourage a few gardening beginners.
Simple answer
“Soil! Everything starts with soil. Get good soil, don’t poison it with chemicals and amend it with compost every year. Cultivate your weeds out; don’t let them flower and drop seeds into your garden beds.
When you find earthworms in your soil, be glad. The rest is easy.”
Daily digest
Now, imagine my surprise when Quora informed me some days later that my answer above was sent in their Daily Digest e-mail to over one-thousand people interested in gardening. Awesome. Now I understand why people want to go viral. It’s exhilarating.
Lessons
What lessons can we learn from this, aside from the fact that Vas is a genius?
A) Gardening is extremely popular as a topic and niche. People love to garden and start gardening. Often, they don’t know how. So it makes sense to start with good soil because it really is, I believe, the key to success. You can get great seeds, bullet-proof vegetables and flowers but if your soil is marginal, so will be your plants.
B) People know instinctively that using chemicals in their gardens is short-sighted. We need to encourage life in the soil, not demolish it with poisons.
It used be people would stress about the physical components of soil but now we’re finding out that the life in the soil is critical. Which is why finding earthworms in your garden is a blessing. And trust me, there are plenty of other smaller creatures down there, turning over and enriching the soil.
Adding compost is always a great idea. For example, when I rented a small community garden plot years ago, the garden club would host a compost day every year because it’s important to build up the soil.
C) It’s not easy. I lied. The rest isn’t really easy because you have to put in some work, especially for weeding. Thus my tip on never letting weeds flower and develop seeds. You must take action before copious amounts of weed seeds drop into your precious garden.
I hope you will try gardening for yourself and derive your own lessons from your labours. And if you need some inspiration, I can suggest two great books. One is from the UK, and one from the US. Both books have the same message: you can’t do much about the big picture but you can start with your own garden.
“The Garden Jungle” was written by Dr. D. Goulson and “Bringing Nature Home” by D. Tallamy. Good luck.
