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Use your gardening downtime wisely

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How are you keeping yourself busy this month? Have you been spending time thinking about your garden? Reading gardening magazines and books? If you’re like me you probably have a number of seed and plant related catalogues to read. I think mine started being delivered in the mail from late November onward.

It’s too cold to go outside and do anything in the garden – other than shovel the snow that is.

If you want to have a great garden this season, you’ll find that thinking and planning are the two best things that you can be doing during these cold months. Use your garden downtime well.

If you’re like me you probably took some photos of your garden as the plants grew and filled in last season. You might have even made some notes- move this plant over here – it’s not getting enough sun, or it’s getting too much sun. Divide this plant and replant a cluster of them over here and so on.

Try to remember which of your plants did well and which ones didn’t last year. Have any of them been struggling for a few years? Is it time to move them or replace them?

As you flip through the gardening magazines and catalogues make notes of which plants, flowers and bulbs you’d like to try in your garden. Even if you aren’t purchasing them now, or perhaps you’d rather try them by seed rather than as a seeding – keep track of what you like. Then as the time comes to purchase the plants or seeds you’ll have a nice list that you can go over and pick from as you buy your new plants.

I’ve been using this site to keep track of which plants did well last year. Oddly enough, anytime I wrote about a plant not doing well and threatened to remove it if it didn’t start performing soon, amazingly enough it did start shaping up! Why I have no idea – did I actually give it a bit more attention since I was trying to figure out what it’s problem was, or did my threats work? Either way, I’ll be giving some of my plants some verbal threats next year – just in case.

Here’s a few great gardening books to keep you busy over the winter months:

Perennials for Every Purpose: Choose the Right Plants for Your Conditions, Your Garden, and Your Taste (A Rodale Organic Gardening Book)

This is an excellent book. I’ve got a copy of it and it keeps me busy for hours!

The Big Book of Flower Gardening: A Guide to Growing Beautiful Annuals, Perennials, Bulbs, and Rose

Another excellent book that I own. There are some great gardening tips in this book.

Annuals for Every Purpose: Choose the Right Plants for Your Conditions, Your Garden, and Your Taste (A Rodale Organic Gardening Book)

I don’t have a copy of this book … yet, but it’s on my list!






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.

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