Garden Mistakes and Lessons Learned Over Time

Affiliate Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, the Master Gardener Foundation of Washington State earns from qualifying purchases. When you buy through our links, you’re helping The Evergreen Thumb Podcast grow—just like good fertilizer! Product recommendations are our own and do not represent the views of MGFWS or Washington State University. Thanks for supporting us!

In this episode of The Evergreen Thumb, Erin Hoover reflects on lessons learned from her own gardening experiences, emphasizing how decisions can have long-term consequences—both positive and negative. She discusses the challenges of letting plants self-sow, which can lead to more work due to their prolific spreading. Erin also highlights the benefits of letting some plants volunteer and shares improvements that made her gardening easier. She notes which strategies have not worked as planned and stresses the value of investing in high-quality seed garlic and potatoes for better long-term results. Erin concludes by encouraging gardeners to reflect on their own wins and lessons, underscoring that ongoing observation and incremental changes are key to gardening success.

As a modern homesteader, Erin has turned her property into a small, thriving farm. She grows veggies, tends to fruit trees and shrubs, and raises livestock, all while keeping sustainability in mind. Her focus these days is on finding new uses for native plants, finding ways to feed her animals from her land, and growing her own food.

When she’s not working on the homestead or recording The Evergreen Thumb, you’ll find Erin out exploring Washington’s mountains, forests, and beaches, bringing new ideas home to try in her own garden.

• Drip Irrigation for the Yard and Garden
• Watering Home Gardens and Landscape Plants
• Growing Garlic in Home Gardens
• Gardening When Water is Scarce – Episode 74
• XLUX Long Probe Deep Use Soil Moisture Meter Sensor, Water Monitor Indicator, Hygrometer for
• Outdoor Indoor Large Pot Plants, Flower, Gardening, Farming, 2 Pack
• Drip Irrigation tools and kits

Erin Hoover (00:00)

Welcome to The Evergreen Thumb, episode 76. Today I thought I’d try something a little bit different, and so I’m going to talk about how gardening decisions often look different over time than they do in the moment. And some of those choices can reduce work and increase success, while others kind of create long-term maintenance challenges. And a lot of what we learn comes from experience, not planning.

So for this episode, I’m doing something a little different, and I’m going to kind of reflect on some things in my own garden. What worked well, what became more work than expected, what I would do differently, and a few unexpected gardening surprises.

My goal is to just kind of share my experiences, and hopefully you can maybe learn something from my mistakes or from my wins that you can take into your own garden rather than learn them the hard way, like I did.

Lessons from Self-Sowing Dill and Parsley

(01:10)
But also just to kind of reinforce the idea that gardeners are always learning, we’re always observing, and there’s always room to improve. So, first, I want to talk about some plants that became more work than expected in my garden.

Some of these may not be a surprise to experienced gardeners, but I wanted to first talk about the mistake of letting any plant in the Apiaceae family self-sow. So the Apiaceae family includes herbs like dill and parsley. It also includes carrots, flowers like Queen Anne’s lace and poison hemlock, but what I’m talking about today is specifically dill and parsley.

(02:39)
I intentionally allowed dill and parsley to bloom in two separate areas of my garden. One was in my vegetable garden. The dill was, and it’s cause I grow the herbs that I only use like once a year or I save for long-term use in the vegetable garden.

And then I have a small kitchen herb garden outside of my back door. That’s where my parsley grows because I can go out and cut it fresh for a meal easily. So, I did intentionally allow those to self-sow, both for the pollinators and just for the convenience of not having to replant them.

(03:30)
And honestly, for the dill, after I used what I needed for my pickles, the flower heads, they were pretty; they were attracting pollinators, so I just decided to let them go. And initially, it seemed like a great trade-off because I do like volunteers in my garden, and I like being able to choose crops to self-sow. But dill and parsley in particular spread like crazy. Because they have these compound umbels, which are the style of the flower, and they have hundreds and hundreds of flowers, smaller flowers that create one compound blossom.

And so that’s hundreds and hundreds of seeds per plant. Or just per blossom, even. And you multiply, you know, a dill can have a half a dozen flowers on it. So this became a problem. The dill became a problem in the vegetable garden because the seedlings are so small and so fine that I couldn’t pull them, and I underestimated how easily those seeds would germinate.

