February 13, 2025

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Home » The 7 greatest gardening myths, debunked by science
The 7 greatest gardening myths, debunked by science

The 7 greatest gardening myths, debunked by science

It has taken me 40 years to find the enjoyment of gardening. Not since sowing a handful of cress seeds right into a compost-filled plastic cup on the age of six had I felt the joys of seeing completely shaped inexperienced life emerge from brown filth.

Like so many others, the COVID lockdowns grew to become a possibility to rediscover the wonders of nature simply outdoors the again door. Gardening is the right antidote to doom-scrolling via at the moment’s information – it reconnects us with the perpetual cycle of life, dying, and renewal of which we’re all an element. And but for one thing as superbly easy as sowing, planting, and watering, we people have made gardening terribly sophisticated.

Skilled as a medical physician, I do know solely too effectively bamboozle others with technical phrases – and now as a gardener, I’m befuddled by a forest of gobbledygook and unusual rituals. What’s a perennial? What on earth is mulching? Our grownup egos make us embarrassed to ask.

Outdated hand or rookie, I’m keen to wager you’ve been confused by Latin names, a mysterious time period, or maybe questioned whether or not you actually do have to put ‘crocks’ within the backside of plant pots. Right here I clarify the misunderstandings and pseudoscience that sprout up in gardening sooner than clover.

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1. Utilizing a spade will not assist your soil – it may destroy it

Soil is essentially the most treasured factor in your backyard, but for years it has been mistreated. Digging, we’re instructed, will take away weeds, cut back ‘compaction’ by including air or enhancing drainage, and increase soil fertility. Analysis now reveals that the reverse is definitely true. Farmers around the globe are catching on, and much more are ditching their ploughs to modify to extra environment friendly ‘no until’ practices.

The 200g of soil that you could simply maintain in your fingers accommodates 100 billion micro organism, 5,000 bugs, arachnids, worms, molluscs, and minute fungal filaments that may stretch 100km if laid end-to-end. This mind-blowingly complicated interconnected system of life is what makes soil wholesome and can nourish and defend any plant that units down roots inside it.

Wholesome soil additionally has a spongey construction that crumbles and might be pressed again collectively simply. Air and water freely circulate via soil’s huge community of microscopic tunnels, sustaining all the pieces that lives inside it. Nonetheless, this structure is left in ruins after work with a spade.

Every slice with a spade severs numerous fungal threads, via which vegetation obtain vitamins and water, collapses the numerous tunnels cast by earthworms, and reveals sleeping plant-digesting microbes, stimulating them to feed after which launch plumes of greenhouse gases into the air. Soil that has been dug up really finally ends up extra dense, compressed, and airless (‘compacted’). So make sure that to maintain the spade within the shed, until it’s for planting and shifting vegetation, or maybe shovelling compost.

As a substitute, defend the soil’s construction and feed its treasured unseen ecosystem (known as the soil ‘meals net’) whereas suppressing weeds and lowering the necessity for watering by merely ‘mulching’ with natural matter, ideally backyard compost.

‘Mulching’ merely means to put one thing on the floor of the soil. ‘Natural matter’ means any useless, decaying or decomposed materials that has come from a residing organism (i.e. plant or animal), and might embody leaves, grass clippings, bark or wooden chippings.

On the boundary between mulch and soil, bugs, tiny bugs, earthworms, and microscopic organisms work to digest this natural materials, which is built-in into soil – there actually is not any have to ‘dig in’ something.

2. Pebbles in a plant pot will not alter humidity ranges

Plant pot with pebbles in

© Getty Photos

Many a home plant struggles with the dry air of a centrally heated residence. Inserting a pot plant in a dish of pebbles and water might look fairly, however does nothing to vary the humidity within the air round their foliage. Neither does spraying a advantageous mist over their leaves, which evaporates in seconds. Put humid-loving tropical vegetation in a rest room as a substitute.

3. Compost is definitely simple to make – and will save the planet

Compost is a surprise meals for soil that supercharges plant progress when laid on its floor. It’s simple to make from strange backyard and kitchen waste, and by doing so, additionally, you will be doing all your bit for the planet. Discarded meals ranks excessive within the league desk of local weather crimes. Each kilogram of meals waste you lob into the trash, the equal of about 2kg of carbon dioxide ascends heavenwards from a landfill – the identical as burning a litre of petrol.

Everyone knows that apple cores, vegetable peelings, and bread offcuts all rot down into brown mush. Nonetheless, within the vile poisonous cauldron that could be a landfill website, the air-breathing microscopic creatures that may usually decompose useless stuff are suffocated beneath a mountain of paper, plastic, tins, and damaged tv screens. Of their place, subterranean bacterial nasties go to work.

