Weird Things I Do in the Garden That Actually Work

You should be more weird when it comes to gardening. My name is Nicole Burke, and I am definitely weird. And I am definitely, definitely weird when it comes to gardening. Today I'm going to share with you some of the weirdest things I do in the garden that actually work well. Welcome back to the Grow youw Self podcast. This is the place to come to learn how to start a garden or how to start a garden business. Today we're going to talk about upgrading that garden. You started by doing some weird stuff. When I first started gardening, I taught myself. This was, I guess, the Internet. Yeah, the Internet was definitely around. It was like 2011. But I didn't have much time for reading the Internet because I had four kids that were tiny and crazy. And so I was spending almost all my time running around, chasing them, changing their diapers, cooking them dinner. And so I kind of learned to garden on the go and by myself outside in the wild with my plants. And I have to say, some of the results were not great, but a lot of the results were incredible. And I think part of it was because I didn't follow any directions. I wasn't, you know, trying to. To follow all the rules. Instead, I was just having fun. And that's my main message to you today, is that you should have more fun in the garden. In fact, that should be the one rule you keep gardening has to be fun. Because the more fun that gardening is for you, the more likely you're going to keep gardening. You're going to not want to skip it. You're not going to feel bad when stuff doesn't work out, because the whole point of the garden is for it to be fun. So here's some weird stuff that you can start doing in your garden that I've done in mine that I think make garden more fun and also sometimes actually work better. So the first is that I plant eight tomato plants on one arch trellis. So if you followed me, if you've seen my book Kitchen Garden Revival, it's right here on the front photo me with an arch trellis underneath, just tons of an explosion of tomatoes. So each and every season, I take one arch trellis. We'll have several. But on an arch trellis, I will plant eight tomato plants. The way I do this is I have the two sides, the two ends on one side of the arch, and I plant one tomato plant about 10 inches from that front piece of the arch and then 10 inches behind it. So these two tomato plants, even though they're right in a row and they're on the same side of the arch trellis in soil measurement, they're about 12 to 15 inches apart from one another. And then as they start to grow, I would just vine them up and connect them to the trellis. Then I do the same thing. On the other side of that same side of the arch, I'll put another two tomato plants. And then on the other side of the garden, in the other garden where that other. Where the arch trellis ends, I'll do the exact same thing. So four plants on one side of the arch, four plants on the other. And the results are not weird at all. They're amazing. So you want to grow indeterminate tomatoes. If you want to try this out, indeterminate means vining, or that it will continue to produce more and more leaves and growth as it goes through the season. And what happens is these four tomatoes on either side, they're just growing up and up and up and over this arch trellis until eventually they meet in the middle and then go past one another. And the results are spectacular. So 90 to 100 days after you plant your tomato plants, you're standing under this incredible thick arch that's got loads of tomatoes just bursting out of the arch. It's so beautiful and prolific, and it is so much easier to do than growing with a tomato cage. So when I first started, I. My husband bought some tomato cages, and even some of my first clients, I bought them tomato cages. And let me just say what happened. Disaster. It was terrible. These tomato plants grew so well. They had great soil underneath them. But I couldn't get to the plants to prune them or to, you know, support them because they were just all bunched inside this cage. Like, why do they need to be caged? Do you know what I mean? Like, tomatoes should be free, not caged. So I remember I went to this one client and his tomato cage had completely fallen horizontal because of all the tomato growth, and it actually broke the tomato plants that were doing so well. And I was like, never again. No more tomato cages in my life. And that's when I started using the tomato arch instead. So if you're growing tomatoes, be weird like me and put eight tomato plants on one arch trellis. Tell me in the comments if you think that's what you want to do this year. I'm hoping so. So that's number one, growing tomatoes on an arch trellis. Eight plants at once for just one arch. The second thing that I've done is I just take one packet of seed, particularly lettuce seed. It could be arugula or spring mix. And I just sprinkle it all, dump the whole seed pocket