Meleah Maynard, author of the new book Decoding Gardening Advice, is our guest poster today. She shares her thoughts about following gardening rules–do you follow them in your own garden? You can read more from Meleah on her blog, Everyday Gardener.

Rules can really suck the fun and relaxation out of all things good. I’ve always thought this, and that probably has a lot to do with having been raised in a house with wall-to-wall white carpeting. Come over to my house and even if fresh, new babies suddenly need to lick formula from my floors on a regular basis, I will never ask you to take off your shoes. Just got back from tromping around the horse barns at the State Fair? Come on in!

Being rule averse has served me well for the most part. I wear white whenever I want to. I pair foods that ought to be served with white wine with red. And I have gardened successfully for years without paying much mind to many of the rules I heard you must follow when putting shovel to dirt.

Divide plants only in spring and fall. Sterilize containers at the end of each season. Water in the morning, and never with an overhead sprinkler. Get a soil test. These aren’t useless rules at all. But they aren’t make-or-break rules for most people, either. As Jeff Gillman and I talk about in our book, a lot of the gardening advice we all hear is debatable rather than wrong or right.

I wish this truth, the fact that some advice can be broken without all hell breaking loose, would get more play, because it might make gardening more fun and less scary for a lot of beginners. And it might save ruleophobes like me from dismissing too many rules and regretting breaking some really important ones—like the need to prepare your soil before planting and the importance of keeping soil healthy over time.

If you’ve made the mistake of planting gardens in crappy soil, you know how hard it is to amend that soil with organic matter once all those plants are in place. Even after years of working compost, manure and mulched leaves into the gardens in my front yard, there are still areas where the dirt is as cracked, hard and dry as the floor of the Arizona desert where I grew up.

In my haste to get rid of the blanket of weeds and patchy turf grass that called itself our front lawn when we moved in, I did some soil amending but not nearly enough. Once we’d broken our backs ripping out all that ugly stuff, I just wanted to get to the fun part and plant. Boy, do I wish I hadn’t done that.

I still hate rules when they’re soul-crushingly capricious. But I absolutely get the wisdom in advising against sticking your hand down a running garbage disposal. Nailing down all the in between stuff is the trick.

Before and after: If only we'd broken our backs just a wee bit more and amended the soil better before laying the path and planting.

Thanks so much for the advice, Meleah! This month we’ll be featuring several posts from Meleah and a chance to win a copy of her new book, so stay tuned for more of her gardening insight. 

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