Many people enjoy gardening because it is a great way to beautify the home, reduce stress, and provide fresh vegetables for the dinner tables. Products marketed toward home gardeners have become big business, with many manufacturers and retailers competing for gardening dollars for tools, fertilizer, herbicides, and pesticides. However, several misconceptions or myths about gardening exist that too often color the perceptions of people who garden or who want to pursue gardening. With some careful consideration, a few of the worst of these myths can be eliminated.
One of the worst misconceptions is that watering your plants during the day creates droplets that can refract the sun’s rays and “burn” your plants. This is simply not true, and can be illustrated by using the simple example of a magnifying glass burning markings in wood. If you lay the glass directly on your piece of wood, the sun will not mark the wood at all.
It is only by moving the magnifying glass away from the wood that the necessary focus can be achieved to burn the wood. You can also imagine the tremendous losses that farmers would face every time it rained, since they clearly could not dry off every plant in their fields before the sun comes back out! Where this myth came from, no one is sure but it is definitely misleading information.
Another myth is that when you prune a tree or shrub, the resulting gash in the wood needs to be “healed” with some kind of compound or bandage. In fact, it has been proven that this can actually prevent the plant from healing itself, because these coatings do not allow oxygen to reach the “wound” By leaving the wood exposed, these patches often allow water-borne bacteria to infect and sometimes permanently damage or kill your tree, shrub, or bush.