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Helpful gardening tips

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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






Common Gardening terms

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Gardening glossary of terms

When you’re new to gardening, you might not understand all of the terms that are used on the various gardening websites that you might encounter so I thought that it might be a great idea to post some of the more common terms and explain them.

Annual: a plant that completes it life cycle in one growing season and then dies. Keep in mind that annuals for one region of the Country may be a perennial in another region, or even in another Country.

Biennial: a plant that completes its life cycle in two growing seasons and then dies. Generally, the first year the plant produces foliage and the 2nd year the plant flowers.

Bulbs: fleshy leaf bases consisting of scales attached to a basal plate; tulips are one example.

Conifer: mostly evergreen trees or shrubs, usually with needle-like linear leaves and seeds borne naked on the scales of cones.

Deadheading: removing spent flowers or flowerheads for aesthetics, to prolong bloom or promote rebloom, or to prevent seeding.

Feng Shui: the ancient Chinese art of design and placement that balances the chi, or energies, within your surroundings.

Golden Mean: the ration 1:1.618 and a rule of proportion common throughout nature that can be applied to garden design.

Hardiness Zone: determined by the average annual frost-free days and minimum winter temperatures. The Hardiness zones in Canada are rated differently than those of US regions, keep that in mind when you read up on hardiness zones. If you are purchasing a plant in Canada that was shipped in from the states know your USD zones.

Herbaceous: a plant without woody stem; the plant parts are fleshy and wither after each growing season.

Mixed garden: a garden that is planted with combinations of herbaceous and woody plant material.

Neutral colors: green, violet, black, white, gray, brown.

Perennial: a plant that lives three or more years.

Primary hues: red, yellow, blue.

Rhizomes: swollen, horizontal undergrown stem; cannas are examples.

Suckering: describes plant material with adventitious shoots arising from below soil level, usually from the roots rather than the crown or stem of the plant.

Tuber: a swollen, irregularly shaped stem or root used for food storage; dahlias are one example.

Vascular plants: plants such as ferns and seed-bearing plants in which the phloem transports sugar and the xylem transports water and salts.

Warmer colors: yellow, yellow-green, yellow-orange, orange, red-orange, red, and red-violet (magenta).

Woody: A vascular plant that has a stem or more than one stem. Woody plants are trees, shrubs, etc. Most woody plants will be composed mostly of wood.

New Years Resolutions for Gardeners

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Happy New year everyone! I hope that you all have a fantastic year!

When we thinking of making New Years resolutions it’s usually something about ourselves, such as, to be a better person, to lose weight, to quit smoking and so on, but do we ever resolve to take better care of our gardens? I don’t think so.

Since I wasn’t feeling very well this past year I wasn’t out in my garden as much as I was in past years. Usually I’m out there every day – dead heading, trimming, adding organics to the soil and so on. I really fell off this fall when I didn’t even put my garden to bed for the winter. Yes, this year it is totally without winter protection. It should be interesting to see what happens come Spring time.

So in the New Year, I’ve decided to try to follow these great tips from the Plant Doctors at The American Phytopathological Society – perhaps you will too:

  • Mulch my perennials after the ground freezes to help them overwinter comfortably even though temperatures may fluctuate.
  • When studying plant catalogs, look for pest- and disease-resistant plants, such as mildew-resistant phlox, Fusarium-resistant tomatoes and disease-resistant crabapples that will make my gardening job easier and keep my plants healthier.
  • Send a soil sample to a laboratory to learn what my lime and fertilizer needs are, rather than guessing.
  • Set plants in the ground only at the proper depth-deep planting harms roots and kills plants!
  • Use only the well-drained areas of my garden for plants-unless I purchase some swamp-loving species!
  • Inspect plants carefully before purchasing to find evidence of invaders such as spider mites, scale insects or mealybugs, or root swellings that might mean crown gall disease on plants such as flowering cherries or roses.
  • Spread a circle of mulch around young trees to keep lawn mowers from damaging the bark, leading to canker diseases later on.
  • Use only a few inches depth of mulch and keep it a few inches away from trunks and stems of plants to discourage crown rot.
  • Scout regularly for symptoms in the garden, so that I can pick off the occasional spotted leaf before problems escalate.
  • Irrigate new trees and shrubs the first two years especially during dry weather to help them establish good root systems.
  • Use a soaker hose or some type of irrigation system for the flower beds and vegetable garden that won’t wet the foliage and encourage leaf spots.
  • Obtain a diagnosis when the cause of a problem is unclear or needs identification.
  • Prune only in dry weather, especially when pruning plants prone to fire blight, such as pears, crabapples and hawthorns.
  • Encourage beneficial insects and mites by minimizing use of broad- spectrum insecticides.
  • Join a Master Gardener class to learn more about the fun of growing and maintaining plants.

To the New Year and better gardens for all.

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