*cough* grow lights, and irrigation, and scarecrows ...
I did read the journal. I'm happy to be proven wrong but I didn't stumble across anything about irrigation and how to do it and why I might want to, and why I might want to throw down a scarecrow ... SnowBee's video showed me why I should irrigate and how to do it, and this forum told me about scarecrows. Sure the scarecrow tells you what it does but you only see that if you already know you want one and are looking at it.
One of the things I really liked about DF when I started playing it was how I didn't know what I could and couldn't do, and how so much didn't work the way I was used to, and that there was so much I had to either stumble across or hear about from other people, just like it would be in a real zombie apocalypse - and this is a great example. I knew I could grow crops and I knew they needed water but that was about it - beyond the basics it's something that has to be discovered.