They came up in my onions, and I had to wait for them to get large enough that I could actually grab them and pull them from the soil, which means that in the short term they also you know, use the water and the soil nutrients that I would have rather given to my onions.

So parsley was the same thing in my herb bed in the back. I allowed it to self-sow. I thought, great, you know, I’ll have a few parsley plants next year. No, I had a few thousand parsley plants this year.

I had a lot come up in the fall, actually. And I thought, well, they’ll freeze over the winter, no big deal. Well, then we had a really mild winter and they didn’t freeze. Then in the spring, more of them germinated. So I had my entire herb bed. I had a little bit of sage sticking out, I had a little bit of oregano sticking out, and the rest of the bed was entirely parsley. I don’t even know if my chives are still alive. They’re buried under the parsley.

So this year, what I did to attempt to stop the spread or to stop how thick they were in the garden is once they got taller than the other herbs, I just I took hedge trimmers, and I just chopped off the tops of them to prevent most of them from going to bloom. And we’ll see how that works. I’m hoping that’ll help me be able to control them a little bit better.

The lesson learned is that beneficial plants can still create long-term management work. So, lesson learned for me.

Keeping Calendula Under Control

Another plant that became a little bit more work than I expected was calendula. I love calendula; it’s pretty, it’s very visually appealing, it has pollinator value, it has a number of other uses. And I underestimated how freely it reseeds.

Again, every blossom has, I don’t know, probably 10 to 20 seeds. And they’re actually larger seeds, so they’re easier to contain. But, I didn’t deadhead them or anything like that. So I thought that they would just stop blooming.

And again, we had such a mild winter. They kept blooming all through the winter and setting more seed, even though we ripped out a number of the mature plants last fall, when we were done for the season. And so now it’s showing up throughout the garden. So, the seedlings are a little bit easier to pull than, say, the dill and the parsley. They have a nice long root, so they come out fairly easily, but it’s still persistent, and they are continuing to germinate all through the spring and into the summer.

(08:23)
And I’m still getting new seeds germinating well into the season. So again, another lesson learned about how easily things self-sow.

Phacelia Control

I know another one is phacelia; It’s this beautiful purple flower. Sometimes used as a cover crop.

I put it in as a pollinator plant again, and also learned that you need to terminate that before it goes to seed, or you will have it forever. It’s very pretty; it’s very attractive, but when it’s used as a cover crop, you terminate it when it’s blooming so that it doesn’t self-sow so that you make room for the things that you are trying to support with that cover crop.

So that’s another one. I had phacelia; it was pretty prolific in my garden, until several years ago our garden had a big depression in the middle. And so we just kind of bulldozed the whole thing and put in a proper deer fence and put in raised beds. And so that it wasn’t until then that we actually got rid of the phacelia.

Lemon Balm and Mints

And the last one is actually one that I kind of knew was going to be questionable.  Lemon balm is a member of the mint family and for some reason, I thought I knew better and that I could control it. I have peppermint; I have spearmint, and those have both stayed in relatively good control. I let them go in my food forest, and the spearmint has kind of picked its area and stayed there.

(10:37)
Believe it or not, my mint, I have like two little stalks of mint this year. I don’t know what happened. There’s some strawberries that were in there and they kind of started taking over the mint patch. So apparently, strawberries and mint, the mint doesn’t like the strawberries. I don’t know what’s going on there. So, spearmint, peppermint, they were both easy to keep in check as long as I harvested them and made use of them.

But the lemon balm. Every year, I harvest the lemon balm right before it goes to flower. And I cut the tops off most of them.

One thing that I did do that was a mistake on my part is I took a pot that I thought was a different member of the mint family that I had bought. I bought catmint. And for some reason, I grabbed this pot thinking it was catmint and put it in my herb garden behind the house. And then all of a sudden this year I realized that’s lemon balm. That’s not catmint.

So now, I just yestterday chopped that to the ground because I don’t want it spreading beyond that. And I’m going to have to actually start pulling the roots and stuff out as well. But this year I have found lemon balm in areas of my yard or areas of my property that are hundreds of feet away from where the lemon balm grows. So the seeds do spread via wind or via birds. The last thing I want is lemon balm, you know, showing up in weird places on my property. So yes, mints can spread aggressively beyond your expectations.

