Bad Gardening Advice EXPOSED! || Black Gumbo

welcome to black gumbo southern gardening we're going to talk about bad advice [Music] well the garden's really starting to take off with this warm spell that we've been having and all the plants have you know they've left that infant stage where they're tiny and small and they're starting to grow some of them are starting to put on fruit and it's at about this time that plants often show signs of disease or pest or something's not looking right or it's not growing well this is about the time when your freshly prepared beds start growing weeds and a lot of people go online and get on facebook forums or facebook groups and forums and they ask questions what's wrong with my plant what's wrong with my soil a lot of the advice that people give out these days it's really bad advice the first thing i see people get really upset about is weeds and the there's this idea out there that if you have even a single weed in your garden somehow your garden's imperfect and you're a bad gardener weeds just go along with gardening this idea that we need to eradicate every single weed out of our garden it's just not good advice it's bad advice it's impossible to get all the weeds you can come in and pull weeds away from your plants when you see them and you know hoe and mulch and do all the things but you're still going to encounter weeds they're going to come up everywhere because they're weeds they're sturdy hardy plants they grow natively they grow in the worst of soils the worst conditions and when you give all this wonderful soil to your plants well the weeds are going to love it too and so like you know in this soil i've got nutsedge i've got purslane i've got cooch grass or something like cooch grass i've got bermuda grass right here i've got wood sorrels there's lots of weeds in here but it's okay they're not going to harm your plants unless the garden bed just gets taken over with weeds all you have to do is just stay on top of it and keep a reasonable amount of weed pressure down off your plants if you see one or two weeds you're not a bad gardener in fact this particular bed has been weed bound well twice i i let it go fallow one year and i laid down some stuff on top some old carpet that i had thinking that that would keep the weeds down no they just grew right through it this entire bed was filled with bermuda grass and yeah well we reclaimed it and you can see it's a perfectly good bed most of these plants can grow even with weeds in fact some weeds are beneficial you can eat this purslane it's a superfood this weed is not even a weed it's a marigold it came up voluntarily there's a carrot that came up voluntarily these were not planned for this space so technically speaking they're weeds there are two ways to deal with weeds and neither of them are perfect neither neither of them are going to give you a weed free garden one of them is to mulch mulch helps to suppress weeds mulch is a good idea all around if you don't mulch like right here in this section of my garden there's no mulch on this ground i wanted to see how much weed pressure my plants would get with my compost and to see if i had fewer weeds this year than last year well if you don't mulch you could just take a stirrup hoe like this one right here and just run it under the surface of the soil uh where your weeds are coming up and you'll cut those weeds down just leave them laying there and the sun will bake them and they'll die well here's another bit of bad advice that i heard just the other day in a facebook group for gardeners and the original poster asked hey i've got mushrooms coming up in my garden what should i do about it and the very first response said well you need to eradicate mushrooms and mushrooms are a sign of bad soil i thought to myself what i thought every gardener on earth knew that mushrooms are not a sign of bad soil in fact mushrooms are a sign of good soil mushroom they're a fungus they they grow in the soil they feed on the woody chips and the organic material in your soil and fungal life grows in the soil it sends out a web of uh like spidery tissue goes out all through soil it's that white stuff you see in there mycorrhizal fungi is a benefit to your soil it helps your plants take up nutrients from the soil it's a symbiotic relationship all fungal life and soil is good for your soil pretty much and if you see mushrooms in there you shouldn't want to eradicate them just enjoy them for what they are they come up they send out their spores and then they die so you don't have to worry about it mushrooms are good for your soil here at my compost bin i'm looking down at my compost in there and it's got bugs in it and people online sometimes say you shouldn't have bugs in your compost that's a sign that it's not breaking down or it's imbalanced to one side or the other that's not true the bugs are actually doing their their work in there for you they're breaking things down even if you've got perfectly balanced uh perfectly heating up compost and it's way up in the 160s area you know your compost is breaking down really well by bacterial life but you dig in there you're still going to find bugs find earwigs pill bugs little tiny mites all kinds of roaches beetles all kinds of bugs live in compost and they're just doing your job their job for you they're breaking it down and they're leaving their droppings behind and they're helping to make compost don't worry about bugs people sometimes get freaked out when they dig into their compost and they see these giant maggots those big ones you know from the black soldier fly leave them there man they're doing great work for you they'll pupate and fly away and by the time you need your compost and once it's all broken down most of those macro devourers those macro organisms like bugs and roaches they'll be long gone because there's nothing left for them to eat don't worry about bugs in your compost it's bad advice to try to eradicate the bugs in your compost unless they happen to be like carpenter ants or fire ants or termites and then you might have to deal with it but for the stuff we all want that black gold out of our compost pile let the bugs do part of the work for you so this is just a scoop of compost it's breaking down i see some tiny little bugs running around there they're going to lose it all yeah lots of life in here that's what you want look at all these tomato plants they're doing great i am so happy with my tomatoes this year and i've got a whole bunch of varieties in here and that's some bad advice you often hear people will say you can't plant multiple varieties together otherwise they're going to cross pollinate of course they're going to cross pollinate but why is that a problem unless