“I think we are starting to see a new breed of gardener and garden writer who is no longer willing to accept or dispense information without first-hand experience or scientific testing.”

excerpted from The Kat’s Garden

Glad to see people in agreement with me…

I think that there have been some garden writers who have reprinted the information that they read without stepping foot in the garden themselves… And if the information was accurate, there might not be a particular problem…

Commonly accepted gardening practices aren’t always the best…
I’ve had people suggest that the mulch should be pulled away from the plants to allow the soil to warm up…

I found it hard to credit that idea…. Here in the deep south, we don’t need to hurry that particular process… Rake the mulch away from the plants means that the seedlings get cooked, those little feeder roots on the surface of the soil get injured, and you lose the nutrients absorbed by the mulch…

If some garden writer up in Yankee country theorizes that warming the soil is a good idea, let him try it first… and report back… I thought it was a terrible idea…

There are practices that are published on the gardener’s calendar each year that I feel need tweaking time-wise… things like the correct date for rose pruning… the calendar suggests February, and I feel like waiting past the last cold snap that we ALWAYS get in March makes better sense… Or as this rose pruning video suggests, let nature herself suggest the proper time…. Paul Zimmerman isn’t afraid to use his own common sense, instead of blindly following the volumes of published information.

When people tell me about practices that run completely counter to my own intuition… Stuff that other people have told them, and they think that these new practices will get them additional blooms… I usually advocate the side by side practice… If they MUST try this ridiculous practice, at least test it against some of the same plants that this isn’t being done to… Like as not, there will be little improvement, or even negative results with the extra efforts expended…

I believe that 90% of gardening is observation….