Are You Doing It Wrong

If gardening’s not really fun anymore, it might be because you’re making one of the mistakes that we all make.

- Anna Celliers

I always tell gardening friends that I don’t think that there should be any rules to gardening. It is, after all, your property, your money and your labour that goes into a garden, not true?

But although it is okay to do exactly what you want or to allow your own creativity to lead you, it also makes sense to stick to some tried and tested principles that can help you to achieve gardening happiness and contentment.

1. Trees in purgatory

It’s exciting to plant a tree, and a lot of hope and dreams are invested in any tree that you bring home from the nursery. But the following stuff can go wrong:

The hole is a sump

We all know that a large hole should be dug when getting ready to put a tree in the ground. We also know that you never plant a R100 tree in a R2 hole, and we assume that you have made provision for bone meal or super phosphate and a bag of compost to add to the hole. But you need to remember to mix the compost properly into the excavated topsoil, and don’t use it unmixed to back fill the hole. In some soils, especially with heavy rain, this creates a spongy sump that can cause root disease, or even a tree drowning. Planting a tree too deep and not at the same level in which it was growing in its nursery container has the same effect.

The tree is encumbered