you save seeds see here's what's going to happen the plants are in fact going to cross-pollinate bees and flies and wasps and bugs that go from flower to flower are going to carry pollen from each of those flowers and carry it over to other plants and it's going to pollinate those plants and they're going to grow and produce fruit but the fruit on the plant will always be true to type the fruit will always be for example a brandywine tomato is always going to produce a brandywine tomato on that plant even if it gets cross-pollinated in fact some plants actually benefit from cross-pollination there are certain trees that must have another another type of the same another cultivar of the same species of tree in order to pollinate but what people mean that cross pollination is bad is that you can't save those seeds from that fruit and expect to get the same kind of seed each year what you're going to get is a hybrid but see the hybridization happens in the seeds and so whenever let's say i have tomatoes cross-pollinating here and i will i'm going to get fruit that's true to the type that i planted but i can't save that seed and expect the next generation next year to be the same type and well if you're into experimentation that could be fun that's how that's how varieties are made cross pollination is how we do hybrids so don't worry about it you can plant all the stuff like tons of peppers tons of pumpkins tons of tomatoes yes they're going to cross pollinate but your type is going to be true to type this year next year though your seeds will be wonky they'll be hybrids and you might get some surprising results so don't worry about planting things together if you don't save the seeds you know this bed and this bed a couple years ago were wrecked and all the plants i had to pull the tomato plants up i didn't get any tomatoes that year it was herbicide see i brought in hay for straw or hay for mulch and all that hay had been sprayed with an herbicide while in the field as a weed killer you know a broad weave broadleaf killer it was amino pure lit herbicide and it killed all my broadleaf plants like tomatoes so i did a video on that and i discovered that lots and lots of other people are experiencing the same thing we can't really trust the materials that we bring in from outside of our our gardens you know compost bagged manure these are all suspect now because of the amino pyralids and the bad advice that i'm hearing online is people are saying oh no those gardeners are just overblowing that issue it's not a big issue oh no there's not really that much of an amino pyralid threat their herbicide is not really out there that much but friends every single week i see someone post a picture on facebook saying what's wrong with my tomatoes it's almost always tomatoes because they are so susceptible to it and they'll show a picture of their leaves and their leaves will be curling up and turning in on themselves and they'll be literally deformed growing you know growing like a fractal design you know they're weird looking leaves it's not just stress know tomatoes will curl their leaves when they're stressed but these these are deformed and curling that's immunopyramid herbicide and people don't know it and more often than not yes they've brought in bagged manure they brought in a bag of black cow they brought in some some hay and used it in their garden and all that was tainted with immunopyrulate herbicides we can't trust that stuff there is a way to do a test though here's what you do if you bring in something like manure give yourself about four weeks head time cut that bag open and plant some bean seeds in it just any kind of bean will do and let them grow up and put on a couple of sets of true leaves if those leaves look healthy and fine your bag of whatever it is compost manure uh probably just fine but if they start to deform and they're curling on themselves and they're not growing right i'd get rid of that bag real quick it's not safe this is not an overblown issue charles dowding has talked about david the good has talked about it multiple gardeners who aren't just like new gardeners but our established and well-respected gardeners are talking about this issue because it's such an important thing for us to be aware of it is a very big threat this amino pyralid herbicide that's out there i have a video on that you can go watch my videos on amino pyramids if you suspect that you've experienced this or if you want to educate yourself here's another bit of bad advice it has to do with watering surely you've heard this one and it's a myth you say don't water your plants when the sun is shining especially at midday because the droplets of water that rest on the leaves will focus the light like a magnifying glass and they'll burn your leaves this is this is just nonsense this has been proven to be a myth over and over several university studies have been done on it and it's just not possible on most plants for water to focus light that intensely that it's going to burn your plants more often than not if you see something like that happening it's another issue altogether it's not related to water you can water whenever you want i mean it rains on all the plants and they don't get burned it rains on all the native plants and they don't get burned so water your plants whenever you want there is some issues about watering times that are legitimate though and this is good advice but there's a debate should i water my plants in the early part of the day or the later part of the day the thinking goes if you water your plants in the early part of the day the ground is not heated up and the the early part of the day is more mild than you know the high noon and late afternoon and the water has a chance to soak down into the soil and your plants can take it up that's valid but it's also valid that if you water in the evening the similar kind of thing happens the plants can take up the water and through the night that water can sit in that soil and work its way in yeah that works too but there's a problem if you water midday some folks believe that if you water it midday all your water is basically going to evaporate away before it can percolate into the soil well yeah if it's 105 degrees like it sometimes is here that can happen you just have to water more but in that case i don't want to be standing around in 100 degree weather watering my garden i'm going to water in the morning or i'm going to water in the evening so really watering is not a big deal just do it whenever you can and yeah water your plants all right well here's another bit of bad advice and it's really really bad advice i have clay black gumbo clay that's what my soil is mostly and it's hard to grow stuff in clay it's hard