 Hello everyone, Rob Greenfield here in the garden and today I'm going to share my tips for beginner gardeners. So if you are out there feeling like you have a black thumb feeling like whatever you plant dies and you are dreaming of having a green thumb, dreaming of growing an abundance of food and having that fresh food on your table to eat, then this is the video for you. I actually feel like I'm in a really good position to be able to share these tips with you and the reason why is it's not that long ago that I was a complete rookie gardener myself. Go back just three years ago and I had grown very little food and then I launched into a year-long project of attempting to and successfully growing and foraging everything that I ate for an entire year and during that year I grew over a hundred different foods in my garden. So I quickly went from a beginner who had grown very little to a pretty experienced gardener who has spent hundreds of hours in my garden and in other people's gardens both in the United States and in other parts of the world. So I'm in a place where I can still remember the nights of frantic searching online and calling friends and seeds not sprouting and plants dying and just that that fear to now having the confidence and really being way beyond that beginner stage. So that's why I'm really excited to be able to share this advice with you from a recent beginner to a now pretty decent gardener. So my first tip is a really simple one and that is to start small. A lot of people have this dream of turning their whole yard into a garden and growing an incredible amount of food. That is a wonderful dream to have. I completely support it. But what a lot of people miss out on is the fact that it doesn't happen overnight that you go from having very little gardening skills to all of a sudden this paradisical garden. Everybody has to start somewhere and for a lot of us who don't have gardening in our background, our parents didn't garden where we're starting kind of from scratch as adults starting small is one of my absolute key places for beginner gardeners. So that could mean a small raised bed in your front yard. It could mean, you know, some plants on your balcony or your window sill. Don't put yourself down for any amount of food that you grow. Any amount of food you grow is a really positive step forward. So start small and each season you can add on more and more and more. And this will also build your confidence one step at a time. If you start with way more than you could possibly handle, often it gets away from you. You become overwhelmed and then you just kind of lose it all. So if that's the case for you and you don't think you can go big right away, absolutely start small. Now if you have so much free time and you really think this is what you want to do, I'm not discouraging you from going big, but definitely one of my number one tips is start small if you feel like that is what is needed for you at the time. Next up is keep it local. Really try to seek out the local resources. The truth is is that the gardening knowledge is almost everywhere. It's often that we pass it up. We don't realize that anybody gardens in our area because we're not looking for it. We don't realize it, but everywhere around the country and around the world there are local resources. That really know that area well. So seek out local nurseries, local seed companies, local gardeners. If you're driving around your neighborhood and you see a garden in someone's front yard, knock on that door and say hello and talk to them. A really great way to go local is community gardens. Join a community garden so that you can learn what plants are growing well there. Get support from them. Another thing is local classes. If you can find classes that are in your area, that's a great way to get the knowledge that is based on your area and then books as well. Check out your local library. Often they will have books that are based on your region or your state. For example, when I was in Florida, I got Robert Bowden's book, which was Florida Fruit and Vegetable Gardening. So it was geared exactly towards my area and leaves out so much of the information that I didn't need. It focuses on the information that you need. Keeping it as local as you possibly can. And then that moves into the next one and they're pretty much tied together. And that is garden as a community, garden together. There's no reason to do this alone. If you are at home alone, doing this all by yourself and all you're doing is looking on the internet, you know, Facebook groups and things like that, watching YouTube videos. Sure, those things are helpful, but it's easy to feel, you know, really overwhelmed and unempowered when it's all by yourself. So get involved with others. When I had my garden in my front yard, I'd have people drive by and I would see them stop and look and I would encourage them to stop by. One time I even had someone knock on my door and he very timidly said, I know this is awkward, but I've been dreaming of starting to grow food with my kids. I just had to knock on the door and ask and I walked him throughout my garden, sent him home with a bunch of food and gardeners love that. Gardeners love to share their time and their knowledge. So get involved with local people. Joining a community garden is one of the simplest, easiest ways to do that if you can. Another thing you can do is volunteer at local organic farms. There's a website called Woofing, Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms. It's W-W-O-O-F dot net. And that's a great way to just immerse in local food growing. And you can also travel and do it as well. So there is no need to do it alone. The resources are out there. The knowledge is out there. The community is out there. Gardeners welcome people in. So don't do it alone. Do it with community. Now, keeping on that theme of local, but moving into actual plants, moving into the planting, where do you source your seeds and your plants? For me, it's all about local varieties. So seeking