Hello everyone, welcome back to the Epic Gardening podcast. Kevin here, I am joined again by Chris, my assistant.

We talked yesterday about Chris's journey into, I would say growing a decent amount of your own food.

From nothing, more or less. And now we're going to talk today about in that first year, like many people last year, what are the biggest things you did wrong that looking back a year and a half now?

You could kind of look back and laugh and be like, wow, like that was way off, you know.

It's funny because I always see those top five, you know, beginning Gardening mistakes, top 10. I bet I have a top 20 list easily.

I made every possible mistake. I think that you can make my first year. Probably the biggest one was my soil mix. I did the raised big garden because I wanted to control the soil because we talked yesterday about how, you know, credit our soil is here in Rocky.

And so I just filled my beds up with that raised garden mix and through some, just like a bag mix from the store. Yeah. And through some compost on top of it.

And I noticed throughout my first season, I mean, just what a big mistake it was. There was no drainage. The plants just didn't thrive. They were really just struggling to even.

So you, you used a standard raised bed bag mix and then you put compost on top, but you didn't mix it. Yeah. Okay. So you sort of had like a two layered thing going on. Okay.

And, and I really think it was, it was super compacted. Like I noticed like when I went to go and like, you know, pull some plants, it was just my soil was so thick and dense. And so it was really detrimental to the root system of almost everything that I grew.

So it was, what was the problem you were seeing where they just stunted? They were, they were so stunted. I had, I had, I looked like I was growing food for hobbits.

Yeah. I had it. Itty bitty baby peppers. Itity bitty to me. You know, I just couldn't get anything to really bloom. I would have, you know, zucchini and squash that never even made it.

You know, just failure to thrive. We would call it. Yeah. Yeah. Failure to thrive. So that was probably my biggest mistake. My second biggest mistake I think was not having pollinator plants in the back.

I noticed that a lot of my, like I said, zucchini and squash, they weren't getting pollinated. And I was trying to hand pollinate them with that stupid paintbrush. Okay.

And now when I planted pollinator plants and in all of my beds and it's made a tremendous difference. And I've also let a couple of things like my basil really flower into like a giant bush.

And so now I have a ton of bees back there, a ton of ladybugs and hummingbirds and butterflies and my garden for the past two seasons has just been spectacular.

Yeah. Did you notice that like in the first season during the pandemic, did you have a lot of problems with pests or not so much?

No, we didn't have a lot of problems with pests. It wasn't that I mean, we just didn't have really anything going on in the back. We didn't have any kind of wildlife except for a few birds here and there.

So that was probably my second biggest mistake. My third biggest mistake was being overzealous and planting, I don't know, 25 different things.

It was super overwhelming as a beginning gardener. You know, you have to research everything. I remember when I grew potatoes and I saw them, you know, pop up and I didn't know how to harvest potatoes.

I didn't know what to do. I didn't know when they were ready to harvest. And so I had a research every single plant and take notes on every single plant and win to harvest it.

And you know, and then not to count and you know, all the diseases that came from having all these different kinds of plants.

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