9 Garden Mistakes We Won't Repeat Next Year

It's fall here at the Epic Garden. We had a great season this year, but next year could be better. So in this video, we're going to go over nine things we did this year that we won't be doing in our gardens next year. The first thing that quite frankly, I don't want to do next year or any year in the upcoming seasons is buy bulk soil or compost without vetting the source very carefully. Last year I bought some compost that just wasn't that great. And then earlier on in my gardening journey at my old house, I bought some soil that I put in all these birdies beds back in the early days that gave me one season of good growth. And that was it. So what I recommend is if you're going to buy a lot of soil at once, where a truck's coming to deliver it, you really want to get a small sample, give it a test. You can even send it into a soil test and see if it's actually good because otherwise you just committed your entire garden to potentially years of poor performance. One of the hardest things to do as a gardener is to walk away from a plant once it's done. These shishito peppers, for example, are now well past their prime as we are now in November. And they're not really doing anything for me. There's quite a lot of them on the plant because I kind of got sick of them because I ate way too many in the summertime. So what I should have done is come through here and remove those plants when I knew that I wasn't going to be eating anymore. Instead, I've left them here to slowly die and wither away and really just take up space, nutrients, water, and sunlight that I'm never going to get back because we are now going into winter and the sunlight hours are decreasing. And that's why it's so important to get your plants in like your garlic or your brassicas like I have in that bed behind me. And so it's really a critical thing to know when to walk away from a plant. And that can be a personal thing. Maybe you just got enough shishito peppers. You don't need anymore or their plant is looking very sickly and dying and it's time for it to go. So just remember, it's important to know when to walk away from a plant when you're done with it. One thing I should have thought through a little bit more was the use of this large eight by eight spot that's in full sun. It's flat and it has pretty decent soil. So at the beginning of the year, I was really excited about growing a whole bunch of neat cereal crops like baby corn, sorghum, millet, teff, um, oats, and even rice. But after a whole summer of waiting, this was all I could harvest. So this is some rice. And as you can tell, yields like this out of a spot this big is really, really awful. Even though I love experimenting with different plants in the garden every year next year, I don't think I'm going to dedicate so much prime real estate to growing plants that may not be great performers in my area or may not be great with yields. So in looking at this space, I know I can definitely fit at least 10 tomato plants, some cucumbers, squashes, beans, even, especially if a bunch of them were grown vertically. So that would have really changed up the yields and how I felt about the space because I just felt that this area was not really a waste of space, but it wasn't very exciting because there wasn't really anything that I could harvest from throughout the season. These rows that I'm standing in here were one of my biggest mistakes this year. Now it might not look like much right now because all of these dahlias are dead and we're getting ready to dig them up. But when these were growing, this was a major mistake that I made this season. Even though I'm in my fifth season here of farming and growing dahlias, I still make mistakes too. And the spacing between these two rows was much too close. So the spacing and getting down this walkway to get to these plants and get them maintained and get them cut back regularly and deadheaded was really problematic. So while our spacing between dahlias is usually about a foot and we made our walkways two feet. If I were to put dahlias next to each other like this in rows again, I would definitely give them a bigger walkway and make sure they each had enough room so that we could get to them. Spacing is really key in the garden. So make sure that you're planning ahead. The next thing you won't find me doing next year is starting the right amount of seeds, which sounds absurd. How could you have a good garden unless you start the right amount of seeds? I'm going to start way more seeds than I need my friends. Why? I was just out here a little bit ago and it wasn't raining and storming. The weather can be weird. You can lose seedlings to weather. You can lose them to disease. The seedlings might not look super healthy. So if you plan 100% of what you think you need and that's all you plant, chances are you're only going to get about 75 to 80% of these things to be nice and healthy by the time it goes into the beautiful garden. And let me tell you this, the health of your seeds from germination all the way up to the seedling stage is the most important time to be really paying attention. Because if you have any flaws or potential issues at this point, it's just going to grow out that way in the garden. So I'm going to start roughly twice as many seeds as I need. It doesn't take a lot of extra time. You're already in that mode when you're planting and starting your seeds. Throw a couple trays on. You'll thank yourself in the season to come. Wait, Jacques, aren't you supposed to be at your house telling everyone what they shouldn't do next year? Yeah, but we said we were going to do that sponsor section in the middle. The sponsor section? Why don't we just sponsor the video ourselves? Guys, you know that we are supported by you. Whether you're watching our videos or you're purchasing