In honor of the Super Bowl XLIX game between the Seattle Seahawks and New England Patriots, this blog post was written to warn gardeners about 20 things they can do to destroy their garden in 20 seconds or less. (Seattle, this one’s for you!)

  1. Till garden soil with high clay content under wet conditions – can you say impenetrable soil clods for years to come?
  2. Mix fine sand with clay soil – way to mix up some low grade concrete!
  3. Add lime to Utah soils – pH 7.5 too low for you; let’s see if we can make it a perfect 10!
  4. Add wood ashes to garden soil – they call it Salt Lake for a reason; trust me, more salt won’t make your plants grow better.
  5. Step on your planting beds – unless you are trying to make fossilized footprints, don’t step on your planting beds!
  6. Apply nitrogen fertilizer to garden plants at 5 times the recommended amount – more is always better, right?
  7. Dump litter from the cat box into your garden soil – this is unsafe, enough said!
  8. Use a soil sterilant next to your garden – hey, why won’t your garden plants grow?
  9. Mix black walnut leaves in with your garden soil – crazy how the weeds even stopped growing!
  10. Spray broad-leaf weed killer in grass right next to garden plants on a windy day – your garden has gone with the wind!
  11. Use a flame thrower to kill weeds growing around the base of garden plants – another one bites the dust!
  12. Apply a pre-emergent herbicide right before you seed your garden – way to waste your time and money!
  13. Kill garden slugs and snails with table salt – it will kill your slugs, snails, and as a bonus, your garden plants too!
  14. Treat your lawn with weed and feed and dump the grass clippings in your garden – oops you killed them again!
  15. Mix ‘free’ topsoil into your garden soil – have you heard of field bindweed?
  16. Use hay as mulch in the garden – have you heard of cheat grass?
  17. Dump a 12 inch layer of wood chips in your garden – you will have great topsoil in 12 years!
  18. Add raw, un-composted animal manure to your garden – do you think your garden plants are dying because it smells bad?
  19. Mix 50 pound bags of old flour into your garden soil – reduce, reuse, recycle is a good concept to follow, but this takes it too far!
  20. Plant warm season vegetable plants 2 weeks before your last average frost – frosty was both a snowman and a plant killer!

Here’s to not doing stupid things to ruin your garden in 2015 – happy gardening to you and happy growing to your garden plants!