The other day I was scrolling through Youtube and I thought I'd find some simple gardening videos to try and figure out why I always kill all of my plants when I feel like it should be something stupid simple. For years I've been resigned to saying that I just don't have a green thumb but after watching this simple video about pruning it was like a light bulb turned on. I had been trying to follow miscellaneous bits of advice like "use lots of mulch!" or "never prune your plants!" or "you need to have some sort of greenhouse effect to start seeds" without actually having a fundamental understanding of how plants work. I've done things like suffocating my seedlings, let things grow way out of hand so that they choke everything out, let my herbs bolt and die without a clue as to what I was doing wrong, etc. etc.
So for everyone else out there that does not have a green thumb or they have turned their thumb green through a lot of frustration and perseverance, I would like to know...
What was an "aha!" moment you had where you found a piece of information that was seemingly stupid simple but it made all the difference for you? This is likely something that the "experts" neglect to explain because it should be obvious (but obviously it wasn't for some of us).
For me, it was the fact that when you cut a plant it grows back. And you can control how it grows back. I guess I always knew this because things like grass grow back but for some reason it did not occur to me that an herb will grow back. i tried this on my sad sage and basil plants that I have growing in my kitchen window and the they are both putting out a million more little sprouts (branches? leaves?) and are no longer all leggy. Here's the simple video that I was watching:
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