in one raised bed. And then I just get tons and tons and tons and tons of lettuce. So I love re placing my groceries with my garden. I don't do that with a lot of things because I'm not like a homesteader. But the one thing I definitely do replace is my lettuce greens. And I do that by taking one package of spring mix or arugula and literally dumping it over the entire bed. Usually it's a 4x4 bed and then just cutting lettuce after lettuce after lettuce, day after day after day. One way you can help spread out that seed if you're a little worried about this weird thing is you can take the seed, mix it with a little bit of sand. And what that will help you do is as you're spreading it over the soil, the sand you'll get, you can see the sand a lot more clearly than you can the seed. And so you'll see all the areas of the garden where you've already spread the seed. You won't double up anywhere. And then it also helps disperse the seed a little bit more evenly. So weird thing that I do that actually works is basically how does it work? You end up with a ton of lettuce and I'm talking a ton just from one seed packet. So don't hold back on that seed pocket. Don't just put like five or six seeds down. Plant the whole darn thing in one raised bed. All right. Another thing I love to do is to cover up my raised beds with flowers. So a huge question I get asked almost all the time is what about pests, what about pests? What about pests? What about pests? And one of the things that, you know, the one thing that is for sure way to fight pests is with fencing, with physical barriers. And you can definitely do that. But one of the things I prefer to do is living fences or plant barriers. And you can make plant barriers with native plants, with grasses, with flowers. Essentially you want to block the view of the garden from whatever pest you're trying to prevent it from coming in. So whether those pests are deer or rabbits or squirrels or whatever else, you can definitely put a physical barrier that's going to be the most for sure. But just an easy first step that maybe isn't as big of a commitment financially or space wise or even just aesthetically is just to plant some flowers. Plant Some grasses in between your lawn and your garden. So I've done that for years with flowers, especially, like zinnias and sunflowers and lots of herbs, things like that. So I've never read to do that in a book or seen someone else. But it's kind of like. Yeah, it's like a flower fence. And I just think flower fences are a great weird idea. So try it out. If you've got pests or if you've got things you're afraid of getting into your garden, try to block the site of the garden with some extra flowers and plants. Plants help plants, right? More plants is more. So let's go. All right. The next weird thing that I do is stuff plants into 1 12th the space recommended. So if you've ever noticed all those, you know, instructions on the back of your plant in your seed packages, they always tell you how far apart to put them from each and every plant. So here's the cool thing I realized. All right, so those directions, first of all, they're not meant for me as a gardener. They're meant more for a farmer. But also they're just talking about that particular plant. So the assumption is that you're only planting that kind of plant, right? They're just talking about how far apart to space the peppers or how far apart to space the tomatoes. The assumption is you're just planting a ton of tomatoes. You're just planting a ton of peppers. And so what I've learned is that, yes, maybe the peppers need to be a certain space between, but that doesn't mean you can't plant other kinds of plants in between those two pepper plants. You follow me? And so what I've started doing, what I started doing way back when, is just packing in as many plants as possible in between all the plants, essentially, oftentimes giving each plant 1/12 of the space that is recommended at least one half. Right? So never giving the full space recommendation, mostly because I'm not just planting one plant all by itself. I'm planting all these different plants all together. And that allows me to kind of mix and match to create this almost quilt of plants of lots of different types of plants together. And it makes it able for me to break the plant spacing rules. But there's other benefits to this. Hidden benefits to breaking rules. Don't tell my kids that there's hidden benefits to breaking rules, but one is that you help with pest protection. So when you don't have just a slew of all the same kind of plants in one bed, then A pest may jump onto one of your plants, but if there's a lot of other different plants around it, chances are they're going to maybe demolish that one plant, but they don't how far they can go to keep eating right. And so that helps with pest protection. And then also planting this way is going to protect your soil. It's going to keep your soil from drying out and protect the nutrients for