Garden Series Archives - Page 2 of 3

January 22, 2020September 13, 2020

7 Tips For Protecting Your Garden From The Weather

For those of us lucky enough to live in a continent with all four seasons, getting outdoors in all weathers is of top concern. One of the best ways to make the most of your own backyard is through gardening. Setting up a garden for your family, or yourself means getting to know your outdoor environment and familiarizing yourself with DIY tools and tricks. With a wide variety of weather to worry about, new plants are at risk of being flooded out, while certain fruits and vegetables could dry out in hot summers if they don’t get enough shade.

Properly weatherproofing your garden takes the right tools and some planning. With these tips, you’ll be able to protect your garden, as it grows.

Know When To Prune

Pruning back trees and bushes helps you control how much shade there is in your yard. If you’ve got delicate flowers in your yard, planting them next to large, thick trees protect them from wind, rain, and frost. If you’ve got plants that need a lot of sunlight or space, pruning back the larger trees is a good way to make better use of sunlight. If you’ve got older trees with complicated root systems, they could be crowding out younger plants as well. You’ll want to use pruning shears on bushes and brush, but a chainsaw often works best for bigger bushes, or old trees. You can use the pieces you’ve pruned in a compost heat, or for firewood. Make sure you do your research into the best chainsaws for firewood, when you need to prune older trees without risking their health.

Add Wind Barriers

Even if your weather report doesn’t include snow, winter weather like high winds, and frost, can still cause soil erosion. If you can’t raise your beds, adding wind barriers can make the difference. Whether that means sandbags in your flower beds, a rock wall, or staking and tying down young trees or vines, or creating covered beds, your options for wind barriers depends on your space, budget, and weather conditions.

Create Raised Beds

Creating raised flower beds with a rock wall or wooden planks has a variety of benefits for weatherproofing your garden. Raised beds allow you to minimize access for garden pests, and protect against various types of extreme weather. They warm up faster in the spring, making it easier to resist frost. Raised beds are easier to irrigate, so they won’t be exposed to too much or too little water. You can also create beds that are much more portable, which makes it easier to move them when they are crowding out other plants, or if they’re more exposed to cold, wind, and rain.

Build Cold Frames, Or Green Houses

Young plants tend to be the most vulnerable to everything from erosion by excessive rain, to high winds. One solution is to build a cold frame structure, a temporary garden bed to give your tender young winter plants a chance to thrive. There are different ways to construct a cold frame, but ideally, you want a weather-resistant wood treated with copper naphthenate, a good ventilation system (you can get a kit at your local home and garden store) and a sash that slopes southward to maximize exposure to sunlight as the temperature drops. Warm beds, heated with copper wires are another option, and if you’re particularly handy, cold frames equipped with solar panels or a full greenhouse can also help keep your garden toasty in colder weathers, and keep plants healthy. It all depends on your space and budget.

Know Your Plants

If you’re going to garden, you need to know which plants do best in your area, at various times of the year. If you’re in a city, where sidewalk salt is in common use, you’ll want salt-resistant varieties like Russian sage and butterfly weed. If you’re living in an arid climate, choose drought-resistant cacti and succulents. Planting frost-sensitive varieties at the foot of the bigger, hardier plants can also help keep them protected from frost and wind.

Protect Young Trees From Wind And Frost

Planting and shaping smaller trees is a good way to protect your home from the elements, provide shade, and improve the air quality in and around your home. But slim, sapling trees are vulnerable to strong wind and frost, which can kill them before they’ve had a chance to grow the needed root structure. Using stakes and ties to protect young trees and shrubs can help, but a garden fleece can help keep the soil warm and allow the tree to grow.

Toughen Plants Up With Good Mulch

The best defense for hardier winter plants against both frost and the heavy downpour is good mulch. Before winter, take the time to clear away the dead or dying plants, and add them to your compost heap, putting down new, rich compost, and covering with a layer of mulch, woodchips and leaves can help keep hardy plants warm, as well as soaking up excess moisture from heavy rains. A good three-inch layer will protect your garden from anything the winter season could throw at it.

Gardening is a relaxing pastime that can help get you out in the great outdoors in all weathers. But not all plants are created equal, and some may struggle with the more extreme weather patterns, like downpour rains, extreme heat, and humidity, or high winds. With a little DIY know-how, you can learn the tricks and tools to keep your garden thriving all year round.
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What Makes a Good Garden?
Practical Principles of Gardening You Should Learn

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October 5, 2018October 24, 2020

Cleaning Up Your Garden And Getting Ready For Fall

It’s harvest season in your garden. The tomatoes are ripe and practically falling off the vine, the summer squash is fat and heavy, the peppers are colorful, and your onions are turning yellow just in time for fall. The early part of autumn is a busy time for any gardener and there’s still plenty of harvesting to do, but if you live in a colder climate, the first snowfall isn’t far away. Once you’ve finished harvesting all the delicious fresh vegetables you’ve been tending to all summer long, it’s going to be time to get your garden ready to survive the winter so that you can do it all over again in the spring.

