- Placing or Planting Identical Plants together or in a row: This may sound weird but it’s true. Though it may look nice with a tidy row of similar trees in your garden or even if it’s container gardening, you tend to place one type of similar plants together. This is a bad idea because If pests or disease strikes, you’ll lose the whole row.
- Transplanting a Seedling: Many gardeners tend to hold the little ones with their tender stems. This is wrong, because stems are tender and this can damage the water and food conducting tubes – that’s xylem and phloem passing through the stem. Always lift the seedlings by their leaves and use a fork or a spoon to dig through the roots.
- Immediately Repotting a Newly Purchased Plant from a Nursery: If your plant just came home from a local garden centre or nursery, let it adjust to its new environment for atleast a week before repotting it. This is because the Plants are already in shock in their new place and they need to adapt to new factors like light, temperature, and humidity conditions. On the contrary, if your purchased a plant online, you have to repot it immediately for reasons, quite obvious.
- Over Confidence: One of the biggest mistakes sometimes experienced gardeners make is over-reliance on their own experience and knowledge. You are never perfect and the most successful gardeners are usually those who are willing to continue learning and growing in their knowledge.
- Removing the Root Ball while repotting: Never pull out the plant by its stem to remove the root ball. Just tap the container on a hard surface gently, it will easily come out. If it resists, run a knife around the container to loosen the root ball.
- Using Contaminated or Dirty Tools: We’ve all been guilty of this one time or another. Digging in different pots of soil with the same tool can transfer pathogens from an afflicted plant to a healthy one. Investing in multiple sets of trowels or spades may not seem to be practical. What you can do is disinfect or clean the tool after use or just wash it with water. You can use household baking soda or even vinegar for cleaning your tools.
- Placing a Repotted plant in Direct Sunlight: This is another common mistake most of us commit. The plant is already in transplant shock after repotting. Always keep the plant in indirect light or shade for at least a week before you shift to full sunlight.
- Planting Too Close Together: That’s Spacing: Whether its planting seeds or saplings, planting too close to each other is not useful and will lead to stunted growth of plants due to competition for nutrients in the soil.
- Sowing Too Deeply: This is a common mistake most neophytes commit. If you sow too deep, the seed may not germinate. The general rule of thumb is, the seeds should be sown twice or max thrice as deep as they are thick. For example, if the seeds are 5mm thick, sow them 10mm deep. If the seeds are too tiny like less than 1 mm, simply sprinkle them on the top of soil.
- Removing the Mother Soil during repotting: You should never remove the entire mother soil in which the plant came with during purchase, unless the soil is too clayey or if its afflicted with disease like fungus gnats or stuff like that. Just tease the roots and place the root ball into the new container while repotting.
- Killing Beneficial Insects and Pollinators like honey bees and butterflies. And also the pest eating insects like ladybugs, beetles and many more.
- Over Watering: This is the most common mistake and the biggest plant killer. Over watering or water suffocating the roots can lead to root rot and death of the plant. The best practice is to dip your finger to about an inch into the soil to check for moisture before watering.
- Over Fertilizing: Over feeding the plant with fertilizers especially the chemical fertilizers in an attempt to make them grow faster can literally kill your plant. The best fix to this problem is to use organic fertilizers like vermicompost, decomposed cowdung and stuff like that and stay away from chemical fertilizers.
- Not Following Hardening-Off Process: Hardening Off means you gradually expose your seedlings to the outside world mainly the sunlight and get them acclimatized. Once you get your first leaves on your seedlings, you introduce them to sunlight in an incremental or step by step exposure like for example,1 hour for the first day, 2 hours for the next 2 days and so on.
- Not Closely Inspecting Pest Attacks: Pests need to be identified and eliminated carefully. Failure to control the pests like aphids, whiteflies, mealy bugs and others can cause heavy damage to your plants.
- Hesitating to Prune or Trim Your Plants: Pruning or trimming is very much beneficial to the plant and promotes more branching and hence increases the yield. You can watch a detailed video on when and how to prune from a link in description below.
- Allowing Weeds to grow: This is an act of laziness rather than mistake. Unwanted plants or weeds will suck out the nutrients from the soil and cause deficiency issues in your main plant.
- Not knowing the Importance of Sunlight: Without Sunlight, Plants cannot prepare their food and survive. However the light requirement for every plant is different. But expecting to grow vegetables and fruits without full sunlight exposure is a mistake. As a general rule for most flowering and fruiting plants at least six to eight hours a day of direct sunlight is indispensable.
- Planting invasive plants close to other plants. This can cause deficiencies in the weaker plants closer to the stronger invasive ones. As You all know – SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST!
- Relying on Unscientific Information in Gardening: This is the most dangerous mistake. Newbie gardeners tend to watch so many crappy non-scientific gardening information and advices on the internet and damage their plants. Little bit of common sense and applying some basic science is all that’s necessary for successful gardening.
Happy Gardening!
Here, Summer is completely gone and monsoon is at its peak and this month of August is the best time for sowing vegetable seeds.
As I have discussed in one of my videos titled 15 major gardening mistakes, one of them is sowing wrong seeds in the wrong time. So, Some Vegetables and fruits grow only in certain Temperatures, Humidity, and Soil PH levels, so it is critical to know which season is compatible to grow our plants.
In India, We have three main seasons:
Summer or Pre-monsoon season – Occurring from April to June
Monsoon or Rainy season -Lasting from July to September
Winter season – Lasting from December to Feb.
In July, the rains start and temperature levels fall and the soil cools down. So, August is the ideal time to sow some vegetable seeds.
Well, we will list out the vegetable seeds one by one with results of some of them. But before that, I want to share you this package of seeds containing 45 different varieties, I purchased this from amazon website. It came in a very well packaged and well arranged container and also comes with an instruction leaflet. Initially I did not believe this, but the results were really exceptional.
CHECK OUT THIS SEED PACKAGE ONLINE
So, lets start:
- All Types of Gourds and Squashes: Like Bitter Gourd, Ridge Gourd, Bottle Gourd, Pumpkins and many others including cucumber. You can see, I have sown these gourds. Theres nothing special about the sowing technique. Just remember a simple tip on the depth of sowing, like you need to sow double the thickness of the seed. You can checkout my video on 25 seed hacks from my video collection.
You can watch video below to see the results. Will update your on how these thrive further possibly at facebook or instagram,
- Radish, Carrots and also beets and Onions, now or after a month. Choose deeper containers for these underground veggies or root crops. And also maintain sufficient spacing when you sow these. You can see the result of some of these.
- Beans and Peas: This is the best season for sowing beans and peas. Just sow them normally and see the result in few days.
- Green Leafy vegetables, you can get good results with Spinach, Lettuce, Coriander, and others. You can see the results of this package on your screen.
- Well, next. You can also sow Other seeds like Tomatoes, Brinjals, cauliflowers and capsicum.
The results of this online seeds was 99 percent to me, that’s really exceptional. You get lot of varieties of veg seeds in this package for just 250 INR, that’s less than about 4 US dollars.
CHECK OUT THIS SEED PACKAGE ONLINE