that soil as well. So that's another weird thing I do in the garden that actually works. Next up is using a wedding veil to keep out caterpillars. So back in the day, I was. My first year of planting lettuce had so much success and no pests, believe it or not. But the second year, that one. That one wasn't as great. So we planted our lettuce seed, and I went to harvest one day and saw tons. And I don't. I'm not tons. Tons is a southern word. I don't know if you've heard of it, but it's. It's very technical. It means a lot. There was a lot of caterpillars in that lettuce, and it was pretty gross. And so I learned from that that the time to protect your lettuce is not. At that point. It was too late at that point. Yes, you could come back and spray some things. I just didn't really want to do that. And so the time to protect your plants is actually at the planting time. Right when those plants go into the garden. And so what I did. I know that there's all kinds of more technical agricultural fabrics and things, but actually what I did is I went down to Joann Fabrics and I bought a yar. What do they call that thing? Not. It's more than a yard. I bought the whole thing. I'm obviously not a quilter or a sewer or a seamstress, but I got bolt. Is it the bolt? I bought the whole thing of tulle, T U L L E, which is essentially wedding veil material, and I brought it home and I unwrapped it, and I covered my lettuce bed with it the moment that I planted it. And that some of the purest, cleanest, best lettuce ever. It had no pest issues because I used, technically, a wedding veil. So if you've got greens or if you've got something that needs protection from caterpillars, and especially like flying pests, things like that, then covering those plants with tulle with a wedding veil actually works. Why? Because it lets in light. It lets in Air, it lets in sun, sun and wind, but it does not let in anything that is smaller or larger than the gauge of the tool. And so moths and caterpillars and those kind of insects, they can't get through, but light, water and air can. So. So, yeah, wedding veil in the garden for the wind. All right. The next thing I do is I hide potatoes in the flower bed. If you've ever grown potatoes, you know, sometimes they can have bug issues and beetle issues. And potatoes also take up a lot of room. So I don't like putting potatoes in my raised bed garden. They take up a lot of space that I'd prefer to be for other plants, especially because potatoes in general are pretty easy. Put them in, you grow them, and then you take them out. And so there's not a lot of fuss. There's really not a lot of tending that you have to do. You don't have to do any pruning. And they're just big and bushy. And they also take up a lot of roots space. And so I learned after a couple times that potatoes should not go into my raised beds because that real estate is just too prime. I want to save it for the plants that really need the raised bed to grow in. So I started just going into my flower, my pollinator garden that's right in front of my kitchen garden. And I just started stuffing potatoes in there. And it gave this most beautiful look to the garden space. So I'd have these potatoes that are, you know, they provide. They look kind of like a bush, right? So you'd have all the flowers growing up and then these low lying greenery right around the base of those flowers. And then, you know, when it was time to pull up the potatoes, it wasn't like there was this big, open, ugly spot in the garden because the garden was surrounded with all these flowers. So I would just dig up the potatoes, you know, move things around, and you never know they had been there. So if you want to grow potatoes highly, highly recommend doing the weird thing of hiding them inside your flower beds. The next thing I love to do is grow pounds and pounds and pounds and pounds of beans on the edge of a raised bed. So beans can grow in a pole or a bush variety. This is only going to work for the bush variety. But essentially what you do is after you planted all the other important plants in your garden, you come back along the very edge of your bed and you just plant bean seeds about 4 inches apart from one another. The bush bean seeds, the bush bean plants are Kind of like a floppy kind of plant. So it's not like this upright, strong bush. It's, like floppy. And so the floppiness, I noticed, was taking up a lot of room in my garden, and I didn't like that. And so I thought, well, if I just plant this alongside the edge of the bed, it can just flop over the edge of the bed. And then the root system for a bean plant is pretty small, so it doesn't take up much room. And then you just have all these beans, like, hanging over the side of your bed. It's wonderful. So that's how I grow pounds and pounds and pounds and pounds of beans and really only take up this much space in the garden. I plant them along the edges of the bed. So that's a weird thing I do, and it actually