Garden apprentice is all about learning from the garden, being its student, and learning from others. I have learned so much in my many years of gardening, the most important one is that I should have listened to others who learned from their gardens before me. I have wasted so much time trying to do it my way, instead I should have listened to others with experience. Listening to them allowed me to understand my garden so much faster, and led me to the point where I can now listen to my garden, and see what it is telling me. Everyone’s garden is different, and learning from others is just the start. You then need to listen and learn directly from your garden.
I want to help you learn faster, and be able to listen to your garden sooner. The sooner you know if your particular garden needs more water or better water management the better. Why your plants look sad and have little spots on the lower leaves that look like dried sugar water. Or why your plants older leaves are green and the new ones are yellow or white. This is your garden telling you what is wrong, and the fastest way to learn its language is by learning from others first.
I do not like the sites where they simply take other peoples blogs and shuffle the information around and make a post. I will show you my own real experience, I will find someone with experience to teach me, or my favorite source of all are researchers and scientists at universities and indigenous peoples . They really know how to find out what the garden is saying to them, and have data to back it up or generations of trial and error.
Much of this data is available online if you look hard enough. So when I write about tomato varieties that are the best for a certain situations, it won’t be a list from another website. It will be a list that I put together from research papers, from university studies, someone credible, or from a test of my own.
Now the people with the most information about growing in any given area, in my opinion are the indigenous people. They either learned to grow in that area with its many hurdles, or they didn’t eat. Their knowledge isn’t usually as easy to come by though. They aren’t usually posting there farming practices online for everyone to read. This makes it difficult to obtain their knowledge, but when I can, I will be gathering information from these people and telling others. I will also make sure those indigenous people get the credit.
So come along with me , learn with me, and I will do my best to help you learn faster. I do not know everything so sometimes I may just point you in the right direction..