Gardening tips: You DON'T need a GREEN thumb

You don’t need a green thumb when you’ve got the basic gardening tips down. Anyone can learn to garden. Over the years I’ve learned that you don’t have to know everything about gardening to have a fruitful season.

It’s more about your level of commitment than about your knowledge. If you can commit to the work of planting, weeding, and watering, you can have a productive garden.

Of course there are some basic supplies you’ll need such as:

Yard space or containers
Seeds or starter plants
Compost
Fertilizer
Garden Tools

It doesn’t matter if you don’t know anything about a specific plant variety. Thanks to the internet, you can research just about any plant or vegetable within minutes.

Gardening tips for growing your favorite veggies

Below you’ll find links to sites that provide some of the best gardening tips for growing the most common fruits and vegetables. You can find just about everything you need to know just by browsing internet. Here are a few links to save you time.

These are just a few of my favorites. Leave a comment below if you’d like me to provide links for other crops that I haven’t mentioned above.

Get gardening tips from Youtube videos

If you’re more of a visual learner, you can find some very helpful gardening tips on Youtube. Here are a few short videos that can help you get started.

How to start a garden

This video has some awesome gardening tips that will help you carefully plan and learn to garden. It will help you select the best site for your garden, how to prepare the soil and building a soil bed. It also provides simple tips for weed prevention.

How to start a raised bed garden

This video will show you how to make an inexpensive raised bed, quickly and simply.

Gardening tips for vertical gardening

This video shows you where to find inexpensive gardening supplies and how to make a vertical garden planter.

How to avoid common garden mistakes

This short video gives great insights on mistakes to avoid.

How to make your own compost

I love the simple compost making tips in this video.

Learn by doing and experimenting

Most people learn by doing, so one of the best gardening tips I can give you is this: just start! The experience will teach you quickly what works and what doesn’t. I love experimenting and gardening is perfect for that.

Try experimenting with produce you purchase from the grocery store or farmers markets. When you buy sweet potatoes, try placing one in a jar of water and watch it sprout roots.

You could also try planting cloves of garlic from from the grocery store. Last year I grew some of the best tasting, beautiful purple skinned garlic from cloves I had purchased at the store.

If you fail, keep trying

The beautiful thing about gardening, is that failure doesn’t mean the end. It only presents learning opportunities. Some people think that just because a few plants have died in their care, that it means they can’t grow anything. That’s just not true. All the gardening tips in the world won’t help you if you quit. I still have failures – that doesn’t mean I’m going to stop gardening. Sometimes things just happen, sometimes plants get over watered, underwatered, not enough sun, not enough nutrients or who knows what else. That doesn’t mean that you can’t try to grow something else and succeed.

Why gardening is so worth it

There are three main reasons why I garden: for health, wealth and therapy.

Gardening for health

Growing my own food allows me to know for sure, exactly where my food is coming from. I can know for certain that I haven’t used in pesticides or herbicides and I can choose to grow organic, GMO free produce if I wish. I can ensure that my plants get the right nutrients which means my body will also receive the right nutrients.

Gardening for wealth

Growing my own fruits and vegetables allow me to save money. I’ve learned that I can produce high quality fruits and vegetables that taste tremendously better than produce at Walmart or any other grocery store and I can do it for a fraction of the cost. Yes, it may cost me in the time it takes to start a garden and tend to it, but it’s worth it to me. If I choose to, I could also sell my fresh organic produce, but I’ve learned that the produce is worth more to me to keep than sell.

Gardening therapy

Gardening truly revitalizes me. When I see things grow and progress, it really energizes me. I love the little surprises that each growing experience brings – it’s predictably unpredictable. The year I grew a canta-melon (a honey dew melon with cantaloupe colored flesh), from seeds that I had harvested from a cantaloupe, it was the highlight of the season!

I hope this post has motivated you and encouraged you to learn to garden this year. If you actually give it a try, I guarantee that you won’t regret it. Once you get a taste of your own produce, you’ll never want to go back to the grocery stores for those items again.

So what’s blocking you from starting your garden? Please share your response in the comments section.

Last updated: 02/13/15