Gardening for Beginners Series： Gardening Basics for Beginner

Good morning everyone, my name is Janie and welcome back to my garden. I live in northern California in zone 9b. Two years ago we moved into this home in January 2020 and I had my first actual yard. I decided to teach myself to garden and I've been obsessed ever since. I've learned everything I know from trial and error, YouTube videos, blogs, and library books. When starting this gardening channel for YouTube my aim was to inspire small home gardeners to start their gardening journey and I think the most important thing is to start with the basics. I remember two years ago when I was starting my gardening journey not having any idea what was being talked about in gardening videos and in books and I had to look up every vocabulary term before I knew what I was actually supposed to do in my garden. So I'm really excited about the video today. Today is the first video in my gardening for beginners series. I plan to get into the nitty-gritty and the basics of gardening for all you new gardeners out there. I plan to release a new video every Monday on my channel so if this sounds like something that might be interesting to you please subscribe. Every week we'll work together working through the essentials and the basics of gardening so by the time the gardening season is in full swing you guys will be ready to go. Now let's get into the gardening basics for beginners starting with eight easy steps. Okay now let's start with step one which is know your zone and this is really important if you watch videos or read books that are written by gardeners that live in different climates than you and thus different zones than you. The map is divided up into USDA hardiness zones which defines a certain range of climate conditions. This will tell you how hot and how cold your area is and thus what plants will survive and thrive in your garden. To find your zone is very easy just type into Google something like growing zone and then your zip code and your zone should pop up right away. Once you know your zone then you'll know what kind of plants are available to you. For instance I live in zone 9b. If I was to look up an arctic fire dogwood from proven winners I would see that this shrub is hardy in zones 2 through 7. Since this plant is hardy in zones lower than mine I can safely assume that our summer heat will kill this plant. Alternatively if you live in a zone that is lower than the plant's hardiness zone such as a petunia that is only hardy in zones 10 through 11 which is higher than my zone 9b I can safely assume that the cold in our winter will kill this plant. This is usually what we call annuals in that the plant will survive for one of our growing seasons until the cold kills them in the winter and we have to plant new ones next year. So speaking of annuals I think it is important for new gardeners to understand the different types of plants. Annuals, perennials, shrubs and trees. If you go to your local nursery and see all these beautiful and colorful plants you need to know if they're going to last beyond one season or come back next year and next year and next. When I started gardening I wanted the biggest bang for my buck so I always focused on perennials that I knew were going to come back the next year the next year and the next. Now the trade-off with that is that usually perennials have less color than annuals. Perennials bloom for less of the season than annuals so it's a trade-off. So to break it down annuals will live for only one season or one growing year. However annuals tend to be more colorful and have a longer blooming season. If you watched my first YouTube video on Supertunia Vista Bubblegum you will have seen that these flowers bloom a bright vibrant pink from March when I planted them all the way through November. Good examples of annuals in most gardening zones are petunias and super bells. In my zone, zone 9b, a common perennial is lantana. Now in most zones in the country this is an annual and most people treat this as an annual. It's a beautiful sun-loving heat-loving plant that we are lucky enough to call a perennial here in northern California. So speaking of perennials, perennials will regrow every spring however they generally have a shorter blooming period during the year. Common perennials in my area are daylilies, hostas, hellebores, most salvias just to name a few. Shrubs are similar to perennials in that they'll become permanent elements in your garden. Shrubs can either be deciduous which means they will lose their leaves in the winter or evergreen which means they will keep their leaves green throughout the winter and provide great winter interest. Shrubs are usually woody stemmed and obviously smaller than a tree. Finally the last type of plant in your garden will be a tree. Trees are pretty self-explanatory. We know what trees look like however we have to remember that trees start small. They start as babies so what might look like a small shrub could actually grow over the years into a large specimen tree that we're all looking for. So step three in my basics for beginner gardeners is consider your watering system. New gardeners need to think about how they're going to water their garden. Are they going to hand water with a hose