68 | September 2019 BY MARGARET ROACH^
PHOTO: ERICA BERGER
HOME GARDEN
1
Don’t buy every
plant you crave
at the nursery.
This often leads to a
polka-dot garden of
onesies, not a
coherent landscape.
Purchase fewer things
in greater numbers to
plant in drifts, and
repeat elsewhere in
the garden.
2
Plants grow.
Like “green side
up,” this should be
obvious, but
sometimes isn’t.
Planting trees and
shrubs too near a
path, a structure, or
one another can be
costly. Space woody
plants no closer than
two-thirds of their
mature width apart,
using annuals and
perennials to fill in in
the meantime.
3
Limit the width
of your beds.
If for edibles or cutting
flowers, whether in-
ground or raised, a
bed that’s 6 feet wide
or larger is impractical.
Crawling in to plant
and weed the middle
compacts the soil.
Four or 5 feet wide
is plenty, enough to
reach the midpoint
from either side.
4
It’s never too
soon to install
drip irrigation.
This is especially
true for intensively
cultivated crops
like vegetables. Save
time and water.
here’s a joke that I often replay with a friend of mine
who’s also a longtime gardener: “What’s the best garden
advice you ever got?” one of us asks. “Green side up,”
the other replies. It’s a solid tip, but I hope to hand down
more textured advice to new gardeners. These are insights I’ve
gleaned from working my patch of land over three decades.
Garden author Margaret Roach has learned plenty during her
30 years of planting. With the rerelease of her seminal book,
A Way to Garden, she shares her advice for beginners.
5
Get to know
your weeds.
Learning the names
and growth habits of
your weeds is critical to
garden management.
Are you up against
a prodigious self-
sowing annual like
crabgrass, where
efforts must be timed
to prevent seeding?
Or does your opponent
run underground like
perennial goutweed?
Many local extension
services have online
tools for identifying
weeds. (Rutgers and
the University of
Minnesota have good
ones.) Once you’ve
identified your weeds,
photograph them
with notes to reference
for next year.
6
Make use of
desirable
volunteer plants.
I shop in my own
garden each spring,
relocating baby
nicotiana, foxglove,
and hellebores to
better spots. So
learning to recognize
seedlings of volunteers
is valuable; if I couldn’t
identify them, I’d waste
money on more of
each at the nursery.
7
There are
no “deerproof”
plants. By that
I mean deer will at
least browse any
plant, taking a nibble
or more. The best
investment I ever
made was a fence.
8
The vast
majority of
insects aren’t pests.
Most insects are
beneficial or harmless,
nothing to worry
about. A shelf of
regional field guides, a
browser bookmarked
to bugguide.net, and
apps like iNaturalist are
among a gardener’s
best companions.
9
The number
of seeds
in a packet bears
little relation to how
many to sow.
With tomatoes, for
example, a packet
might have 40 seeds
when all you need are
six plum for sauce
and two slicers. Don’t
make the same mistake
I did early on and
wind up with more than
you can keep up with.
field GUIDE
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