This quick video explains why you can ignore these 4 common garden myths…

Gardening advice abounds online in forums, blogs, and social media, and your gardening friends and neighbors probably have more than a few tips that they are happy to share as well. However, there is also lots of advice out there that is misguided, inaccurate, or just plain false.

While many of the garden myths out there won’t actually harm your garden, they won’t really do much good either, so there’s no sense in wasting time (and sometimes money) on trying them – unless you really want to, just for fun.

The video below debunks 4 popular gardening myths that you can ignore from now on whenever you hear this advice.

Personally, I have a few comments on a couple of these garden myths, from my own experiences. First of all, the only one I have actually listened to in the past is the one about the coffee grounds. I am glad I watched this, because I had been trying to keep my blueberry plants alive using this method, and have also heavily used them on our hay bales where we have our potatoes planted, to try to prevent scab.

The blueberries were looking terrible this year despite repeat applications of lots of coffee grounds, so I ended up buying some organic acidifying fertilizer for them, and I hope they make it through.

As for the potatoes, the first year they were pretty good but had some scab, the second year I applied coffee grounds and had less scab, the third year I applied even more coffee grounds and had more scab than the previous year, and this year I also applied quite a few grounds, and though we haven’t harvested them all yet, the ones I have pulled so far have had NO scab at all, leading me to believe it has more to do with the weather and growing conditions than anything about the coffee grounds…

Also a quick note on the cross-pollinating “squmpkins” myth (he does mention this in the video, but I wanted to emphasize it) – while you might not end up with weird, mutant “squmpkins” by planting them together in the garden, you WILL indeed have odd, wacky and completely unpredictable results if you try to save seeds from any squashes or pumpkins you have growing in the same area and plant them the following year – as we have experienced this year quite dramatically in our giant compost squash patch, which has at least 6 different types of mutant squashes growing wild in it, only one of which is even remotely recognizable! (I will try to share a video on this soon, so you can see some of our crazy “squmpkin” crosses.)