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Gardening Design Easy As One, Two, Three!

Admin — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 12:39:27 +0000

Garden design defined- Many people wonder what garden design exactly entails. Well, its actually a very straight forward concept consisting out of an artful process which in turn comprises of design, creation and planning precise layout of not only garden plants but also as the landscape areas self. The owner of the garden or a professional such as a landscaper can undertake a garden design project, depending on the expertise required. Even if you decide on a professional, it's important to remember that his or her level of experience and expertise will vary from individual to individual.

Education- Most garden designers have been trained in both design and horticulture, with advanced know-how and experience on plants and their use. A Landscape Architect can also be considered part of a professional garden designer team, with formal training in the form of a degree, which includes state licensing.

Will only a pro succeed? -Its not only pro's that succeed in garden design. Amateur gardeners also have the to potential to gain immense levels of experience, expertise and know-how from working in their own gardens. Wanna-be designers can also get necessary knowledge from either part-time or full-time study in the form of a University or College Degree in Gardening. Gardening or garden design organisations or clubs are also a very popular choice for individuals who want to learn more about gardening. These clubs include The Gardeners of America, National Garden Club or American Horticultural Society.

Increased interest in garden design- The popularity of garden design has boomed substantially in resent years specifically during the last century, not only as a mere hobby for gardening fanatics, but also as an addition to professional garden designers' portfolio's.

Basic principles of design- It doesn't matter whether you are a garden designer by profession or an amateur trying your hand at something new, the basic principles of design will always remain the same if you want to ensure design effectiveness, resulting in a garden meeting the needs, goals and desires of the owner or user of the garden.

Elements of design- Essential garden design elements include, solid landscape layout such as paths, walls, water features, seating and decking; plant layout, with proper consideration to every plants individual requirements, the season, lifespan, habit in terms of growth including size and speed and lastly the combi of other plants and landscape characteristics.

Regular maintenance considerations- Regular maintenance considerations are also very important, this includes the time and costs spent to ensure the garden is properly maintained. This will have a direct impact on your plant choices, as special consideration needs to be taking in terms of plant growth speed, seeding, whether plants are annual, bi-annual or perennial, bloom-time and actual bloom duration, and numerous other factors.

Other considerations of importance- Of all the design considerations garden use is definitely regarded as the most important, desired style follows very close behind, and lastly the way the garden is intended to blend with your home or surrounding areas. Unfortunately, mentioned considerations are subject to two problems, namely budget and time limitations. Budget limitations are beaten chop-chop by a simple, basic garden design style with few and quick growing plants, inexpensive materials for landscaping and seeding instead sodding. Apart from this, garden owners can decide to design their gardens' over an extended period, in sections, with primary focus on each individual section instead of manage all at once.

Vegetable Gardening For Beginners – 6 Easy Tips To Start You Off

Admin — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 08:19:22 +0000

Healthy vegetable gardens do more than provide a beautiful area in your yard. They repay your labor with nutritious food and a healthy varied diet. Vegetable gardeners are in tune with the environment, giving back to the soil what they take from it. Abundant vegetable gardens start with healthy, rich soil. Compost and mulch contribute to that natural wealth.

About 11,000 years ago, the first farmers began to select and cultivate desired food plants in the southwest Asian Fertile Crescent - between the ancient Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Although we believe there was some use of wild cereals before that time, the earliest crops were barley, bitter vetch, chick peas, flax, lentils, peas, emmer, and wheat. About 9,000 years ago, Egyptians began to grow wheat and barley. About the same time, farmers in the Far East began to grow rice, soy, mung, azuki, and taro.

Then, about 7,000 years ago, ancient Sumarians established the first organized agricultural practices that made large-scale farming possible. Of particular note, they established irrigation as a way to nurture crops where none were possible before. Vegetable gardeners today use many of the same techniques established in early history. But today's vegetable gardeners have millennia of experience behind them. Trial and error today is success or failure at the margins. Failure is not disaster.

As in centuries passed, a successful vegetable gardener cultivates the garden before planting for three main reasons: to eliminate weeds, to distribute air and nutrients throughout the soil, and to conserve moisture. Preparation of the soil is the single most important step in assuring abundant harvests.

Weeds are the most powerful enemy of a healthy vegetable garden. Letting them multiply in your vegetable garden will create much work and disappointment through the growing season. And when your vegetables begin to grow, removing weeds can your new vegetable plants beyond repair. Weeds also steal the precious nutrients necessary to produce healthy vegetables.

Rather than sacrificing the new garden to a patch of weeds, the successful vegetable gardener will cultivate the bed often, breaking up the soil to maintain healthy air, moisture, and heat to facilitate desirable chemical processes that produce abundant plant food. Ancient growers learned by trial and error the importance of keeping the soil loose around young plants. Early farmers deposited rotten fish beneath their crops as fertilizer and then used tools of shell and stone to nurture healthy soil and get plentiful air to the roots of their crops.

