Stop Guessing in the Garden: Simple Tests for Smarter Observation and Planting

🌱 Before you plant another single tree, there’s one step that can save you years of frustration: observation.

In this Mastering the Garden episode of White Strawberries, I walk you through how to understand your land before you grow — from mapping shade and wind to testing soil, water movement, and frost patterns.

Using real examples (including why my mum’s feijoas fruit weeks before mine just 12 minutes away), we explore how small environmental differences shape what thrives — and what struggles.

This episode is your practical guide to working with your land instead of against it, using simple, often free tests to build a resilient, abundant garden.

🌿 If you’ve ever felt like you don’t have a “green thumb,” this might be the missing piece.

🌱 What You’ll Discover

•  How to map shade across seasons and use it to your advantage 
•  What wind patterns reveal about plant placement and disease risk 
•  How frost moves through your land — and how to work with it 
•  Simple ways to observe water flow, drainage, and waterlogging
•  Easy at-home soil tests (including structure and moisture checks) 
•  How weeds can give clues about your soil conditions 
•  Why climate zones (like USDA) are helpful — but limited 

🔗 References & Resources Mentioned

•  Permaculture Research Soil Test Handbook — by Chris Trump & collaborators 
•  iNaturalist (plant identification app) 
•  Seek by iNaturalist (child-friendly version) 

🎧 Previous White Strawberries Episodes Referred to

•  How I Saved My Garden from Summer Storms, Flooding and Wind (Episode 37). Look it up on your platform 🤗

🎧 Connect with me.

Transcript

Observation-Driven Garden Mapping and Testing Guide

[00:00:00] Understanding the subtle variations on your property as opposed to your neighbors, as opposed to a 15 minute drive up the road empowers you to make better decisions and save effort prior to putting anything in the ground. And so this episode is all about the nitty gritty of. Observation. Observation is potentially the most important thing any gardener can do and is one of the most common tools of practice in permaculture, and really any holistic or perennial growing wisdom 

In this case, what we're talking about is how do we observe. Before we plant, but ideally, we are doing some of these on a regular basis. , choosing the right cultive for your area and creating a garden that is both abundant and resilient. Hi there. If you are new around here. I'm Sam, and this is White Strawberries where we focus on growing wellness and joy from the soil up, creating spaces that support our lives, not train them. Together, we explore ideas, science, and conversations to support our spaces to give more than they take full of nourishing food, gorgeous flowers and life.

Let's dig in. I want to talk to you a little bit about my mom's garden. So she raised me in a garden and I think back now and laugh because now she's urban. She wants, you know, a couple of handfuls of plants and, and that's it really. And she does find some joy in plants, but certainly doesn't want the food forest I've got.

But what she does have in her urban garden now is some fiejoa trees and fiejoas are abundant in New Zealand and uh, for some reason we all love them. They're very similar to the tropical guava and they're abundant in New Zealand.

In the eighties and nineties, you couldn't get them in the supermarket, but people would have them in their backyards. So mum is about a 12 minute drive towards the coast from me, and the saltwater can keep the climate a little bit warmer, in the winter, and it also, because it's salty, it can decrease the amount of frost that they have.

But the curious thing to me is how this has [00:02:00] impacted her fruiting times. So, mum's, Fiji is all done now as I record this. We're a third of the way through Autumn and they've, they've pretty much all fallen down and they've finished, and she has maybe five cultive of Fiji trees on her land and her surrounding properties.

And I have. Three cultive here. I've got five trees and three of them are different. They have not started. I think I've had one or two FI Joes max, and that's because the wind's knocked them down a little bit prematurely. So a 12 minute drive away and we've got different climates, which results in.

Different fruiting times as well as obviously what cultive is of. Different trees are gonna be happy on her land and my land. She can grow a lot more subtropical things than I can, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera

 I wanted to share this example so that I could implore on you the importance of observing your specific space. I'm going to touch on wind, water, soil, some online research, and a few other more minor things. 

Let this episode wash over you for now. Take what you like and leave the rest. Some observation will just be exactly what you need and some may be irrelevant. Okay. Online research can be a brilliant place to start. 