some of the products that we've started to carry. And I think most of you think we just sell these raised beds. Yeah, we definitely sell a lot more. We sell a lot more. We sell this, we sell this, we invented this. So what we're doing is sponsoring our own videos, saying thank you for watching and also saying that we have a Black Friday promotion going on. We're on our store. If you buy $500 or more worth of gear for next season, you get in a hundred dollar digital gift card for free immediately. And we've got a couple of bundles that Jacques, I and some other creators have put together to kind of get you, get your brain going a little bit and see if there's something that either you want to gift a friend or grab for yourself. So thank you for watching our videos. Thank you for supporting our products. Jacques, why don't you get on back over and teach them what to do. Now that we got that out of the way, I can now share with you my next mistake. This mistake involves compost and it's probably something that a lot of you guys have done in your garden that is using too much compost and not really using it in the right way or at the right time. This right here is actually my first major no dig bed that I built and it was built originally off a pile of cardboard and a bunch of compost. Now this did end up working in the end, but at the beginning it was quite rough. I'll have to say that nothing really did that well. So let me bring you to another bed to show you how you could actually fix this problem in the future. Let's leave that no dig behind and take a look at this gigantic no dig bed right here. Now this bed is almost entirely made out of compost that's been layered on top of the native soil. What you see here is that most of it is actually totally uncovered. And what I mean by uncovered is that it's just compost sitting on the surface. And what happens is that when the sun hits that compost, it immediately dries out and it stops it from being moist enough for microbes and things like that to live in it. And if those microbes are not in your compost, they're not breaking it down. What that means is that unfinished compost will actually block out nitrogen from your plants and end up stunting them from their growth. So the secret to actually fixing that problem is to simply mulch it on top. You could use anything like straw, fallen leaves or wood chips, whatever you have available really. But what the straw will do is actually create a little vapor barrier. And as you water that bed and it starts evaporating, it'll hit the straw and re-hit the surface of your compost, making it nice and moist for those microbes and earthworms to actually break it down and make it available for your plants. In the spring and fall, I usually like to grow an assortment of cover crops, especially in those beds that are looking a little bit vacant. And field peas are my favourite because they grow really fast and they create a nice lush green cover. And it looks really pretty, especially going into the fall and winter months. However, this year I kind of missed the window for sowing the peas. So springtime is not so much a big deal because if you sow them in the spring while it's still cool, as the temperatures rise, the plants grow quickly and there's still a good enough window for growth before you need to put the warm season plants in its place. However, for cover crops to do their best work over the cooler season, they need to enter this cooler period at a more mature state. So unfortunately, my first round of field peas didn't germinate or they were eaten. And because everything got pushed back, if I sow them now, they are not going to really grow into that nice lush cover that I was talking about. So next year, definitely I need to sow at least a month earlier. And that way I'll have a nice green blanket. But for this year, thankfully, I have a whole bunch of leaves and straw that I can use as mulch. Now, it might not look like much right now because it's late fall and a lot of this is dormant. But this is an area that we've been working on turning into a native grass prairie. And we're incorporating a lot of different plants into that. But what we've been doing is planting in plugs. And we got some advice that we should plant a cover crop in here to help keep the weeds down, which sounded like a great idea at the time. But this ended up being one of the biggest mistakes that we made this season. What happened was we planted in the oats and the oats actually did so well that they ended up choking out a lot of the plugs that we had planted. So the plugs that we had planted that were all these native grasses and native plants had trouble getting sunlight and getting water because the oats were so huge. We actually ended up having to cut down the oats and even then they regrew a couple of times. So it ended up making a lot of extra work. In hindsight, I probably would have just hand weeded this area because it would have been less work. I'm emerging from a cornfield that we thought would be an incredible success here at the garden this year. And in fact, it wasn't a failure. But guys, it wasn't awesome. We wanted it to be this huge, amazing maze. And it brings me to my point here. I'm not going to really stress that much about some of my major failures in the garden. In fact, I made a whole video on this on TikTok about how things just don't go to plan a lot of the time in the garden. And in fact, that's where you learn the most. If you mess a tomato up, you get way more information about how to be a better gardener than if you actually succeed with the tomato. So those are our tips. If you want to know some crops we also don't plan to grow next year, check this video out. And don't forget about our epic Black Friday sale, which is going on right now. Good luck in the garden and keep on growing.