As the Garden Grows

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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






Glorious Annuals

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Annuals are usually grown to provide color. Since they are only temporary plants in many gardens – if they are always treated as such, they tend to thrive anywhere. Annuals permit gardeners in cold areas to briefly ignore the prospect of inter bleakness and inject a touch of tropical summer color into their gardens.

Annuals are subject to all the normal climatic considerations – wind, salt spray, and summer heat – but they are remarkably resilient plants that carry on flowering under most conditions, except severe cold.

Tender annuals must be planted in spring, after the last frosts, with a view to summer and autumn flowering. However, the so called hardy annuals are often planted in the autumn and left to over-winter for spring flowering. Pansies, Sweet William and Iceland poppies are among the best known hardy annuals. It’s true that the majority of my Pansies (provided they survive the heat of summer), Sweet William (pinks, dianthus) and Iceland poppies often do survive our Canadian zone 6B/ USD zone 5B winters.

With careful planning- depending upon your zone of course, it’s possible to have blooms almost all year round. I tend to have blooms outdoors in my garden from perennials, annuals, bulbs and rhizomes from Mid-March well into November; and indoors my plants such as Thanks Giving and Christmas Cactus, Jasmine and amaryllis give me blooms inside through November to March.

My Addiction

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I went out on Saturday and bought several types of spring bulbs from Freesia to tulips. I haven’t purchased bulbs for a couple of years because I planted so many in the first three years that we had the garden. I think I’ve planted more than 3000 bulbs in those first years.

Unfortunately some of the bulbs have either died off, or else they were dug up and carried off by those pesky squirrels, so I just had to purchase more right?

Depending on the weather I hope to plant them later today or perhaps tomorrow. No delaying like I did with all of those annuals. Uh huh, these are going in the ground as soon as possible.

I’ll tell you exactly what I bought and planted in my next post – and how many there were. I don’t have the bags near me right now but I’d estimate there are at least 300 bulbs this time round!

Yeah I’m addicted to gardening, so shoot me. LOL

It’s click and comment Monday and yeah, I don’t have a renter, but please feel free to visit one of the links in my blogroll ( My blogroll is on the Links page) Pick someone to visit and leave a comment, then visit their renter or someone on their blogroll and leave a comment there. Do this at least five times to spread the bloggy love.

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