My top 7 gardening mistakes (so far)

Raspberries overtaking the limbs of an apple tree.

A hot topic in my corner of academia right now is “traditional ecological knowledge.” One representation of that idea: The people responsible for producing the food we all eat must have a deep well of knowledge about the living world. How deep seeds of different crops should be planted, what wild species can be used as food or medicine, early signs of pest and disease trouble, what animal or plant activity signals a change in seasons, and so forth. This knowledge may or may not be explicitly “traditional” in the sense of being passed down within a culture through generations. A good portion of it is probably sensory, intuitive, and hard to catalogue in books—akin to the experience that allows a skilled cook to produce a delicious dinner without a recipe.

For small farmers in the Global South especially, this sort of expertise is often underrecognized and devalued. The true holders of scientific knowledge, it’s supposed, are people with white collar jobs and advanced degrees. Farmers are often cast as the passive recipients of the advice and technology developed by the experts. Or worse, ignorant rubes whose backwards ways perpetuate their poverty.

These framings are laden with “knowledge politics” that ascribe value to some forms of expertise and not others. But in reality, traditional ecological knowledge plays a critical role, alongside modern science, in keeping us all from starving. (What if we drop some agronomy PhDs onto a few acres of land and tell them they have to survive off only what they can produce with their own hands? Then we’ll see who the real experts are!)

When we started our backyard “food forest” garden in late 2023, I wrote that I hoped it would offer some as-then undefined perspective on my academic study of food and agriculture. One lesson has been underscoring how much of this practical knowledge I do not have, and how much there is to learn: Fruit trees need pruning, but trim plums later than peaches. Some seeds need a supplemental heat source to germinate, some don’t. Underwatering might cause leaves to curl, but so could overwatering.

I’ve made no shortage of mistakes in the course of learning all this. The garden project has also underscored where that knowledge is held in my own communities. Many of my errors probably could have been avoided if my mom or one of my aunts were looking over my shoulder. There’s value in having the direct experience as a learning vehicle, though.

We’ve had plenty of success too. For most of 2024, we were able to “shop” for produce in the backyard instead of the grocery store pretty much whenever we wanted. We didn’t have to return in earnest to grocery store purchasing until our large chest freezer was emptied of stored veggies in mid-winter.

So, with no shame or regret, I want to share some of my biggest blunders so far:

7. Using wood chips as mulch in vegetable beds

The city’s brush processing site is down the street from us, and so we have essentially unlimited access to free wood chips a short drive away. After planting vegetables this spring, I got a few loads of wood mulch to top the vegetable beds. As I put layers of wood mulch down in raised beds, I wondered in the back of my mind why more people don’t do so.

Turns out there’s a reason: the microbial activity involved in wood decomposition consumes soil nitrogen, leaving plants with less nutrients. Whoops. I would guess that wood mulch works fine for perennials because plants with deeper roots are less dependent on nutrients near the soil surface.

I’m not sure whether it’s been long enough for the chips to do real damage. We’ll see though, because once they are down, removing wood chips from soil is not exactly a trivial task. But in their place we now have straw, plus a little bit of organic fertilizer for a nutrient boost.

6. Overwatering seed starts

This year and last year I tried my hand at starting vegetables from seed. I knew that seeds needed moisture, but didn’t think overwatering was likely, so last year I kept them pretty wet. The germination rate was fairly poor and I think this was the reason.

5. Underwatering seed starts

This year I think I overcompensated in the other direction. Germination was pretty good for some seeds, but poor for others.

To be honest, I’m not 100% sure what’s going wrong here, but I do think I kept the soil on the dry side. This is clearly a skill I’m still mastering.

A passionflower that survived the winter.

4. Haphazard raspberry planting

We got a handful of raspberry canes last spring, and I sort of just threw them into the ground in a few different places without thinking much about it.

I did not realize how aggressively these guys spread. In their second spring, they started popping up in a variety of new places near the original plants. This isn’t a huge problem, because we’re happy to have more of them, up to a point. But I’ve already had to start pruning and transplanting to keep them from encroaching on trees, vegetables, and flower beds.

3. Overlooking winter protection

All the perennials we’ve planted are known to grow in sub-zero Wisconsin winter conditions, but for a few more fragile species, like pawpaw and passionflower, some extra protection is recommended. I basically forgot about this in the time between spring planting and the onset of the cold season. I belatedly piled some mulch on the pawpaw seedlings in December or January, and didn’t do anything at all for the passionflower.

We didn’t have much serious cold this winter, so I got off free on this one, other than one tropical herb that I didn’t think to cover or move indoors. The pawpaws are growing new leaves and the passionflower has sprouted. This could have been a costly oversight, though, had the weather been different.

2. A poorly calibrated irrigation system

Last year, before leaving for two months of research in Central America, I rushed to install a drip irrigation system for our annual plants. The goal was to allow my wife Sophie to water all our plants by simply flipping a switch each morning (and then of course saving us time and water in the years to come).

We got the system in place, but without much time to fine-tune the details. As a result, the pressure was way too high and instead of a steady drip targeted to plant roots, the system blasted some leaves with a sprinkler-like spray from below. Not as efficient at delivering water, and not great for the health of plants. This created some disease that pretty much killed a patch of strawberries, but thankfully they were old and needed renewing anyway. I’m sure it also wasn’t great for our vegetables, which showed some signs of disease by the end of the growing season.

I’m going to install a pressure regulator for this summer, and make sure all the holes in the drip hose are actually pointed towards the soil.

Should’ve protected this trunk a little better.

1. Underestimating the rabbits

At the beginning of our first full season in the house, we planted half a dozen or so trees as well as some vines and shrubs. I was very focused on getting everything in ground, with the hope getting fruit as soon as possible. Maybe for that reason, I was a bit blasé about protecting trunks and stems once everything was planted. By mid-summer, some small critter had gnawed through the bark of a pear tree, girdling the trunk and leaving it slowly to wither over the remainder of year. And once winter came and I stopped checking the yard frequently, rabbits went to town on everything young and woody, chomping the heads off lots of our grapevines, raspberries, and woody shrubs.

The only thing killed outright was the pear, but we lost the whole year’s aboveground growth on several other vines and bushes. So much for getting fruit as soon as possible. This winter, everything living is going to be protected with tree tape or tubes. Lesson learned, hopefully.