Use this checklist when it’s time to get your garden and backyard ready for the winter.

Finish the Harvest

Depending on where you live, harvest season can go quite long. Some of the last herbs and vegetables that are ready to be harvested will include chives, mint, cilantro, parsley, and rosemary for herbs, and vegetables like celery, carrots, cabbage, winter squash, parsnips, and kale. Once these are on your kitchen table, it’s time to begin.

Weeding

It’s not the most fun part of gardening, but it’s essential to a healthy, fruitful garden. It’s also important to get rid of any diseased or infected plants so that they don’t spread. Get rid of anything that could be a source of bugs or that didn’t grow well. Odd coloring is another sign that it might be infected. Fall makes it easier to get rid of bad plants and weeds as it’s easier to find the strongest roots and pull the plant out whole.

Protect New Garden Beds

Establishing new perennials is a difficult task and they are especially vulnerable in the winter. Covering new garden beds that you added this year will help them survive. Drape a garden cloche over the garden you want to protect. However, vegetable gardens don’t need to be protected from the winter weather as much. A simple cold frame can help you keep growing winter vegetables.

Cutting and Pruning

There are some plants you will want to let die naturally and come back in the spring, but many flowering trees, vines, and shrubs benefit from a prune before the winter. You will also want to remove spent stalks and other debris. This can be a natural home for pests you don’t want.

Winterize Your Gazebo

A gazebo is a lovely addition to a large garden that lets you spend time relaxing out of the sun. If you have recently set up a gazebo in your garden, you should learn about how to winterize it properly. Put away all the gazebo furniture and give it a good cleaning. Sweep away debris and follow it up by washing it thoroughly to get gunk out of the crevices. You may even want to scrub parts.

Getting your garden ready for winter means it will be healthier and more productive come spring time.

May 31, 2018

Practical Principles of Gardening You Should Learn

Gardening is a difficult but interesting work. It involves a lot of principles that you should follow. Gardening includes various aspect as well as works, such as planning, designing, growing, fertilizing, caring, harvesting, and so on. The article is going to give you some practical principles of gardening that you should know to become an excellent gardener. This article will bring you some concrete ideas to care for your garden and farm.

Species Diversity

The diversity of plants will promote the diversity of animal species. It is because different insects, birds, mammals, etc. will be attracted by different plant species. Therefore, a particular suite of insects won’t gather in one place as their preferred plants are often spread out.

To make your garden diverse in both plant and animal species, you should grow a small amount of wide variety of plants. If you have enough land, you can raise a wider variety of animal species. Following this principle does not mean that you have to give up the oblong bed of your garden. You don’t need to follow it fanatically. You can arrange your garden in a convenient and reasonable concept. The numbers of the rows, the plants you will grow in each bed, the place of the chicken cage, etc. are up to you. You can grow some flower to make your garden look more pretty and poetry.

Symbiosis

This term refers to a relationship of mutual benefit or dependence between two or more than two species. No matter far or near each other they live, they still, connect, interact, exchange the natural properties and get their benefits from the other. For example, birds and insects get honey from a certain flower species, and then they help this flower species pollinate despite the distance. For another example, birds and animals eat fruits and berries, and then they help spread out the seeds of these fruits by excreting the fertilizer with undigested seeds, support the reproduction process of plants they feed on.

To make use of this natural relationship of plant and animal species, you should understand the companion planting, including the mutually beneficial interactions of the plants you grow together in your garden. You can even develop this principle farther by grouping plants which have a mutually beneficial association as “guilds.” By growing plants as guilds, you can take full advantage of symbiosis and save the labor in gardening.

Balance

In the best garden in the world, wildlife, species live in a balance. Herbivores eat plants; carnivores eat herbivores. They keep the other species in a controlled size and are likely to live in balance. A variety of plants provide foods for herbivores as well as habitats for animals. These plants and herbivorous animals together create a complicated food web, supply a diverse source of foods for carnivorous species. It preserves the balance of wildlife out of outbreak.

