As the Garden Grows

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Do you read gardening magazines?

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I have two subscriptions to gardening magazines, one of which I don’t seem to have been receiving lately. I don’t know about magazines in other parts of the world, but the two major Canadian gardening magazines are pretty good. Like any magazine they have a little too much advertising but overall I enjoy the information in them.

I get Canadian Gardening – that’s the one that I don’t seem to have had a copy of recently – and the magazine also has a pretty good website and forum so if you are craving gardening info and just can’t wait for your magazine to arrive you can always visit the forums and join in on the discussions there.

They also have a lot of great How to articles as well as articles about popular plants and gardening techniques.

The other magazine that I subscribe to is Gardening Life. I enjoy both magazines, but if I had to decide which website I liked best it would be Gardening Life’s website. It’s much more professional looking and easier to navigate.

Gardening Life also has forums, great how to articles and plant profiles as well as tips on entertaining outdoors, a section called curb appeal and just like Canadian Gardening they also hold regular contests. I just entered two of the three contests they are running. Maybe if I’m lucky I’ll win the trip to British Columbia!

What are your favorite gardening magazines? Do you have a subscription or do you just buy them from a store when the mood hits you?






Tips on how to learn more about the plants growing in your garden

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I often receive questions that ask me to explain in detail how to care for specific perennials. While I am working on having a very large index of care information for specific plants it does take time to create this information.

Now, even though I grew up in a family that gardened, I still found myself somewhat bewildered when I moved into my current home and started a garden of my own. I was growing a number of new plants – perennial and annual that I’d never worked with in the past. I too, had tons of questions.

What did I do in order to brush up on my knowledge?

Well, I went searching on the internet to find information on specific plants and gardening techniques. This was a wonderful method of getting information and my list of gardening related bookmark is huge! Unfortunately I also came across information that contradicted other information that I’d found.

That’s when I began buying gardening books. I bought a few good general gardening books, one or two about perennials and annuals, and a few that discussed gardening in my particular area, or at least in my Country. That was one of the best moves that I could have made. Now I’ve got 10+ very helpful gardening books at hand whenever I need to look something up.

Practice, experimentation, talking to other gardeners, and joining garden forums such as the Garden Web also helped quite a bit.

I observed my plants carefully in the first year on my own, taking notes occasionally as to the various plants bloom time, how often it bloomed, when it first started to grow in the spring and so on. I learned a lot just by observing my plants and caring for them as best I could.

Of course nothing pleased me more than when my mother, visiting from our home town and staying with us for a week or so, remarked as she gazed at our garden, “It’s so nice to know that one of our children inherited my green thumb”. What higher compliment could one gardener give another?

If you are just starting your garden, or still in the process of learning about new plants you might want to pick up one or all of the following books:

Perennials for Dummies by Marcia Tatroe ISBN 0764550306;

Rodale’s Illustrated Encyclopedia of Perennials: 10th Anniversary Revised and Expanded Edition by Ellen Phillips and C. Colston Burrell ISBN: 0875965709;

The Well-Tended Perennial Garden: Planting and Pruning Techniques by Tracy Disabato-Aust, Steven M. Still ISBN: 0881924148.

Enjoy your garden!

Gardening Tips forum created at GoBoardz

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GoBoardz is a newish site where you can go and create your own GoBoardz Forums absolutely free of charge. GoBoardz is sponsoring this post so that I can tell you how to create your own free forum for your website.

It’s very easy actually. You just visit the site, create an account and then go to the forum set up area. Some of the things I like about the forums at GoBoardz is that users can upload photos or link to ones on other sites. Members can also have avatars to uniquely express themselves when posting on the boards. If someone creates a really good post on the board you can even save it to Del.icio.us or Digg it.

So I went ahead and created a forum for gardeners and I called it Gardening Tips. I’ve only created one category so far – General – but if you’d like to sign in and begin a topic that would be nice.

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