Gardening is a journey,
and we all tread that path at our very own pace.
And while some of you have been doing it for decades,
every single day, someone picks up a spade for the first time.
And while we all learn for a lifetime in the garden,
I want to share with you today
a few things I wish I'd known from the start.
Gardening is not a race.
Take it slow. There's so much to learn along the way.
A vegetable garden is a fantastic place
to learn lots of foundational skills.
Things like watering might seem really simple,
but you need to get your eye in
to work out when something needs a drink
or, often, when it's had too much.
It's a really common thing that people struggle with.
Of course, to grow good lettuce,
you're gonna need to get to know your soil.
Now, you need something that is friable and fertile,
it holds moisture and nutrients.
You might have it to begin with
or, of course, you might have to do some work to get there.
You'll also learn about microclimates.
In the cooler parts of the year,
you might need your lettuce out in blazing sunshine,
whereas when it gets really hot,
to grow it well you'll need to offer a little bit of shade
or maybe even grow it in a pot in a sheltered spot in the garden.
And, of course, you will learn
the most important thing in gardening,
and that is observation.
You come out every day, have a look at the crop, you see how it's going.
You can see at that end of the garden bed I've got a problem.
Something is eating my lettuce. I think it's birds.
But by spotting that really early,
I can intervene straightaway
and stop it ruining the whole crop.
One tip that I always have for new players
is not to put too much pressure on yourself.
Really, plants were making flowers and fruit
well before we got involved.
So, if you give them the basics that they need,
they will work with you.
They want to live.
Now, to get those basics, you can look at a plant label.
It'll tell you perhaps how much sun it needs,
a little bit about the soil,
and maybe even where that plant comes from.
But I reckon, if you want to grow something that is a bit unusual,
you need to dig deeper.
And working out where a plant is from
can tell you a lot about what it needs to grow strongly.
This is a little perennial climbing nasturtium.
It comes from some of those high-altitude regions
in South America.
Now, it's really happy in my cold climate.
It grows gangbusters through those cooler months
and then produces these gorgeous little tricolour flowers.
That's its species name.
Now, it does handle the really cold, wet winter,
but the thing about it
is that in these high-altitude areas,
they also have a really long, hot summer.
In summertime, this dies all the way back to a tuber,
where it waits out that long summer,
and a lot of people have trouble growing it
because they water the dormant tuber and it rots away.
So my solution is to grow it in a container,
which means that if we have a really wet summer,
I can always just tip that container over
so that those tubers don't get wet at all.
Come autumn, I put it back upright.
It can grow away, and then I get this gorgeous display.
Plants will also die.
Killing plants is a huge part of gardening.
It's where we learn.
And really, for every garden success,
there's probably five failures that have fed into a good decision.
You might remember when I planted this display pot.
It was meant to look good right through the cooler months.
All evergreen plants and a contrast of foliage and flowers.
Now, it did look good through autumn and into winter,
but once that coldest weather hit, I saw a problem.
Now, this is a tea tree. I'm a bit of a fan of these.
It's a dark-leaf form known as 'Burgundy'.
And it looked really, really nice
right until the frosts started to bite.
And, in fact, it killed most of the tips of the plant.
It looked absolutely rubbish.
Down in the lower part of the garden, where it's even colder,
it completely cooked the plant almost back down to the ground.
So, I have learned something by nearly killing this plant.
I looked at some of the different cultivars around town
that are doing really, really well,
and this one, 'Copper Glow',
similar dark foliage and gorgeous white flowers,
is much more cold-hardy.
So by nearly killing this plant,
I've learnt something that'll help my success in the future.
It's OK to change your mind.
Admitting that you're wrong
or perhaps that you've just changed your mind
can be hard in lots of parts of life.
And in the garden, it sometimes means
that you've wasted some really hard work.
Take this vegetable garden.
A few years ago, you saw me dig the whole thing out
and line it with geotextile fabric.
I was trying to stop the competition from those elm tree roots
nicking all the water and nutrients from my veggies.
Now, it did work for the first little while,
but over time, I found that some of these small feeder roots
still made their way through the fabric,
and they're the ones that really compete with the veggies.
Now, this is such a difficult thing to admit that I was wrong about.
I put in lots of thought and research into this solution.
I bought a really high-quality product,
one that's made from recycled materials.
But the truth is, a few years down the track,
and, really, I've changed my position.
It's not really doing a good enough job,
but also, personally, I'm not sure that I'm comfortable
with using this high-tech and plastic solution.
I'm gonna dig it out of the whole garden
and I have to come up with another way to grow food
in the competition with the trees.
But I guess my message to you
is it doesn't matter how hard it is to admit that you've gone wrong,
or how hard the work will be to find another solution.
But in the garden, it is always OK to change your mind.
Push your luck.
One of the final things that I want to tell you,
and it's something that I wish I had heard at the start,
is it's a great idea to push your luck.
Once you've learned all of the rules of gardening,
of course you can break them
and you can try things that you are not sure if they're gonna work.
This is Eucalyptus gregsoniana.
It's known as the Wolgan snow gum.
It's a dwarf snow gum, about 4-6 metres,
from around Canberra.
I think it's gonna be really happy in this cool climate.
And I'm hoping that I can train it
into the central feature of my garden.
I'm gonna have to prune it,
I'm gonna have to sculpt it into what I hope is the perfect tree.
And I reckon I can do it,
but if it doesn't work,
that is the learning in gardening.
And you can always go back and try something else.
All gardening is a journey
and we all tread that path at a different pace.
But if you need a little bit of encouragement,
don't forget that there's plenty of us on that path with you.
Some are further down the way and some behind.
The important thing, no matter where you are on that path,
you never stop growing.