gardening

Disclaimer: this is a tongue-in-cheek blog post. Never ruin someone’s garden.

If you hang out online long enough, you will run into some crazy questions. Like this one: how do you ruin someone’s garden? Aha. Let’s have some fun.

Chemicals

Contact liquids

For sure the quickest way to ruin someone’s garden is to cover it in copious amounts of weed killer. I don’t want to name any one specific product but there are many available, they’re cheap and they work. If you soak everything thoroughly, you’re guaranteed success. Usually in a matter of hours.

Warning: cosmetic pesticide use isn’t allowed in British Columbia. Of course, this is a tongue-in-cheek blog post. I’m not expecting anyone to actually run out and ruin a garden but if you do, do it under cover of darkness.

Pre-emergent granular

You might also consider applying a pre-emergent granular product that forms a barrier on top of the soil. It will sterilize your garden soil and affect the most important part of garden soil: the life in the soil.

The discussion used to be about soil content. How much organic matter is in the soil, etc. But now we’re finding out that the life in your soil is crucial to success. You can quickly ruin a garden by affecting the life in its soil.

Grass seed

Dumping fast-germinating grass seed onto someone’s garden would also be a nightmare because you’d have to weed it out. And that’s not fun.

This is actually a thing in the landscaping industry. When company A loses a maintenance contract to company B, they dump a lot of expensive grass seed into beds just to mess with the new landscapers moving in. It’s hard to believe, I know.

Stop weeding

You can also ruin a garden by not weeding. Allow all weedy plants to flower and produce seeds. Since weeds are opportunistic colonizers they usually produce lots of seeds. So let them produce their seeds. They will accumulate in the soil and cause headaches for years to come.

There you have it. I hope that whoever asked the question online was kidding because need healthy gardens. One book I recommend is Dr. David Goulson’s The Garden Jungle. He wants you to stop worrying about global climate emergencies. Start with your own garden.

Would you raze your own garden? It seems like a radical waste of time but I like the idea. What if you try gardening and years later you admit to yourself that you’re not really a gardener?

This blog post was inspired by a story I had read in the Globe and Mail newspaper. The writer started gardening in her small Calgary garden and everything went well. Her husband helped with spring preparations and the garden produced all sorts of vegetables for the family.

Then they moved to British Columbia where their new neighbours were gardening all-stars. And it must have been a bit intimidating.

I have some experience with this. I was once a happy community garden plot “owner” and then I made the mistake of renting a bigger plot. It was bigger but also closer to the main building. This meant close scrutiny of my plot by a gardener on disability with time to kill. He would constantly analyze my vegetable choices and rob me of the joy of growing and experimenting with new plants. I let my plot go to some lucky person on the waiting list. And to this day I regret accepting the bigger garden plot.

Back to our family. While the husband helped in spring, he didn’t do much beyond that. Same with the kids. The wife was left to care for the garden, weeding, planting, watering, harvesting. And soon she was overwhelmed.

That’s when the family decided to quit. The husband went out and razed the garden; the wife walked out on the patio and instead of worrying about the garden, she opened up a book and relaxed. The change felt great. They weren’t really gardeners and they openly admitted it.

I totally loved reading this article because it’s different from beautiful garden magazine stories. You never read about people giving up and razing their gardens. That wouldn’t sell many gardening magazines or books, tools and seeds.