But for some reason, this is the only mint that has been so aggressive that I have not been able to manage it adequately. So, the lesson learned here is that some plants don’t stay where they were originally placed, and that’s not always a bad thing.

Positive Volunteer Plants in the Garden

(12:55)
That kind of leads me to things that I let volunteer and/or have found volunteers in my garden that are a positive.

So, one of them is lettuce. Every year, I let at least two or three lettuce plants of at least two to three different varieties. I let them go to seed intentionally so that they can self-sow.

It’s not like the other ones that I mentioned, the dill or the calendula. I think this year I had about ten lettuce plants volunteer. Those are really easy. Once they get, you know, a few leaves on them, I can transplant them to wherever I had planned to put my greens that year. And they’re much easier to manage.

You know, Mother Nature does the job for me. And it also acts as an indicator. So when I see the lettuce start to come up, I know that the ground is warm enough to support that, and I can start planting a lot of those early greens.

It’s a low-effort bonus that doesn’t get out of control like some of the other volunteers.

I’ve also had some flowers that were unexpected. I had a few years ago, before we did the reconstruction of our garden. This beautiful purple poppy that just arrived in my garden. I don’t know if it was introduced by birds or by the wind.

I happened to recognize when it came up that it looked like a poppy. So I let it go to see what it looked like. It was just this beautiful two-tone purple, and after we restructured and rebuilt our garden, I didn’t see the poppy again. And so I was a little disappointed.

(15:14)
So I was surprised this year; we redid our garden almost five years ago now, so suddenly, those poppy seeds I had poppies in my vegetable garden again.

So I was kind of happy about that. It was just one plant that came up, and I let it go. And I will harvest the seed heads to make sure that they don’t blow all over the garden because that’s another one that’s a lot of seeds and it could end up getting out of control if I don’t manage it.

But now I’m happy to have some seed for that poppy, and I can find someplace to put them where I want them.

I’ve also had other flowers like Snapdragons. I have snapdragons in my herb garden that volunteered. They’re a pretty purple. Just things that blow in or that are brought in by birds from the neighbors. They’re not always a bad thing, but it’s important that you know what it is so you can expect how it’s going to behave and understand what you need to do to either manage it or let it go.

Lessons that Made Gardening Easier

(16:31)
Next, I want to talk about some changes that made gardening easier. So I mentioned that we rebuilt and redesigned our garden. And one of the big things that I wanted to do with that garden was improve our irrigation efficiency. We had semi-permanent lines. We would just run the length of the garden, and we put these little emitters on them. There were more of an aerial emitter, but they were only like maybe a foot tall.

So it was still overhead watering, and it worked okay, but it also watered all the weeds, and we just we got really frustrated because the weed pressure was just unbearable. And by August, you couldn’t find the crops in all the weeds because it was impossible to keep up.

So that’s one of the reasons we went to raised beds. When we started to build out the garden with the raised beds, we actually, you know, tied into rather than running hoses into the garden, we actually tied into the water line, and put in a filter.

We have a lot of iron in our water. So, putting in a filter really helps to keep the lines from getting clogged.

And so now every raised bed has its own valve to water that garden, so I can control the water in each bed. I have like four lines of drip tape or drip line on each bed that run the length of the bed. And some of them I have to replace earlier than others. Some have lasted several years. Some only last a year.

(18:36)
It depends on you know, sometimes I’ll be pulling weeds or digging in there, and so the soil gets on top of the drip line, and it clogs up the emitters, things like that. But for the most part, they’ve lasted really well. And it really has reduced the time and effort required to maintain consistent watering.

I’m able to be more consistent, which then for things like potatoes and onions in particular, that have issues if there is inconsistent watering, either with heart rot or the onions will start to put up flowers if they’re inconsistent.

This really helped to get that more consistent to get better yields from those crops, but also just being able to manage the water based on each individual crop and what I have in that bed as opposed to, you know, larger sections of the garden.

(19:38)
And the drip irrigation system was probably the most impactful infrastructure improvement.

Granted, the deer fence helped immensely. And having raised beds, because we have such poor soil, it helped give us more control over the soil content. So, infrastructure changes are not to be underestimated in how they can impact the ease of gardening, the efficiency of your gardening and things like that. So something to keep in mind.