And you can even start doing this before you move onto a property.

So if you know you're gonna buy some land or you know you're gonna start a garden, , we can do online research. We can also do it if it's in the middle of the snow and outside is just all white. We can do some online research. It gives you a rough framework before your own observations deepen over time.

Looking at broad climate classifications, local averages, and even gardening advice from similar regions can help you form early hypotheses about what might work in your area. Just don't mistake it for the full picture. It's a starting point, not a conclusion. Some online things you might wanna look at.

The first is, zonings. And if we talk about the United States Department of Agriculture, they have zones and they can be applied as a simple reference. So zone one is extremely cold, so it's [00:04:00] down to like negative 45 degrees Celsius while zone 13 is tropical with very warm minimum temperatures.

A country like the United States have massive differences in climate, and so does New Zealand for that matter. For me, in Auckland, that places me around what's called zone 10 B. However, there are limitations in these zones because they can tell you what the minimum winter temperatures are, but they don't actually tell you necessarily much else.

You may also come across heat zones, so again, in the USA, they have the American horticultural. Society and they've created a heat zone map which tracks how many days exceed 30 degrees Celsius. Looking at the rainfall your area had last year, or the temperature ranges across the seasons, chill hours, and overall season patterns can be very useful.

These things are really helpful to have written down somewhere because at some point you're gonna be deciding whether or not a tree goes into your area.

So for example, there was a time where I really wanted to grow maple syrup. Um, actually we called our puppy maple syrup, which you might have heard me refer to. But I really wanted to grow a maple tree, and I realized that the temperature it had to go down to, for this maple. Tree to be happy was just way lower than the temperature that I had.

So that was fairly obvious to me. I thought, yeah, you know what? You can grow that in Canada. That's fine. 

The first thing that is easy to map and that needs to be mapped is your shade. The shade that is cast by trees and buildings and. Established structures, but also the shade that you can get just by it being winter and the surrounding hill lines and the horizon.

You wanna map the shade that you receive in the summer, which will be a lot less than the shade that you receive in the winter. And this is important if you've got shade in the winter. We wanna be careful what trees we put there. You might have shade behind your shed in the winter, but no shade in the summer.

You might have shade [00:06:00] underneath trees in a specific place in the summer, and you might find that the shade actually moves in the winter. You're gonna get longer shade lines in the winter and smaller shade lines in the summer. By nature of the sun being higher above our heads. You also wanna map the wind.

Wind is another really key thing that we look at when we are choosing what plants go where. Especially with fruit trees because they are so tall and they are susceptible to wind, but also growing for beauty, growing for joy. Our dahlias and other plants, if they poke their little heads up high, they can be easily blown over and destroyed by the wind.

And then other plants need wind to be happy. So for example, like a peach tree, it really wants to have wind. Otherwise, if it's kind of in a damp place, uh, that's quite humid. What can happen is it can get fungal and bacterial diseases. You can look at wind patterns and do some Googling around it.

You can just spend some time over the next few months mapping where the wind tends to come. If you're in a valley, you'll find that it comes from two opposing places. If you have high structures, you will see also that, uh, the wind can move around different structures. Now the wind. Can be changed and modified a little bit, just like the shade can be modified a little bit.

But for the most part, we really wanna make sure that we know what our baseline is first. If you have a lot of wind coming from a certain direction and you do wanna grow things like citrus. Like sub tropicals, we're gonna need to look at planting a wind belt or putting up wind cloth to protect those trees.

The third thing we wanna map out onto our space is frost fall. Frost can move like molasses and so it actually will start high and it will start sinking down lower and frost can be manipulated. By putting trees on the ground or putting gates up, putting different structures on the ground. It really can be [00:08:00] manipulated quite easily, but it's super important to know where it starts.

Frost can kill plants, and frost is also needed for plants. I love giving examples out of my own garden about how. These observations have supported me because sometimes when I hear things like this, for me personally, I'm like, meh, whatever. I don't get much wind. Or, oh, who cares? I'll put it in the ground.