As important as air is water, even when the vegetable garden is a promise waiting for new seeds. Consider the process of "capillary attraction" - the ability of a substance to pull another substance into it. When you dip one end of a strip of blotting paper into water, you'll see that the moisture moves up the invisible channels formed by the paper's texture. But when you place the side edge of the blotting paper into water, the moisture won't move upward. In a vegetable garden, capillary attraction describes the attraction of water molecules to soil particles. Well cultivated, loose soil maximizes capillary action, maintaining an even distribution of moisture throughout your vegetable garden soil.

Even so, water stored in soil during rain immediately begins to escape, evaporating into the air. Surface water is the first to vaporize into the atmosphere. With capillary action, sub-surface water moves upward and evaporates. Left to natural processes, your garden will lose its moisture as quickly as if you left sponges in the topsoil. Cultivating your vegetable garden by hoeing the soil around your plants disturbs natural capillary action and slows the loss of water for your vegetables.

It's important to hoe your vegetable garden often, particularly those areas not shaded, at the very least every other week. If this seems too difficult, using a wheel hoe will reduce your labor and keep your vegetable garden healthy and productive. Looking somewhat like an old-fashioned plow, the wheel hoe allows you to cultivate very close to your healthy plants, maintaining an even depth and destroying new weeds before they get established. With the wheel hoe, you can cultivate as fast as you can walk.

If you wait until weeds are established, you'll have to pull the weeds by hand, damaging the root systems of your vegetables, depleting the soil of nutrients, and creating a much greater workload for you as gardener. And the work you invest will not be to cultivate a productive crop. It will be to prevent damage that may have already been done. A wheel hoe is essential for a large vegetable garden, but it will also save much time and effort in a small one. However, a simple scuffle hoe is effective in small spaces as well. It takes less storage space and cultivates the soil effectively.

Preparing your vegetable garden properly before you plant vegetables is well worth the investment in time and labor. Keeping your vegetable garden rows free of weeds later on is slow going and difficult. Here are a few tips for keeping your vegetable garden clean and clear of weeds as your plants mature:

1. Work at the weeds while the ground is soft and/or moist. Soon after a rain is the best time. Weeds will come out by the root easier without breaking off, leaving the unwanted plant to grow again.

2. Just before you weed your vegetable garden, cultivate the rows with your wheel or scuffle hoe very shallow in the topsoil and as close to your vegetable plants as possible. This will loosen the soil and make weeds easy to see. A double-wheel hoe with discs is best for this purpose, especially for large plants.

3. Make sure all of the soil is loosened when you cultivate. Pull all the weeds out carefully, avoiding disturbing the vegetable plants. Your weeder will destroy weed seedlings, but you'll have to hand-weed near plant bases and where weeds have matured.

4. Use a small hand-weeder near your vegetable plants. It will loosen the soil, making weeds easier to eliminate, and save a lot of wear and tear on your hands and fingers.

5. Practice with your wheel hoe. At first, watch the wheel's direction and the pressure you put on the handles. The discs or rakes will follow automatically, maintaining an appropriate cultivation depth in your vegetable garden rows.

6. "Hilling" was once a common way to nurture young vegetable plants. This is done by building the soil up around the stems of young vegetable plants, usually the after you've hoed your garden two or three times. In wet soils or dry climates, hilling may still be the way to go. But in most areas, level soil is best. It makes it easier to cultivate the soil in the long run, thereby assuring healthy vegetable plants through the growing season.

Rotating Vegetable Crops

Crop rotation, or growing different vegetable crops each time you plant, is an important part of maintaining a healthy, productive vegetable garden. Some Roman texts mention crop rotation, and early Asian and African farmers also found rotation a productive method. During the Muslim Golden Age of Agriculture, engineers and farmers introduced today's modern crop rotation methods where they alternated winter and summer crops and left fields fallow during some growing seasons. With Chemical Revolution of the mid-20th Century, crop rotation lost some of its appeal. But for home vegetable gardeners, rotation eliminates the risks of using dangerous chemicals and prevents the environmental consequences associated with modern pollutants.

Each different vegetable plant depletes the soil of different nutrients, and each leaves different nutrients as its roots and stems decay. Rotating crops with each planting keeps the soil balanced and rich. Planting the same crop time after time drains it of necessary nutrients, leaving it less productive. Crop rotation also reduces the build-up of pathogens and pests that destroy healthy vegetable gardens. Rotation helps maintain a healthy mix of essential nitrogen in your vegetable garden.

Rotating crops is more important with vegetables like cabbage, but it is a good practice for your vegetable garden generally. Even the hardy onion benefits from rotation, especially if you've done a good job of breaking up the old garden soil and mixing the remaining vegetable plants to serve as compost for the following crop. Here are some basic tips about crop rotation:

1. Do not rotate crops of the same vegetable family, for example turnips and cabbage. Be sure the following crop is a complete different type of vegetable.

2. Deep-rooting crops like carrots or parsnips, should follow vegetables with roots near the surface like onions or lettuce.

