Posts Tagged ‘garden tips’

Great Gardening Made Easy with these Gardening Tips

While some people may be born with green thumbs, the fact is, anyone can learn to garden. The key is providing the right conditions for your plants to do well. Just be aware of the specific needs of the plant you’re dealing with and you have the foundation for success. Lets go through an outline of what many gardeners might consider to be the basics of a thriving garden.

Flower gardens are popular with beginners because they look and smell nice. If you want to make the most of your flower garden start out with flowers from your region.

It’s important to factor the sunlight needs of flowers in your garden and plan your garden accordingly. Perennials are great because they keep flowering year after year at about the same time of the year. Annuals are flowers that must be planted new each and every growing season in order to bloom. But the most important factor to remember when picking your flowers is that you want flowers that reflect your lifestyle, property, and tastes.

Don’t forget to prepare for insects and pests that are likely to invade your garden area. No one wants to go through the painful process of losing a season to pests. Many people are reluctant to use some of the more potent pesticides for fear of harming the environment or risking the health of themselves and their families. But there are natural choices to consider. You can find some surprisingly effective pesticides that have mint, onion, or garlic as main ingredients. Salt is an excellent repellant for ants. Ants are easily repelled by regular old-fashioned table salt. There are many natural ingredient options to repel pests that pose little harm and are much less expensive than traditional pesticides.

If you have limited space, or the property you have is less than ideal for growing plants, your best option may be a container garden. All you need to get started are a few containers, seeds, and soil as well as a place to put the containers – indoors or out. You can purchase the soil and seeds at a nursery or online, and use any type of containers that you prefer. Effective containers for this purpose will have adequate drainage at the bottom. Container gardening works for a wide range of plants including vegetables, flowers, and herbs. In conclusion, you can get many rewards and benefits from gardening. It’s not only a chance to enjoy the great outdoors but can also provide an opportunity to grow your own vegetables and herbs. The more carefully you plan your garden, the more smoothly everything will go and the easier it will be to avoid difficulties. With the right attention, your garden can be a showplace you’ll be proud of.

Staying Fit by Gardening

Gardening can be a great way of keeping active. Staying fit by gardening means that you keep at it, doing it quite often. The first step in creating a garden is, you must determine what size you wish your garden to be.

In our case, we used to make more than one garden. In the back yard was a garden that was 15 feet long x 15 feet wide. On the East side of the property we had a squash/pumpkin garden that was about 20 feet long by ten feet wide; and in the front of the house, beneath the windows, were flower gardens.

Realize, though, that the bigger your gardens are, the more upkeep you’ll have to do on them. That’s where ‘Staying Fit by Gardening’ comes in. Don’t think that, just because a garden looks simple that it’s an easy thing to accomplish.

Mulch is a good start. Begin by dumping all your organic material in one place. Composting is a great way of creating good fertilizer. The main thing with composting is to know what you should compost, what you should never compost, and how to compost. First, buy a composting bin. They will make things really easy for you, as they’ll keep it from spreading, make it look nice, and give you a neat way of storing it. Black compost bins will radiate the heat to the compost, keep the heat inside and intensify the action. You can also build your own bin by looking on the internet for plans, or even have a bin-less compost ‘heap’. Bin-less systems oftentimes don’t work because you start throwing things on the pile which have a depth to them. Things won’t compost properly if they’re getting lots of air throughout them because someone put branches on there. Staying fit by gardening means that you do many different things, not just stand there and wait for crops to grow. First, unless you put some effort into it, your crops will wither and die, instead of grow.

Grass and lawn clippings make good compost, hay, kitchen wastes such as peels/rinds, coffee grounds, eggshells etc. They should be soft and moist. You can also bury your compost about 8” deep. This will keep the neighborhood pets out of it. Don’t put things like scraps of meat in it or fatty foods. Leaves are good and straw or grass that has gone to seed; wood sawdust and chips are good.

If you put your hand into the compost, it should be extremely hot. If they’re not getting hot, they need more moisture.

My father used to ask the farmer across the street if he could have a wheelbarrow of manure to put on his gardens. Each of these things will keep you fit. Buy a wheelbarrow, and use it to transport mulch, compost or manure (if handy). Nothing beats manure as fertilizer.

Next, you should determine the pH of your soil. If it’s too acidic or too alkaline it would behoove you to purchase topsoil from your local store. You should have, at least, four inches of good topsoil that isn’t either too acidic or too alkaline. Tomatoes will grow well in acidic soil, but carrots will be thin and spindly. So, you might determine the plants that do well in acidic soil, and plant those there. Then, put the topsoil in the areas which are more temperamental. Staying fit by gardening is a good way to have fun, as well. Enjoy your garden.