out local seed companies and local nurseries that have been growing these plants in your region for years or even decades. How that works is if a plant is designed for that area, it already knows the insects that are going to attack it. It already knows the weather patterns. This is a plant that is designed to grow in that area. So if you can buy your seeds from local seed companies that produce them in your area, as well as nurseries, this drastically increases your chance of success. Whereas going to the big box stores and buying the plants that have been shipped from who knows how far away from some sort of centralized distribution center, those plants might not be designed for your area. For example, where I did a lot of my gardening in Florida, big, fat, juicy tomatoes like beef steak tomatoes don't do well there. What does really well is the small everglades tomato. And with the everglades tomato, a person with a black thumb, boom, green thumb and tomatoes in incredible amounts. But if you're trying to grow those big ones that are not adapted to that area, black thumb dies, molds, gets tomato blight and you don't get anything and you walk away feeling like a failure. So seeking out your local seed companies and your local nurseries is a huge step in the right direction. When a lot of people start planning their garden and they start planning what they want to plant, what they do is they think about what their favorite foods are. And they even walked on the grocery store aisles and think, OK, these are my favorite things to eat, so this is what I'm going to plant. And sure, that can be beneficial, but here's the downside of that. If you're doing that, most of our grocery stores are based on globalization, where food is shipped in from all different regions, where it does really well in this area and not well in that area. And if you do it that way, you'll often end up planting things that just aren't going to do well in your area. So I think the best thing to do is instead of going to the grocery store and asking what you like to eat, talk to people in your community, ask them what grows so ridiculously well that you can't even kill it. What grows so well that it becomes a problem because there's so much of it and plant those things. For example, here in this garden that I'm in, mint is taking over like crazy. And I just made a video about easy plants to start growing. This is one of them. Plant what has the fewest pests, what grows really easily. And then once you've mastered those easier plants, then you can start to get into the more difficult ones. Maybe you love blueberries, but they grow in acidic soil. So if you don't have acidic soil, you don't want to start there. But once you get more experience, then you can work with changing the pH of your soil. That's a little bit more advanced gardening. So again, with the grocery store, we've become disconnected with the seasons, being able to get most things at any time throughout the year. But one of the absolute most important things is to plant the right things at the right time. If you try to plant tomatoes early on in the spring, while it's still very cold and the soil temperature is really low, you're going to have a hard time because in colder climates, they like heat. The same goes for basil. That's going to be later on. Early things, for example, kale can be started earlier. And actually in very hot places, it doesn't do well in the peak heat because it likes the colder temperatures. So it's really important to plant the right things at the right time. And you don't have to figure out each individual plant. What you have to do is simply find a planting schedule. You can check at local universities. Often their extension program will have a planting schedule. Some community gardens will have them. And you can also just go online and search for, for example, if you live in New York, New York planting schedule. And this will help you to plant the right things at the right time. And by doing that, ensure the success of those plants. As far as the details, like how far apart do you plant each different thing? Like tomatoes or kale or arugula and how deep do you plant the seeds? And should you transplant as in starting from pots in the greenhouse or in your house or direct so the seeds into the ground? For that, I recommend following the instructions on back of the seed packs that you get and really importantly, getting a book for your area, which I mentioned at the beginning. A lot of these books that are based on your area, they give you those details so you don't have to seek it out for each individual one. So in this video, I'm not going to go through those details because they're based on each area. Instead, get a local book for your region and follow the instructions from the seed companies where you buy those seeds. There's a lot of other details. For example, sun and water and soil. You could talk about that for hours and hours and hours. But I want to give just a few tips on that. As far as sun goes for beginner gardeners, I generally recommend full sun. Now, if you're in a shaded area like I am right now, that's really difficult. There's plants that can grow well in shade, but generally most plants need a lot of sun. Make sure that you're not under the shade of a tree or where your house casts shade for half of the day. So before you plant your garden, keep an eye on that spot. And remember that the sun changes throughout the year. So planting in full sun as far as water, one of the basic ways to tell if you're watering enough is when you grab a handful of that soil. Ideally, it should stay in a clump that breaks a little bit. And it's basically the consistency of a rung out sponge. So watering in the morning is the best before the heat. And if not the morning, then the evening, not in the middle of the day. Another way to test if you have enough water is you stick your finger down into the soil. And if it's moist when you get your finger down to about your second knuckle here, then that's another sign that you