3. Follow root crops with vines or leaf crops.

4. Rotate vegetable plants that have long growing seasons with quick-growing crops.

5. Decide on your vegetable garden rotation when you're constructing your planting plan. Making these decisions in the middle of the growing season will be more difficult and waste time and money.

Gardening Made Easy – Gardening Tips For Creating A Lush Garden!

Admin — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 01:31:09 +0000

Most people across the globe take to gardening as it is a great pastime. Gardening is a leisure activity that simply erases the tension and pressure that goes with everyday life in the present times. It provides you with an opportunity to revel in nature while producing something lovely and highly satisfying. Rules on gardening are invaluable to gardeners since they provide them with creative views and help simplify most projects on gardening.

Worldwide, English roses are renowned for their beauty, with yearly sales in millions and nearly everyone has a couple of these exquisite plants adorning their gardens. A vast majority of people is not certain about the right approach to pruning. Gardening pointers throw light on this task and help clear any doubts. The principal reason why roses are pruned is to discard the old, unhealthy, or disfigured stems, which promotes fresh growth and further enhances the rose bloom quality.

Abiding by these simple gardening suggestions for contemporary rose plants will bring forth appreciation from all quarters for your stunning roses. It is advisable that you trim your roses between autumns, when the roses are dormant, until spring when the buds are just bursting forth. Begin by removing all the unhealthy and spoiled stems. Peel back the stems that have turned brown in color to expose the healthy green tissue inside.

Plant growths that overlap each other or those that are extremely lean, will not bring forth flowers, and hence should be taken out. The subsequent gardening suggestion is to ensure that the center of the roses is not in any way inhibited by numerous branches and fresh air and sunshine are easily accessible at the center in order to prevent disease. You have to cut the length of the robust and sturdy stems that are left behind by about one-third.

Many people get baffled at this point although it is a relatively simple thing to carry out. You have to slice the stem up to the nearest bud facing outwards, which is usually one foot above ground level.

Many people wish to learn the ways in which to prevent

slugs and snails feeding on hosts and a variety of plants. The two gardening tips mentioned so far deal with maintaining a neat and clean garden devoid of plant litter, since slugs and snails inhabit sheltered and moist crooks.

Together with getting rid of snails that you discover, also take out the eggs. Snail eggs are usually tiny, semi-transparent and shaped like a sphere. Break up and turn over the soil so that birds can find the snails you have failed to spot. Even in winter, you need to dig up the soil so that birds such as robins can help you out with your predicament. The use of frequent fertilizers yields limp squashy growth that draws slugs. Hence, a fertilizer with slow discharge should be used for your gardening.

Late Summer Garden: Easy and Cheap Gardening Tips

Admin — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 12:53:57 +0000

Has your late summer garden seen better days? If your outdoor paradise is getting a little ragged, and you would like some easy and cheap gardening tips to get it back into shape in time for fall, keep reading!

Most gardens, no matter how well they are designed will have periods without a lot of bloom. But a late summer garden is more than just lack of bloom; it's overgrown plants, ratty leaves, spindly annuals and brown spots in the lawn. Here's how to fix these garden problems.

Cut back your blooming perennials by half. This will stimulate new growth, and create need for another flush of flowers in the fall for many varieties. It will also clean up the overgrown look of your flower beds.

If you still have brown foliage from spring bulbs showing, it is safe to cut them to the ground now. They have already stored all the energy they need for spring bloom, and the dead plant matter isn't doing anything for the look of your garden.

If you have a pest problem, you should be addressing it. You can use commercially available Sevin dust for many of the most common predators, or seek out an organic alternative. One good way to identify what is eating your plants is place a piece of white paper under the leaves of the plant being attached and give the plant a good tap or shake. Whatever pest is the culprit should fall onto the paper for easy identification. If you're stumped, pop it in a jar and take it to your local nursery for identification and advice on how to eradicate it while doing the least damage to beneficial bugs. Remember, we need those bees! Don't' poison them.

If you have annuals planted in containers or beds that have seen better days, cut them back hard. Apply a good dose of water soluble fertilizer and they will bounce back and start re-blooming for you. Petunias, alyssum and geraniums all need a good rejuvenation this time of year, but will bloom well into fall if you try this trick.

If your lawn has developed some dry spots, try raking in an organic compost or fine bark to protect the soil and hold in moisture. Water frequently during the day for a week or two until you start to see new green growth. Cut back on the watering gradually, but be consistent until the lawn is once again green in the spot.

A late summer garden may seem to have gone to sleep, but its pretty easy to throw a big basket of water on it and wake it back up. (Both literally, and figuratively!) Use these easy and cheap gardening tips to renew your garden, and have a beautiful spot to spend those quiet autumn afternoons.

Want free gardening tips and ideas? Kathy Wilson is a home and garden writer, author and consultant and is the home decorating expert for LifetimeTV.com. Visit her for more home and garden ideas at http://www.TheGardenGlove.com and http://www.TheBudgetDecorator.com . Also visit her at http://www.Women-on-the-Net.com where any woman can learn to make money on the internet!