A garden offers much more than beautiful decoration. In fact, it is even more than simply a hobby for enthusiasts with green thumbs. A garden provides the person who has put time into it a way of finding tranquility, peace, and a feeling of appreciation of life. Gardening is best when you have the knowledge to do it right.
Clay soil is hard and will also stick to a shovel, making it difficult to work with. To ease the digging, apply some car wax or floor wax to the head of the shovel and buff. The wax will prevent any rusting, and the shovel will cut through the soil with great ease.
Plant a variety of annuals, biennials and perennials to keep your flower beds bright. These flowers grow quickly and can be planted at any time during the year. If you want to maintain a flower garden all year or you want to add new flowers to reflect the changing seasons, annuals and biennials are for you. In addition, they work well as gap fillers between other areas, as long as those areas receive plenty of sunlight. Some excellent choices include rudbeckia, hollyhock, sunflower, cosmos, petunia and marigold.
If you notice powdery mildew on your plants, do not buy an expensive chemical. Combine baking soda with a small dollop of liquid soap and add it to water. Spray this on the plants once per week until that mildew goes away. This method is not going to cause any damages to your plants and the mildew will go away slowly.
If your garden contains lots of short plants, purchase some gardening knee pads. When you spend a lot of time kneeling while horticulture, your knees can be very achy by the end of the day Purchase a great pair of knee pads; they will provide a cushion for your knees while making gardening more comfortable.
If you want to grow peas, consider starting them indoors instead of planting them outside. Seeds are more likely to sprout when started indoors. It will create heartier seedlings, which means they will more easily resist the pests and diseases they will encounter in an outdoor environment. You will be able to transfer the seedlings outdoors after they become better established.
All of your vegetable plants should have approximately two inches, just outside the stem, of organic mulch placed around them. Mulch will retain water so that you won’t have to water your plants as often. It will also dramatically decrease weed growth. This can prevent you from having to constantly pull weeds.
Look for evergreen variants that produce berries. These year-round berries will give the rest of your yard a much-needed pop of color, especially in the winter. Other winter plants include the American Holly, Winterberry, The American Cranberrybush and the Common Snowberry.
Gardening helps with relaxation. There are many ways to find personal relaxation and peace. Horticulture is one of the easiest ways to attain this. It is not prohibitively expensive, and has numerous benefits. Knowing that you have grown these plants yourself can give you a great feeling of joy and inner peace.
Choose a plant as a focal point. In any good garden design, a focal point will grab the eye and hold it there. Many times, it’s just a plant that differs from the surrounding plants.
If little ones live in your home, consider including everbearing strawberries in the garden plot. Children are thrilled to harvest fruit from their own garden, and doing so often makes them more enthusiastic about helping out with the more hum-drum aspects of tending a garden.
It is easy to quickly prepare your perennial garden ground. Slice under the grass with a spade, flip the layer you have lifted over, and spread three inches of wood chips on top. Allow a few weeks to pass by before you dig down into the applied soil.
After your seeds have sprouted, heat lamps are not needed. Move your plants further away from your heat source as they grow. If you used plastic wrap to insulate your seedlings, you should now remove it. Keep an eye on your seeds so you will know when this should be done.
Keep slugs out of your organic garden naturally, using a beer trap. Start by burying a wide-mouth jar in the soil, ensuring that the rim of the jar is just at the soil’s surface. Pour beer into the container to within an inch of the jar lip. Beer attracts slugs and then they’ll get stuck in the jar.
Use the above tips to revitalize your garden. It is a decision you will not regret, especially when you see all your plants alive and blooming. Gardening is a potentially life altering activity, but only if you permit it, so why not start now?