I'll think about it later. Or. The frost can't be that bad, can I? I don't really remember it from last year, and if I put it here, surely it won't have frost. for example peonies need a lot of frost to flower. Brussels sprouts need a lot of cold time to shape Brussels sprouts.

My subtropical guava tree cannot have any frost or it will be taken out. People that complain they don't have a green thumb. I think that observation and mapping out their system is probably the part of the puzzle that they have not completed.

The fourth thing is water. It's important to know how water moves through your space. Again, water can actually be manipulated digging paths or swales, putting typical drainage in, and depending on your space and your budget. We can hire a tractor to do what's called deep ripping, where a tractor pulls something that breaks uped subsoil during dry conditions, and this improves vertical water movement.

There's lots of options available to us, but we need to know how water is moving to start with in New Zealand. We just had some really, really difficult wind and water. We had a cyclone come through and honestly it feels like it's been back to back rain and water and humidity all summer.

So if you aren't struggling with that, check out episode 37. , it's called How I Saved My Garden from Summer Storms, flooding and Wind, and I talk about the five things I've done to mitigate those things. If this episode is making you think, yeah, I've actually got a lot of water logged ground. Theme's kind of overwhelming.

Check out that episode. You can do [00:10:00] so many easy and free simple things to offset some of this water logging. You don't have to get a tractor to come in and rip your soil. That's, we don't have to do that.

There's a few ways you can look at how water moves through your garden. One of the ways I can see it very clearly to me now that I've been on my property for six years is that there are dips in the earth where the water is actually moving. We know we've got water locking problems if the soil smells sour or chemically or putrid.

Now, in keeping that in mind, there are certain cultivars of certain trees that are happy in. Wet soil, for example, I've got some elderberries and I planted four of them and only a couple of meters apart. All of them, and two of them, which have poorer drainage, have done a lot better than the ones that have phenomenal drainage.

If you are walking through areas of your orchard, and it is squi. Especially if this does not go away, you have a water problem, you've got too much water. If you are noticing the yellowing of leaves, especially on your citrus trees or on other trees, oftentimes this can be water logging . If you go outside to your orchard now and dig a hole and it's just very wet and very tamp, and you haven't had rain for 24 hours, you have a water problem.

Too much water in our growing spaces can cause poor tree health, stunted growth or death. So we need to dig test holes. We need to evaluate the soil structure. We need to find impervious layers, and we need to monitor the water table level. These are all really cool observations.

You can actually come back in two or three years once you've been playing in your garden for a bit and see if you've improved these conditions. I'm gonna link a permaculture research soil test handbook here. It's by Chris. We borton Brown and Tom ney you feel you want more structured tests, please check out this handbook. They just suggest taking a handful of soil in your palm and then squeezing it and see what happens. The soil is dry if there's no water, and the soil does not stick [00:12:00] together at all. That seems fairly obvious. Uh, they say the soil is moist if there is no visible water and no drips. However, the soil sticks together slightly and not dry.

Obviously we want our soil to be moist most of the time. I certainly know that I've got some spaces in my orchard that are still waterlogged. My swales not completed. My swales probably gone halfway through my orchard, and I need to extend that this year when I finish mulching it. So again, here we're observing.

We are not changing anything yet. We can change it later. 

 Another way, I observed my garden when I first moved onto this property. I'm actually opening up my book now just to have a look, is I took, um, samples of weeds, so like a white clover or a Dutch clover. Now, I don't consider that a ween, but at the time I didn't really know what that was.

And, um, I took it out and I, I cellotaped it into my book, A Broadleaf Doc, which I cellotaped into my book. And now I know that the broadleaf doc tends to like quite. Like moist waterlogged land. Now, when people say that certain plants like certain things, I'm not always sure that's the case in the case of weeds.

But I think that the broadleaf dock, um, were all dock for me and also, uh, plants like comfy. Survive. Well 'cause their tap roots are so deep and also provide a, an important role in aerating that soil with their deep tap roots. Another one that I have was buttercup. Again, people say that Buttercup loves wet, damp spaces.