Anaerobic (‘with out oxygen’) demons of the darkish ferment our buried meals into acids, alcohols, and methane fuel, which billows up into the environment. Composting your peelings mimics nature’s recycling course of and might be extremely easy: simply accumulate your meals waste (together with eggshells and low grounds) – ideally chopped up good and small – in a big, sealed container and blend with roughly equal quantities of dry, natural matter, equivalent to shredded paper, brown fallen leaves and/or cardboard.

High it up as you go along with a 50-50 combine and provides it a stir every now and then so that each one the microbes can breathe some air and in a couple of months’ time you’ll find yourself with brown crumbly stuff on the backside that not resembles something you place in. Add it to your backyard by both laying it on high of naked soil or to spice up the well being of all the pieces that grows there. Alternatively, give it to somebody with a backyard and you’ll have a brand new greatest good friend.

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4. The commonest slug and snail traps do little or no

A snail on a beer bottle

© Getty Photos

Solid apart notions that eggshells, copper wires or beer traps cease will stop your hostas from being ravaged by slugs, or your lettuces being hoovered up and snails. These molluscs’ thick slimy bellies slide over obstacles with ease and, whereas slugs are tempted by the heady aroma of beer, solely a handful of unfortunate souls find yourself drowning within the drink.

5. Not all soil is appropriate for all vegetation

If you happen to’re going to develop in pots, you’re going to want one thing to plant your seeds into. Backyard soil gained’t do in small pots as a result of it quickly turns into dense and airless when divorced from the residing, respiration soil ecosystem. So onto the e-shopping record goes a potting combine, that are confusingly known as ‘composts’. However which to purchase? Anticipate to be perplexed.

Seed compost, loam-based, ericaceous or peat-free? Gardening magazines and web sites let you know to purchase a compost for sowing seeds, one for ‘potting on’ or ‘potting up’, and a compost for mature vegetation, though analysis typically reveals there’s often no profit to purchasing these composts – a superb high quality multi-purpose compost is simply as efficient.

For vegetation which advanced in acidic soils (rhododendrons, camellias and pieris, and so on) it’s smart to go for an acidic ‘ericaceous’ compost – so named after a household of acid-loving vegetation known as the ‘Ericaceae’. Take care to keep away from composts containing peat, nonetheless, which actually must be consigned to historical past.

Prized for its spongy, water-absorbent qualities, peat (the ‘forgotten fossil gas’) is jet-black earth sliced out from bogs and peatlands. Uncommon habitats are laid waste by the peat trade and for each dice extracted, carbon dioxide from prehistoric rain forests that has been locked away for millennia is launched – it’s like burning coal to maintain your petunias fairly.

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6. Don’t fret about watering vegetation within the Solar

Fret not about watering out of doors vegetation below the blazing summer time Solar inflicting leaves to scorch. The so-called ‘lens impact’, whereby droplets apparently focus photo voltaic rays onto leaves, by no means really occurs, not least as a result of droplets evaporate away far too shortly. If vegetation are thirsty, give them a drink.

Overlook the watering reminder apps for indoor vegetation and as a substitute water them based on their altering wants via the seasons. Overwatering is the primary explanation for dying of indoor vegetation.

Bits of damaged terracotta (‘crocks’) or gravel within the backside of a pot are mentioned to scale back waterlogging and keep away from fungal root rots. The truth is, science reveals that vegetation in containers with crocks fare no higher than these with out. Worse, their addition may very well stop good drainage, inflicting water to pool larger up contained in the pot.

7. Ignore the city beehive buzz

Effectively-meaning typically urbanites arrange beehives to attempt to assist our beloved pollinators, that are dwindling within the face of local weather change, habitat destruction and air pollution, however these hives do extra hurt than good. Slightly, a brand new beehive introduces a ravenous colony of honeybees (which aren’t endangered) to gobble up all of the close by nectar and pollen, leaving the native pollinators, together with bumblebees, solitary bees, hoverflies, and butterflies to starve.

Worse nonetheless, as a result of there isn’t sufficient meals to go spherical, these beehives hardly ever produce a superb crop of honey and are sometimes deserted after the harm has been accomplished.

The Science of Gardening: Uncover How Your Backyard Actually Grows by Dr Stuart Farrimond (£20.00, DK) is out now and is offered from these shops and Amazon UK. 

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Cover of book The Science of Gardening