10 basic gardening tips for beginners

So you’ve finally got some outdoor space and you want to start a garden Here’s 10 tips to help get you off to the right start.

• Buy yourself a spade. You don’t need to spend much in fact you can pick these up cheap at car boot sales. Weeding, digging holes for new plants, shifting compost, levelling ground, turning over soil – a spade does the lot.
• Get to know your soil. Before you go out and spend a your money on plants get to know a bit about your soil. At the very least see what plants seem to be doing well in neighbouring gardens. The more scientific amongst you might want to invest in a soil testing kit.
• Find a theme and stick to it. Do you want to grow flowers or grow your own food. If you’re not sure yet then perhaps a cottage garden is the way to go where you can mix and match as you see fit.
• Visit a garden show. Here in the UK there’s plenty of garden and flower shows on throughout the spring and summer, the RHS put on a number of these and they are well organised events with plenty of inspiration.
• Get some outdoor furniture, at the very least a chair. That way you can sit and enjoy the fruits of your labour. The garden is probably the most relaxing place to sit at home.
• Subscribe to some of the fantastic gardening channels on youtube. There’s a large community of people with similar interests to you happy to share their stories of success and failure.
• Grow some herbs. They are easy to grow, useful and attractive to look at – what’s not to like ?
• Embrace failure. I suspect that the most experienced gardeners have killed the most plants and there’s no doubt that a few will die on you too. Gardening is all down to experience so the sooner you learn that things don’t always work as you might expect the better.
• Visit some gardens. Your neighbours, your mates, your families or perhaps some of the more famous gardens around Britain, there’s a lot of inspiration and plant ideas all around.
• Start a compost heap. You’ll be surprised just how much waste can be composted, take a look here to see our guide to composting. It’s no doubt a that creating compost heap is one of the best things you can do in your garden. This will provide valuable nutrients to ensure your plants thrive !

So there’s Ten tips for the beginner gardener. What are you waiting for, go buy that spade.