Bizarre gardening lessons you have learned.....

Rummer

In gardening there are so many lessons that you learn over the years and most of them are strange and interesting ones, so come on and share!


I learned yesterday that if you do not pin the leaves of cauliflower the heads go a patchy lilac colour !

invisiblecabbage

useful thread you have started, but what do you mean by 'pin'. thanks

Rummer

Use the leaves to cover the head, one site recommended safety pins the other elastic bands.

Rummer

Meant to add so the head is not exposed to sunlight!

frivolous_fay

Putting tomato feed on tomatoes neat makes tomatoes turn up their toes.

rhiwfield

Dont build a series of raised beds using a screwdriver... use a drill driver instead to avoid 18 months tendonitis of wrist and thumb

Joly_Roger

This reading like the satirical top tips section of Viz.

Here's one from me, which I personally learnt a few months ago.

When working with cement/ bricks in the garden, only mix up enough cement for an hour, not so much cement that you have to work solidly though the entire night laying bricks in the garden. Otherwise the darkness & sleep deprivation will cause your workmanship to suffer, as you will discover in the morning when the sun comes up.

elsien

When your plants start coming up in the spring, wait and see what they turn into as otherwise you find you've weeded out all the wood anenomes you paid a fortune for online.
Sounds like a statement of the bleeding obvious rather than a bizarre thing I've learned, but I surely can't be the only one?

Jojo_the_Tightfisted

When someone else in the family tells you that they've watered the plants, go and check that they haven't consistently forgotten the tomatoes, the herbs, the beans and the lettuces, as well as all the house plants.

When they offer to help tidy up a bit, hide the secateurs, as they will just tidy up your slightly dry climbers by chopping them off at the bottom, leaving the remainder of the plants dying on the trellis.

Lotus-eater

When you meet someone who has grown for years and years and you have one or two years successful growing under your hat, do not contradict said "expert" if he offers advice, because next year it will come back and bite you in the behind.

And never expect two years to be the same.

If you water when it looks like rain, it will rain. If you don't water because it looks like rain, it won't.

Jojo_the_Tightfisted

And never, ever let on to an 'expert' of many years standing that you grow things organically. You'll get hours of lectures about it being no different, the world would starve if everyone did the same, your 20kg of tomatoes that you don't know what to do with would have been 100kg with chemicals, the plant that has died due to slug damage would have been ok if you had put slug pellets out and you wouldn't have had badgers digging up your onions (mainly because they would have been dead) - oh and did they mention that badgers are vermin and will kill everyone with TB - and the only good fox is a dead one - same as with otters - and those animal libbers are nutcases - and what's wrong with all the chemicals being banned by the EU - it's all about tax and control with them -

and you'll still be there an hour later - wishing you had hidden the packaging of the organic growbags when you unloaded them from the car...