I don't necessarily think. That it has a preference for that. I have seen it in my raised garden beds quite happily surviving, but I will say that it is super easy to pull from mulch and, and good soil and very difficult to remove from water, oil, um, compacted soils. I also had sticky willy. One of my other weeds was Morning Glory family weed.

Little did I know what good frenemies we would become. If you don't know what a weed is, [00:14:00] there's so many AI tools now. Um, I try and put all my really favorite, tricky ones to find. On an app called iNaturalist, and if you haven't played with iNaturalist before, it's fabulous. I used to use the child-friendly version called SEEK when I was teaching students probably under 13 years old in identifying different plants.

But honestly, even now an iPhone should be able to ID what the plant is and then ask your local Facebook groups, you know, what is this plant? Flick me a message and say, what does this plant tell me about my soil? If you can't find anything else, and I'll tell you what I know if I do.

 If you don't have any idea of the kind of topsoil you have that's also pretty relevant. Um, take a spade and just dig a hole and see the different levels. You'll probably hit clay at some point. Um, they say 60 centimeters or deeper for your clay bed means that you've got great topsoil. And of course, in all of these systems, we are gonna be improving upon our top soil.

Part of creating our systems after observation and creating our vision is to look at how we're gonna continue to support this ecosystem. But it's a good idea to know how much topsoil you've got in different places. If you have got about five centimeters of topsoil before you had a clay bed, you're gonna.

Need to make sure that you're very clever about what you plant there. Alright, and another free test to do, which is super, super common and super easy to do is a pH test. It's very simple and there's a few different ways you can do it. I like the prongs, putting the prongs in the soil. Oftentimes you'll get a temperature reading and a pH reading, or you can get a witness reading and a pH reading, .

Go to your local garden shop. 10, 20 bucks. You can also get like a powder where you add so much of some liquid to some powder and you can see what the pH test in your soil is. The pH test for me. It is another one of those observations that, yes, we can alter it in the [00:16:00] future, but really nice to know where to start.

And our berries and things love a little bit more acidic. And there are other plants that like a little bit alkaline. And then there's some plants like the hydrangea that will actually have different colored flowers depending on whether or not it's acidic or alkaline. What these free tests and observations are not gonna give you is an idea of whether or not your soil's being poisoned.

And one of the poisons I considered having in my last property because it was urban, was lead. And because there was lead in petrol and that kind of thing, we can often get lead, um, other pollutants or poisons in our soil. And so in this case, I recommend getting a lab test done. Now this will cost you a little bit of money, however, I did have a listener.

Contact me and tell me that there was a place that did it for free, and I will put that link in the show notes as well. Oftentimes there'll be like regional council popups for soil testing or places like Kaipātiki Project where I've worked in the past, and they will do like water testing so you can get your awa your Rivers tested.

 When you understand your space, even in simple ways like where the frost settles or how the water moves, everything else becomes easier.

You stop guessing, you start responding, and your garden begins to work with you instead of against you. Okay? It's gonna be more resilient. We're gonna have higher output, we're gonna have less need for inputs, we're gonna have less need to support our trees and our orchards and our plants because they are where they want to be.

There'll be a time where you are reading the tags on fruit trees and what you're reading actually makes sense. Oh, partial shade. I know exactly where that is. Oh, it needs a thousand hours of cold time. Okay. I know what that is. It needs to be in pH level of 7.4. All right. I know where I can put that. So once we have this information the dreaming is a lot more practical, a lot easier, and a lot more exciting too because you might decide, wow, I have microclimates that my neighbors don't have. I have a [00:18:00] little subtropical guild around the corner of my shed, and that's happened over time when I first started observing. I couldn't grow that, and now I can.

And you guys, I've got my first banana flower this week was very exciting. I'm not sure whether or not I wanna eat it or not yet. I don't know. What's the purpose of banana flour? I don't know. Do I need it to continue to have bananas? I don't know. I've got some learning to do. If this episode has sparked something in you, make sure you're following white stories so you don't miss out what's coming next?

Share this episode with someone who's about to start a garden or someone who feels like they've failed at one, because chances are they needed to observe first. May your garden be abundant. Your strawberries white and your curiosity never ending.