You can plant late, lose the seed labels, skip the expensive raised beds, and still have a garden worth enjoying. You don’t need to get everything right to grow something good. While influencers might make you think there’s only one right way to grow a tomato (“6 Must-Do Tasks To Avoid Killing Your Tomatoes–Most Miss #4”), gardening is really much more chill. Mistakes are allowed, and so is experimentation, and personalizing your garden to fit your time, space, and needs.

Gardening need not be expensive or demanding. A packet of seeds, a bit of soil, and some light and water make a garden. Whether you use seed starting flats or chaos seeding, raised beds or rows, there is no one way to garden. Gardens don't demand the exactness and rule-following of filing your tax returns.

You can garden on the cheap

I recently saw a guy with a fancy, high-tech new boat using a bobber to fish for bluegills. Outdoor magazines might convince you that without a fancy, expensive boat you’ll never catch fish. Just down the way, a kid was catching those same-sized fish from shore. The gardening world is not immune from such advertising messages. Designer tools, expensive machinery, loads of fancy, ready-made raised beds (and the soil to fill them), and nursery plants with eye-watering prices can make us think we need to invest big to garden. Of course, that isn’t so. 

While the joke about spending $200 to grow three tomatoes sometimes hits a bit too close to home, the fact is gardening doesn’t have to be expensive.  Many people garden to provide a bit of security and savings. 

Growing from seed and replanting from your harvest is a great value. One packet of cucumber seeds will likely provide more cucumbers than you know what to do with. A few dollars will get you 500 Buttercrunch Lettuce seeds. I’ve been eating potatoes essentially free for the past four years (if you don’t count my labor) simply because I replant every spring from last year’s crop. 

Plants will grow in the darndest places

Every catalog and article lists Hubbard squash as requiring full sun, and indeed, that is where you should plant them. But if conditions are otherwise excellent, they may perform with less. One year, my compost pile was in partial sun, or really, partial shade. It received only about three hours of sun per day, far less than the six hours considered the minimum for full sun. No one, it appears, told the volunteer Hubbard squash this fact. It shouldn’t have grown there, but it did, right out of the compost pile. It shouldn’t have thrived, but it did, pushing out vines that were 15-20 feet long with deep green leaves the size of serving platters. It shouldn’t have produced any squash, with so little sunshine, but it made several, one a 25 pound monster. 

I don’t recommend planting squash in the shade, but if a spot gets a little less than full sun and that’s all you have, go for it. Provide fertility and moisture, and you might get away with it. 

A little chaos isn’t always bad

Sometimes everything piles up and time runs out. Or you forgot to label a few baggies of seeds. Lately, I’ve taken to something I call chaos seeding for quite a few of my annual, seed grown flowers. It goes like this: grab half a dozen old seed packets, or mystery packets, mix them together, and head out to the garden. Instead of planting in neat rows and spacing seeds meticulously, I sprinkle them evenly over the ground, quickly brush soil over the top with my hands, and water them in. 

Despite this chaotic planting, they germinate quite well. In areas that are overfilled, I simply lift a spade of seedlings, soil and all, and replant them in a thin spot. By early summer I have lush beds of zinnias, cosmos, amaranth, and whatever else got mixed in. It isn’t the traditional way, but it works fine for me, and saves hassle. 

Few gardening rules are absolute

There aren't many absolute rules in gardening, although some advice, like waiting until your frosts are past before planting out your tomatoes, is close. But for the most part, gardening rules are more good, practical ideas. Even then, you can often get away with ignoring a gardening rule as long as you don’t ignore too many at once. 

For example, a common “rule” is to avoid overhead watering, often because of fungal problems. If overhead watering is the method you have, pay more attention to thinning plants and maintaining proper airflow around those plants to mitigate the issue. Consider the whole situation. Most gardening “rules” are aimed at creating perfect conditions, not what will be good enough.

A missed planting date is okay

Spend time on gardening websites, and you’ll see some pretty exacting requirements for when to start seeds: six weeks before your last frost, by Mother's Day, or just about anything else. It can seem like if you’ve missed the window, you might as well give up. In reality, those windows and planting dates are useful guidelines, not deadlines. Plant growth and maturity are highly dependent on a slew of factors, like temperature, soil compaction, fertility, water and irrigation, or even a bunch of cold, breezy days. If you missed the prime window, and there is enough time left in the season, plant it anyway. If time is getting tight, try a quicker-to-mature variety. 

Often, a late-planted crop will catch up to an earlier one simply because germination happens quicker in warmer soil, and plant growth is faster as temperatures approach optimum. While the heat of the South in summer or the approaching frosts in the North may bring those plants to a halt, you’ll be surprised at just how much you can sometimes get away with.

If you do have to sneak some seeds into the ground late, help them out by paying closer attention to their needs. A bit of fertilizer and some extra attention to their soil moisture can go a long way.

That perennial you bought and kept meaning to find a home for, but didn’t, and now your first autumn killing frost has already arrived? If the ground is still workable, plant it anyway. Give it some mulch, water it, tuck it in, and wish it luck. Odds are decent it will survive, even if it might have been better off planted a few weeks earlier. Sometimes, life happens.

When everything seems to go wrong

This year, in my region, every gardener I talked to had a problem with meadow voles. They were voracious and, for some reason, loved nipping off young and not-so-young plants at ground level, then leaving the rest to die. One even took my mother’s clematis vine, all three stems nearly as thick as a pencil. I had to replant my cucumbers four times before the voles finally allowed the plants to grow up the cattle panel arch and survive. The voles took hundreds of sunflower seedlings. It was beyond frustrating. 

But all those extremely late cucumber replants still had time to make cukes. Whatever impulse caused the voles to go overboard in spring faded, or, as I like to hope, the owl got them.

Nature is resilient, and our gardens, even when we keep them manicured, are part of Nature. Seeds want to germinate. A plant wants to survive, and my mother’s clematis has sprouted from the base (now with a hardware cloth cloche around it). My huge A-frame bean trellis that tipped over in a wind storm was righted, and while the beans looked a bit disheveled at first, they quickly perked up again. While some garden losses are unrecoverable, like raccoons in your sweet corn, many things aren’t the disaster they initially seem to be.

Treat variations from perfect conditions and magazine-photo gardens as experiments. Note what you tried or what happened in your garden journal so you can learn from it later, or at least remember it. There’s no one right way to garden, and an imperfect garden isn’t somehow wrong. Enjoy your garden, and allow a bit of the wonder of it all to sink in. That caterpillar, even though it is eating your tomatoes, is still pretty cool.