works. Next up is planting flowers just for the bad bugs. So the idea here is to plant flowers that attract the bad bugs so that they'll go to those flowers and not go to the plants that you want to protect. So a fancy term for this I found out later, after I started doing it, is called a trap crop. Essentially, it's like a distraction. It's a. What's that called when, like, you're trying to break in somewhere and you have the, like. I can't think. Obviously, I'm not a thief either. But, like, that distraction, right, where it's like, it has nothing to do with the main event, but it gets everyone's attention. That's what we're going for with these plants. So nasturtiums are one of these. Calendula is another. I love planting loads of those two flowers in my garden because they bring the pest to them. Another one is zinnias, for those beetles. Stink bugs. Yeah. So I do those three flowers, zinnias, nasturtiums and calendula, knowing full well they're going to attract pests. Because my desire is that the pests go to those flowers and then leave the rest of my garden alone. Does it work every time? Nope, but it works a lot of the time. So that's another weird thing that I do that actually works. And then the last thing that I do that's super weird is I don't prune the suckers on my tomatoes. I know, I know. So suckers on a tomato are this. This part of the growth of the plant that comes up right in the. The arm of the plant. So if you imagine the main stem of the tomato growing straight up, and then it's got these horizontal leaves, what the Plant will do, if it's a vining plant, is it'll produce what people call a sucker, which is a new shoot that'll come right through the diagonal between the vertical and the horizontal stem. And that thing, believe it or not, called a sucker, could actually grow and become a brand new tomato plant if you pinch it off. And if you follow conventional wisdom, everyone says to pinch the suckers. And I did that for many years, and I ended up with just a few tomatoes. And most of those tomatoes got eaten by squirrels and, and birds. And so I was very disappointed. And I decided one year to not follow advice and just to leave the suckers. And I found something crazy. Now, I did still prune, but I didn't prune the suckers. I pruned the leaves. So any of those stems that just produce leaves, I cut those off. But I left the suckers. I realized that all those suckers, because they are essentially new plants, each of those produce fruit. And because I grow plants over an arch trellis, there was plenty of room to support all that sucker growth. And I got lots more tomatoes. So what I figured out is that you prune the suckers if you want bigger tomatoes, because you're going to get less, but they'll be bigger. But you keep the suckers if you want more tomatoes. And if you know anything about me, more is more. So I like increasing my chances of winning. I know that switch. Squirrels are going to take some, birds are going to take some, somebody else is going to take some. And so I want to be sure there's enough left for me. I prefer more over bigger. And so I leave all the suckers. I still do a ton of pruning. I prune away the leaves and the stems, not the main stems, but the side stems. But I always leave the suckers at least until I'm about two weeks to a month out from my last, my first frost that's going to kill the plant so that it can finish up and give me the rest of the tomatoes. All right, that's the end of the list of all my weird things I do in the garden that actually work. Another weird thing I do is plant all the time. And I made a calendar to show you how to do it, too. You can find it at gardenary.com calendar this calendar is awesome. All you got to do is put in two dates for where you live, and I'll tell you all the rest of the dates of when to plant what in your garden. You can get it@gardenary.com calendar and@gardenary.com you can find our upcoming workshops and how to Join me live to learn how to start your garden, how to start to upgrade your garden, or how to start a gardening business. If you love this episode, if you love being weird, come and tell me in the comments. Listen. I really think that if we all had more fun in the garden, the world would be a better place because all of us would be happier and we'd all be spending more time in the garden. So don't worry about all those rules. Conventional wisdom, it's worth it. Worth it for some things. But for a lot of things, the garden is really just meant to be a place for you to play and have fun and like me. Be as weird as you want. Thanks for listening to the Grow youw Self podcast. I'll see you next time. Thanks so much for listening to the Grow youw Self podcast. You can keep listening anywhere. You love getting your podcast delivered on Apple podcasts, on Spotify, iHeartRadio, you name it. We are there for you. And if you want to read the notes and get our free resources to help you grow more, you can go to gardenary.com podcast.