to dig it's hard to work with people say how do i loosen up my clay and the bad advice that is almost always handed out is wow just mix in some sand no if you mix in sand you know what you're doing you're making concrete you're making mortar the structure and the physics of clay is that it is one of the components of the minerals in your soil clay is literally ground up rock it's a mineral it's the smallest version of ground up minerals there is and because those particles are so small they stick together by chemistry by physics and sand's not going to get in there and break that bond sand's just going to get in there and the clay is going to bond to the sand and you're going to have concrete never never ever put sand in your clay unless you want to build a brick a bread oven or something there are two effective ways to break up clay one of them has to do with chemistry rather than putting sand on clay you can mix gypsum which is a mineral you can mix gypsum into your clay gypsum is a material that almost acts like an emulsifier it gets in there and breaks up the bonds of the clay and allows the clay to break up so gypsum is one way but you know gypsum it's expensive you got to work it in and now the easier method is to build on top of your clay bring in soil with high organic content and what will happen is that over time that organic content will release chemicals and will release nutrients that will leach down into your clay and that will begin to break up just the very top surface of that clay but that little bit of clay broken up like that the next year it'll get a little deeper and a little deeper and as you continue to garden on top of the clay it's amending the soil beneath and that clay is being loosened up so you can come back in a few years and dig down and you've gained some growing depth you've gained actually a larger portion of your garden and it was easier than if you'd tried to do the gypsum method okay here's some really bad advice i have seen people online say when you're done growing in your potting soil at the end of the year you have to throw it out like what then the reasoning is they think well there's diseases and weed seeds and pests all down in this soil you got to throw it out friends if we were doing that we would be broke we'd be having to buy new potting soil every single year nobody wants to do that the soil is not nutrient depleted there's plenty of nutrients left in there and if in doubt well put some put some slow release fertilizer in there i have a whole video on reusing and revitalizing potting mix go look go look at that video and learn how to revitalize what you've got so you don't have to break the bank that video is doing fantastic for me people are watching that video and really thankful so if you've been throwing out your potting soil you don't have to in fact let me show you these are my sweet potato slips and they will be going in for a summer garden but i got to grow the slips first and so these are coming up from the sweet potato chunks that i planted down in there that peach tree stump is planted in old potting mix that grape vine is planted in old potting mix here's some of my old potting mix being recollected here all this old potting mix goes to use right here well my mizuna is looking a little wind blown but this little herb garden nothing in here but old potting soil this is potting soil in there and wow look at those plants there's nothing wrong with them our final bit of advice is not necessarily bad advice but it has to do with the advice you get some of it might actually be perfectly good advice but that advice needs to apply to your circumstances to your context you see there are dozens of weighted ways to garden there's raised beds there's sheet mulching methods lasagna gardening in the ground gardening traditional wide roast spacing hugely culture no-till there's all kinds of ways to garden and if if you're giving out a bit of advice you need to understand what context that advice applies to you wouldn't give the same advice to someone who's tilling their ground every year and piling piling up huge rows the way the old timers used to do that's a different way of gardening than say no-till gardening where all you do is put a layer of compost on top of your gardens and you never till it well the advice is going to be different each person needs to get that advice if they ask for advice try to find out okay well how do you garden do we have the same gardening methods is this advice for container gardeners but that's a whole different thing you fertilize a totally different way with container garden than you do with gardening in the ground it's totally different you can't take the same advice and apply it to another system so find out what kind of gardening it is that you do find out what it's called if you just garden in the ground and you dig up a little dirt here and there and make gardens well that's that's in ground gardening if you have a raised bed you got to know about raised bed gardening you also within race bed gardening well are you doing square foot gardening or are you doing traditional gardening in a raised bed totally different you got to have totally different kinds of soil you have to follow the rules with raised with a square foot gardening very closely where you're quickly going to ruin your garden so that's the advice be wise find out what advice is applicable to you don't feel obligated to do all the things you know if you've been on a on a forum or a facebook group for gardeners you ask a question you're going to get 10 different ways to to do it a lot of the advice you're going to get is bad a lot of it's just plain wrong but a lot of it can be good advice if you know how to apply the advice to your circumstances so be wise well folks thank you for joining me on black gumbo southern gardening i hope this video has been helpful to you if you find it to be helpful share it with your friends and subscribe to our channel hit the like button leave a comment ask questions we love to interact and comment so hey thanks for joining us today i hope your gardening season is going well and i hope you have happy gardening see you next time bye [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Scott Head

Views: 103,700

Rating: 4.9607573 out of 5

Keywords: Gardening, Vegetables, Texas Gardening, Zone 9a, Black Gumbo, Gardening advice, gardening tips, bad gardening advice, bad gardening tips, garden myths, busting garden myths, bad garden practices, exposing bad advice, bad gardening tips exposed, how to garden, good gardening advice, how to grow a garden, how not to grow a garden, gardening myths

Id: tqVv64EkcYk

Length: 20min 10sec (1210 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 10 2021