The Context for a Healthy Garden
This post offers you the contextual foundation for creating and maintaining a healthy and beautiful garden.
What actually makes a beautiful and healthy garden?
Care - That you actually care about and enjoy this kind of work. When you do, it translates into the soil and plants you work with. The people with a "green thumb" just care about and have a connection with plants.
The Ground - The soil is the foundation for the health of your plants. Keep the soil rich for your plants because your plants pull up all their nutrition from the soil. If the soil is not up to snuff then your plants can often suffer.
Here's a great example illustrating this. One of my clients had a Boxwood Shrub that was loaded with aphids. I suggested that we feed the soil with compost and fertilizer so that the shrub could replenish itself and have access to the nutrients it needs, supporting its strength to fight off the aphids. After 3 months all the aphids were completely gone. Why was this?
When you give plants what they need to nourish themselves they can heal themselves. Before I started Oregon Ground Works I had a 12+ year extensive background in natural healing and herbal medicine focused on human health. The only thing I ever saw actually work for true healing and removal of symptoms was addressing the root cause of the problem. If the root cause was not addressed and removed the person did not get the results they wanted. This was different for each person and the same applies to plants.
There is no one size fits all with people or plants. True health comes from the ground up. Spraying something on the aphids would have been a top down approach and never addressed the cause {lack of nutrients} in the soil the plant needed to boost its immune system to fight of the aphids itself.
Knowledge Built On Experience - Jump into your garden and get growing! The only way you can learn what works and what doesn't is by trying things. And of course, don't buy a $300 Japanese Maple and plant it in your garden without learning what type of soil it needs for optimizing the health and potential of your Japanese maple.
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