A Beginner's Guide to Common Gardening Terms

Scarification. Deadhead. Transplant. Harden off.

These are some gardening terms that might, to a beginner gardener, sound intimidating, even perhaps a bit morbid. (Don't worry: it's just flower heads that put the "dead" in "deadhead".) Here's a quick breakdown of some terms you might encounter on the backs of seed packets or in my Gardenary resources, plus some videos to watch to take you from novice to master gardener in no time.

annuals, biennials, and perennials

Annuals complete their life cycle in one growing season. Biennials, as you may have guessed, take two years to complete their life cycle. Perennials keep coming back in the spring and can live for years. In this video, I go further into the different types and explain why I love adding biennials to my kitchen garden.

bolting

Bolting means a plant is finishing up its life cycle and focusing on producing seed to perpetuate itself. In the above picture, the spinach plant is bolting. Note the beginning of a floret at the top, plus a change in the leaf shape. I talk more about the signs of bolting in this video.

deadheading

This just means to remove a dead or dying flower to encourage the plant to form new blooms. Regular deadheading tells the plant to focus on producing new flowers instead of seeds. This video shows you how to encourage more blooms on zinnias.

determinate and indeterminate

Determinate, or bush-type tomatoes, produce fruit and finish all at once, while indeterminate, or vining tomatoes, continue producing fruit throughout their life cycle. I grow indeterminate varieties up my arch trellises. I talk more about the two types in this video.

direct sow and transplanting

Direct sow means you put the seeds in the garden where you want them to grow versus starting them indoors and transplanting them to the garden later. As I outline in Chapter 5: Plan of Kitchen Garden Revival, some plant families take a long time to mature and need to be started indoors before the threat of frost has passed, and others really dislike being moved.

germination

This is just a fancy word for when a seed sprouts and starts to grow. When you buy seeds, check the package to see the rate of germination so you'll know how many seeds to plant to get your desired number of plants.

GMO

GMO stands for genetically modified organism, which means the genome of the seeds has been altered in a lab. Check the seed label if avoiding GMOs is important to you. I encourage gardeners to buy local and organic, to be wary of buying plants and seeds that have been sprayed with synthetics, and to ask lots of questions about how a plant has been grown.

hardening off

This means taking your seedlings outdoors for short periods of time to get them used to sun, wind, and rain before moving them to their permanent home in the garden. You're basically toughening those fragile babies up a bit!

heirloom variety

Heirloom seeds are ones that have been around for a very long time but that fell out of favor in our large-scale industrialized food system. You might only experience certain heirloom varieties by growing them yourself, but know that they might be more labor-intensive and less hardy than their hybrid cousins.

intensive planting

This is a way of packing in the plants and growing with the intention of harvesting more often from a variety of different vegetables, fruits, leaves, and herbs. When you build a raised bed like the ones I discuss in my book, we can afford to plant things closer together than what their tags say because the tags were written for people growing in wide rows or an in-ground vegetable patch. Intensive planting aims to get more production out of a small space and avoid having bare soil (which is never good).

scarification

No, this doesn't mean you scare something in the garden. It just means you file down the seed coating to increase the likelihood of germination. Not all seeds need to be scarified. Check out this video to see how it's done.

self-sow

Plants that self-sow can propagate themselves by seed.

stratification

Some plants need to be stratified, or given a cold treatment, before they'll germinate. You can mimic the time seeds might spend underground over the winter by putting seeds in the refrigerator. Google info on your seeds to see if they require any type of cold or warm treatment before sprouting.

successive sowing

I like to call this "never stop planting", and it's a major component of intensive planting. Instead of sowing all my seeds at once, I'll plant a couple and then come back and plant more a week or two later, to ensure I have a continuous harvest of the good stuff I want to eat. I have a video about successive, also called succession, sowing here.

thinning

You might have seen instructions to thin your plants on the back of seed packets. If you've sown too many seeds in one area and had a good germination rate, you'll have to thin, or pull up some seedlings, to give enough room and resources to the ones you keep for them to grow. If you feel guilty pulling up something you've started growing, I have a solution to that here.

trap crop

A trap crop is a sacrificial plant you grow in the garden to attract pests that would otherwise eat the plants you're growing for yourself. It's like an agricultural decoy. Find out more here.