Using Moisture Meters

Also, in episode 75 with Lisa Taylor, she talked about moisture meters. After our conversation, I went on Amazon, and I went and was looking at moisture meters, and it was like, I think I got a two-pack for just under $20. Because I decided I was going to try that.

 I even told Lisa afterwards, after I’d had it for about a week: “This is the best ten dollars I have ever spent in my garden”. It has been a complete game changer when it comes to watering. Using a moisture meter removed all the guesswork, in that it has removed all the guesswork when it comes to watering those raised beds. When I walk out there every morning, and I stick the moisture meter based on what the crop is, where the root system would be.

So, for something like a potato or a tomato, it’s going to be a little deeper than, say, an onion, which is probably only going to be a few inches. But you try to get it to where the roots are. So you know what the moisture level is in the soil, where the roots are for that plant. And it’s helped identify when the soil actually needs water versus when it looks dry on the surface.

(21:43)
So I’ve looked at a bed, and I’m like, gosh, that looks really dry; I better water it. And I’m like, no, I’ve got the moisture meter; It was my onions. And I put the moisture meter in there about three inches, and it was totally wet three inches down. So that saved me from overwatering my onions. Like I said, when the water level is inconsistent and fluctuates, sometimes that can cause the onions to flower. So this moisture meter is actually helping me to to get a more productive crop in my onions this year.

And so it has also been a mindset shift for me in my watering approach in the vegetable garden, from a routine where I’d say, okay, on Monday I start watering, you know, these four beds, I had this routine, this cycle that I would work through every week.

And now I just it literally takes me five to ten minutes to go out there, check a bed, see if it needs water, move on, and work through all of the beds and turn on the water. Okay, that one doesn’t need water. Okay, I’ll go to the next one. That one does. And as soon as I have like four or five beds that are on, then I stop checking, come back in about an hour, see what the moisture looks like, either decide to turn it off or leave it on for another hour.

Then I can turn those off and turn on the next one that’s dry. So it’s really changed my approach from being routine-based to observation-based. And it really is one of the simplest tools that has improved my decision-making in my vegetable garden.

And it is easy to use in your ornamental beds as well. Just for me, I know we have such dry, fast draining soil that I’m not going to get the same benefit from that moisture meter in where a lot of our plants are growing and I don’t have a lot of ornamental beds.it is still it’s a great way to again get more evidence based watering versus routines.

Fencing to Protect Crops

(24:30)
And again, I kind of glossed over these, but my raised beds and my garden structure. The new fencing in our garden, have helped to keep the deer out. We’ve made a number of other improvements to help keep the deer out as well.

But I’ve also learned that the deer were actually doing some of the work for me when it comes to my fruit trees. They were eating and cleaning up the June drop apples and the fall drop that either fell out from higher in the tree or whatever.

They were cleaning all up that cleaning all that up for us. And which helped prevent disease in our, especially our apple trees. So now it’s actually more work for us to go out there and clean up those apples at the end of the season, to help prevent pests and diseases in our trees.

Around the vegetable garden, and it has protected our crops. It’s reduced loss from deer. We get fewer other types of critters in the garden, like raccoons or rabbits. We do occasionally still get rabbits, but they’re not nearly as bad as they were. The only pests that we really have an issue with, vertebrate pests, are birds that like to pull up things like my corn and my beans.

But it really has helped increase the reliability of our harvest. And helps minimize that heartbreak feeling that you when you see one of your crops or one of your plants has been just decimated by a deer or a rabbit or something like that.

So just like I said, those infrastructure changes really have benefits beyond just convenience. There are a lot of positives to a lot of those structural changes. And some of the most meaningful improvements come from better information and systems, not necessarily from more effort.

Lessons From Things Not Working as Expected in the Garden

(26:58)
So now are some things that didn’t work as expected. A lot of these have to actually do with mulch. So mulching pathways. We had this beautiful idea. We put weed barrier down between our raised beds and mulched it. And it didn’t occur to me that mulch is a nutrient trap.

So basically, seeds, anything that’s floating around in the wind is gonna get trapped in the mulch. So the weeds established very quickly in that mulch, even though I had the weed barrier down, and it’s become an ongoing maintenance issue.