and a watering can or set up an irrigation system and have drip put to most plants? I live in a pretty hot and dry climate so if I relied on hand watering I'd be out here for way too long every day. So the time spent installing a drip system in my garden was well worth it. However if you lived in a cooler zone that got more water during the summer and during the winter hand watering might be great for you. I think the best thing to do for new gardeners is take a walk around your neighborhood, look down and see if you see an irrigation or a drip system. If you do most likely that's the way to go in your area and you might want to look into installing one yourself or consider hiring someone to install one for you. So this brings me to gardening step four which is actually don't over water your plants. This tip is for indoor gardeners as well as outdoor gardeners. When I first started gardening I thought the more water the better. That's what the plants need right? And I remember giving this beautiful bougainvillea a gallon of water every single day even as it was losing its blooms and losing its leaves and I just didn't know that I was over watering this drought resistant dry loving plant. I was basically killing this poor plant with kindness. Most new gardeners over water their plants. Just have that in the back of your mind when you are considering how much to water your plants. They usually need less water than you think. Okay so step five in my gardening basics for beginners is to watch out for pests. Most gardens will deal with their fair share of pests and that can ruin all your hard work very quickly. You will know you have pests by looking closely at your flowers or leaves. If they look chewed on you most likely have something in the garden taking a little snap. As a beginner the easiest thing to do is to take a sample of a leaf to your local garden center to have them diagnose it for you. They should be able to tell you what could be eating your plants and what you should do about it. Here in northern California the main pests I deal with are budworms that will eat your entire flower off of your plant if they get to it, earwigs, snails, slugs, white flies, just to name a few. There are easy ways to take care of this problem and manage these pests you just have to know what you're dealing with to know what to do. Step six your plants are hungry. Just like humans we need water and food to survive your plants need water and food to survive as well. Each type of plant has a different fertilizing requirement and a good rule of thumb to think about is the more blooms the more color the plant has probably the more fertilizer it's going to need. Take for example my Supertunia Vista bubblegums. They're probably the most abundantly colorful plant there is and therefore they need food every week during the growing season. Compare this to a perennial that only blooms for a few months out of the season and they might only need a dose of fertilizer once or twice a year. I think that once I started actually feeding my plants they became more vibrant and put on a show to thank me. I like to keep my fertilizing schedule set in the calendar on my phone so I have reminders to tell me when it's time to go feed my plants. Step seven is keep a plant journal. This is a ton of information and there's no way anyone can remember all of it. I like to keep my plant journal in my phone so I can look back on all the information that I have. I like to look on the plant tag and note when I can expect it to bloom how much and when I should be fertilizing and also when and how I should prune the plant if needed. Having this allows me to look back on my notes from when I first bought the plant so I can remind myself what I need to do to treat the plant accordingly. So this has been a lot of information I know. I felt the same way when I started gardening. There was so much information to learn out there and I felt like I was never going to be able to grow anything. The true secret is gardening is an art, it's not a science. It's trial and error and humans have been gardening for hundreds of years and have done a great job at it. We didn't always have YouTube videos or library books or blogs to reference. Gardeners just went outside and got started. I truly think the best way to learn how to garden is by trial and error. Find a plant at your local nursery that you love, take it home, plant it, water it, feed it, take care of it. If it doesn't live, that's okay. Take it as a learning experience. Did you over water it? Did you under water it? Did you plant it in the wrong spot in your garden? It's all a learning process. One day it just clicked for me when I was in my garden. I realized I was actually listening to my plants more than I was listening to YouTube videos and blogs and then I knew I was a gardener. Just get out there, dig, plant, water, and repeat. I hope this video has been helpful for all you new gardeners out there. Please join me next week for the next video in my gardening for beginners series where we talk about planning out a new garden. Thank you everyone for joining me today. If you enjoyed this video, please consider hitting the like button and subscribing. Have a wonderful day and I hope to see you all in another video very soon.