have enough water. If it's dry all the way down, it needs to be watered. So soil varies all over the place and how you're watering, whether you're in the desert or in a very fertile area like Southwest Wisconsin or in Florida, where it's mostly sand, it's going to vary a lot. But those are a few tips with water. And again, local resources are key because they're going to know your soil. And then another one is healthy soil. A lot of people, they only focus on the plants. And when they see problems, they think about the plants. But the truth is one of the most important things is having healthy, living soil. So take care of your soil. Take very good care of your soil. Your soil is your life source to have that healthy and abundant food. My next tip is to make it convenient. Now, what I mean by that is putting your garden in a location where you naturally go. If you put your garden in, you know, a 10 minute walk on the other side of your property where you can't see it. It easily becomes out of sight, out of mind, and it's easy to neglect. So put it in an area where you naturally go every day, maybe your front yard right next to your front sidewalk, where every day you have to walk past it to get to your car. That way, every morning and night, you're naturally drawn to it. And the same goes for water, making sure that you have your water source near your garden ideally, whether that's a long hose. Or if you don't have a hose right next to the spigot, where you have your buckets or your rainwater harvesting, designing it so that it has a relative amount of convenience will make it easier to get out there. Don't put a whole bunch of obstacles in the way. And this is really important when you are getting started and you're not used to it and you don't have a habit of getting into the garden and you have a habit of just going to the grocery store. It's easy to neglect it if it's out of sight, out of mind. So design it to be relatively convenient when you're just getting started and you have an incredible amount of information out there. And it's really hard to choose which is the right information. It's it's easy to be infiltrated by chemical mindsets. The idea that, you know, you need to spray things, that every insect should die, that the soil needs these massive amount of fertilizers. But my tip is don't fall into the chemical mindset. In my year of growing and foraging all of my food, where I grew over 100 different foods, I never used a single pesticide, not even organic ones. And these pesticides have only existed for a tiny, tiny fraction of all the times that humans have lived off of the food that they've grown. So you can grow without all of that, without needing to have all of this money and this outside resources and be able to grow in an organic in a sustainable manner. Next, I want to talk a little bit about mindset and focusing on a mindset of abundance rather than scarcity. Because when you think in scarcity, it often creates scarcity around you. But when you design in abundance and you think in abundance, it can actually help create that abundance. A really important part of that is remembering that in order to have an abundance, you have to have death. Death is a part of the gardening experience. So don't be afraid to kill plants. In fact, when you kill plants, think of that as part of your lessons, part of your learning to becoming a successful gardening. And in that way, it's it's not a failure. It's a part of the success. But even more importantly, remember, plants die. It's not like especially annual plants like carrots and kale and collards and broccoli. All of these only live for a period of time. They have to be harvested and then they die. Don't think of death as a failure. Think about it as a part of the cycle of the gardening. Another thing that I mentioned just now, I mentioned annuals. Annuals are plants that basically you plant every single year and you harvest and you have to replant every year. Perennials are plants that you plant once and they come back for a very long time. Raspberries and blackberries and blueberries, strawberries, fruit trees like apples and pears and plums, nut trees, Jerusalem artichoke, rhubarb, all of these foods that come back year after year are perennials. So I recommend working with perennials as much as you can because they generally take less work. They have a lot fewer pests. They take less nutrients and they keep on coming back year after year after year. And many perennials thrive on neglect. Focusing on perennials is definitely a big tip that I would move towards. It's often great to start with annuals. For example, radishes, they produce in 30 days. That's one of those easy plants that I mentioned that can give you that boost of success and that confidence to move forward. But as you get better and better, I recommend moving more away from those annuals and moving more towards the perennial system. So there you have it. Those are some of my most important tips for beginner gardeners. There's a lot of other ones out there. But if you just start with those ones and you remember to start small, start simply, maybe start with just five easy plants that you're excited about. And if you do five the next year and you do five the next year within a few years time, you can be growing dozens of different species. Make some goals, make some of those smaller goals, make some of those bigger goals and use those smaller goals to chip away at that ultimate success of, you know, your giant front yard just dripping and oozing with food absolutely everywhere. So I hope that you gained a lot from this video. If you did, make sure that you subscribe. If you have friends who are beginner gardeners that consider themselves to have a black thumb, make sure to share this video to help them if you think it would be helpful. And if you want to get this out into the YouTube world, ask questions, comment in the comments below and make sure to give it a thumbs up as well. So I love you all very much and I'll see you again in the garden real soon.