Just this weekend I was out there, I was weed whacking the paths down because of all the weeds, and we just have to stay on top of it. And so, you know, for the rest of the garden, I think that’s just the way it’s gonna be. I have to either find a hearty cover, like a living mulch, that can be walked on.

So maybe like a clover or something like that to plant in the paths to help keep the weeds out, or just accept that the paths are gonna be weedy, and as long as we chop them down and maintain them regularly, they’re not gonna seed into our garden beds.

(28:48)
So the effectiveness of mulching pathways depends heavily on your context and your conditions. Now, mulching in my beds, on the other hand, I like straw mulch for my raised beds. You do occasionally get some seeds from the straw.

But those, because they’re in the straw, they’re not actually in the soil. So when they come up and when they germinate, they’re really easy to just pluck out of the bed. Mulching your beds, like raised vegetable beds, improves moisture retention significantly. So I have mulch on my tomatoes and my peppers. Those are usually the first ones that I mulch because they’re going to be in the ground the longest.

And when I started using the moisture meter, I realized that I can go twice as long or more without having to water those two beds than many of the other beds. So for me, mulching my vegetable beds with straw is a huge win. Another benefit to straw is that it can be reused for two to three years.

So once we’ve harvested for the winter, I’ll leave it on the bed over the winter. And then when I’m ready to plant in that bed, I’ll actually pull all the straw off, and usually I’ll move it to another bed that I’ve already planted in and use it for mulch in that bed so that it’s clean when I’m ready to plant. It does break down some, so usually I have to top with a little bit of newer mulch.

(30:51)
But really, the fact that it can be reused for two to three years is a cost savings. The occasional seedlings that pop up, though to me that’s an acceptable trade-off because they’re so easy to pull up and they’re not huge in volume.

The only thing you have to be careful with straw is that sometimes it can be sprayed with an herbicide, depending on the farm that it comes from, and the number of seeds in the straw can vary significantly as well.

So I’ve been fortunate to have good luck with where I’ve been getting my straw. But to me, straw mulch is the best mulch for my vegetable beds.

And again, the few seedlings that pop up are an acceptable trade-off, and they’re easy enough for me to manage.

So a lot of gardening strategies really are about managing trade-offs rather than eliminating problems.

The Lesson of Investments in The Garden

(32:09)
And then the last segment I’m going to talk about is investments that paid off over time. So, in this particular case, I want to talk about seed crops. So things like seed garlic and seed potatoes. I know it’s convenient and inexpensive to get them at the grocery store or, say, hey, you have a potato that’s sprouting in your cupboard and you want to go stick it in the ground, but a lot of those plants the potatoes and the garlic are treated.

Potatoes in particular, are often treated to delay sprouting. The ones that you get from the grocery store could introduce disease, and they often have inconsistent performance.

So, I know some people swear by them, but if you’re looking, especially if you’re looking to save your own seed, you’re better off buying high-quality materials, especially from a local farm, if possible.

(33:36)
I know there are a couple of commercial garlic seed growers in Washington, and there are several potato seed growers in Washington. But I’ve always had better luck with healthier crops, fewer diseases and a more consistent harvest when I buy quality seed from as local of a farm as I can get.

Just kind of keep in mind that some inputs are worth investing in up front, and short-term savings may create long-term issues.

Reflections on Garden Lessons

(34:24)
Gardening is an ongoing process of learning and learning from others, learning from experience, sometimes learning the hard way. But better results often come from observation and small adjustments rather than just more effort. Experience helps us refine those decisions about what to keep, what to change, what to remove.

So I want to invite you to reflect on what’s one garden win that you are having this year that you’d like to repeat?

Maybe one decision you made about your garden that you would like to rethink for next year.

And, have you had an unexpected volunteer in your garden that you really appreciated? And how can you keep that going?

So thanks for joining me today. If you want to share your answers to any of those questions, you can find us on Facebook or Instagram. Or you’re welcome to email me at hello@theevergreenthumb.org.  I’d love to hear a garden win that you will keep doing, a decision that you learned the hard way maybe wasn’t the best one, or a volunteer that showed up in your garden that you really appreciated.

So thanks for joining me today, and we’ll be back in two weeks.