Here’s a a few handy gardening tips that you might find useful, particularly if you are new to gardening:
1. Do your homework. Visit public gardens, read magazines and books.
2. Amend the soil for success. Lighten clay loam soil with compost.
3. Design for surprise: place some curves in your design or interesting nooks that visitors to your garden have to enter to see what magically beautiful plant you have growing there.
4. If you inherit a garden: Wait a season to see what comes up. You may destroy something you want to save. We were lucky to have purchased our house in June. I was able to watch what grew that year and used the following winter to plan out my new garden.
5. Smart plant picks. Purchase plants that are drought tolerant or said to be easy to care for if you don’t want to spend too much time in the garden watering and pruning.
The Well-Designed Mixed Garden: Building Beds and Borders with Trees, Shrubs, Perennials, Annuals, and Bulbs
6. Mass appeal. Plant large areas with one flower in one color, such as purple phlox. You can always tell who’s a beginning gardener because they plant one of each plant. masses of three to five or more plants planted together in the garden bed make a much more satisfying display.
7. A wild prairie garden can be work until it gets established. If you want a natural looking garden find out what plants are native to your area and use them abundantly.
8. Japanese-style garden do’s. For dimension, build hills and cover them with moss.
9. Time-saving trick. Plant hosta around the base of trees and you won’t have to trim around them.
10. Get the kids to help. Most kids like helping in the garden. You may still end up doing more work than they do, but it’s a way to spend some quality time with them and also a way to get them outside.
11. Sure-fire critter repeller – build a fence with a gate if you want to keep out skunks, who don’t climb but can dig just fine) and other pets that might frequent your garden. Gates and fences don’t stop all critters but a fence might deter a few of them.
The Organic Gardener’s Handbook of Natural Insect and Disease Control: A Complete Problem-Solving Guide to Keeping Your Garden and Yard Healthy Without Chemicals
If you can hold off any major changes to that ‘inherited’ garden for one full turn of the seasons, you will not only learn where the bulbs and dormant perennials are hiding, but where the icicles drip, where the sun and shadows fall, where the ground bakes, and where the wind blows cold…it’s really hard, I know! Just because I recommend this doesn’t mean I was able to follow my own advice!
Annie at the Transplantable Rose