To maintain the balance in your garden, you can grow a variety of plants or raise many different animals if possible, supply food and habitat for native species, and try to put up with wildlife condition even if it may be inconvenient. When designing your garden, you should choose native trees to grow so that they can provide proper foods as well as habitat for native species, which non-native trees cannot do. You should also take climate, moisture, soil type and other natural conditions into consideration before choosing the plants to grow. You also have to consider the symbiosis of native animals and insects and the plants. You can grow some herbs or plants for foods, like fruit trees, vegetables, beans, groundnuts, or some flowers if you like.

Redundancy

Redundancy in gardening means that in the natural biologic systems in a garden, many different species can do the same function. This redundancy ensures the resiliency of the system as when one species is lost, and its function remains thanks to other species with the same function.

To apply this redundancy to your garden, you should grow many plant species which overlap in function in your garden. For example, instead of growing only broccoli in the garden, you should grow many different vegetables so that if the broccoli doesn’t grow as expected, you will have another vegetable for meals. You can also make your meal more diverse with various kinds of greens, too. Moreover, the more species of plants you grow, the more variety of insects and birds your garden attracts. These insects and birds will help pollinate and nourish the soil.

Vertical Structure

Your garden may contain many trees at different heights. Under the canopy of tall trees are smaller ones, herbs, greens, etc. If your garden is diverse in “layers” of plants, it will be more plentiful in animals than a mono-layer garden, because multi-layer garden can supply more habitation conditions for different animal species.

So, you should combine a diversity of plants at different heights in your garden to create a high level of vertical structure. Tall fruit and nut trees are in the upper height, shrub and berries are in the medium height, and herbs and greens are in the lower one.

Growing Plants According To Natural Light, Soil And Moisture Conditions

There are two directs you can follow. The first one is growing according to the natural conditions in your garden. If the soil in your garden is dry and sandy, you can plant drought-tolerant species. If it’s moisture, grow the ones that need water. When you grow the plants that live well in the natural condition in your garden, you can save a lot of energy in doing the gardening.

The second choice is changing the natural conditions in your garden. If the soil condition is poor, plant some nitrogen-fixing species to nourish it. You can change the light condition by growing some tall trees to create shade for shade-grown plants. By changing the existing condition in the garden, you can diversify the plant bed in your land.

Succession

Succession is the changing process of species composition when a species dies and resigns natural conditions like light, soil, and moisture for other alive ones in its neighbor. It’s more common in wildlife but unusual in garden or farm when people always arrange and grow their plant according to season and natural condition in their farm or garden. However, you can still apply this concept by combining short-term plants with long-term species. Additionally, some plant cannot yield when growing under the shade of others while some will, so, by understanding this term, you’ll know how to combine the plant in your garden.

Recycling

You should keep organic dead properties, like leaves, branches, trees and let them disintegrate to fertilize the soil, add more nutrients to the soil. This organic fertilizer also improves exhausted soil after many crops. You can also grow some nitrogen-fixing plant species to fertilize the soil naturally. To recycle and build nutrient-rich soil, use organic properties produced right in your garden.

Minimal Tilling

Besides making the soil rich in nutrients, you should also tiller the soil to make it aerated and oxygen-dense. But you shouldn’t plow the land as it can make the nutrients release faster and more than the amount that the plants can absorb, destroy the structure of the soil, and lead to erosion.

You’d better use minimal tilling methods such as hugelkultur or lasagna garden. These methods include layering organic properties which keep the weeds down so that you needn’t tiller. These methods help the soil aerated and oxygen-rich without destroying the soil structure so that the plants can grow well. You can raise some chicken to have them scratch the land and use their droppings to fertilize the soil.

The article has given you some practical principles of gardening that you should know to be a good gardener. By following these principles, you can make your garden lush, green, and grow well. Gardening involves many skills and a lot of effort, and also patience. However, seeing your pretty garden developing every day would be a wonderful feeling. Eating fresh, natural and safe foods produced right in your garden would be even a more wonderful feeling. Let’s make gardening an interesting work with these simple-but-effective practical principles.

Author Bio:

This guest post is by Emily Pham, a blogger with many years of experience in searching the best effective remedies for health and beauty issues.

April 2, 2018

If They Grow It, They’ll Eat It – 3 Tips for Pre-School Edible Gardens

Photo credit/site https://unsplash.com/photos/PMxoh8zJNb0

The earlier we teach our children about the cycle of life and how we obtain the food we eat the better. If you ask most youngsters where food comes from, they will say the grocery store. Of course, we are amused. But many children in today’s society do not have a clue what goes into the food they are eating, how much effort it took to produce it, or that food is fuel to help them grow.

Picky eaters

We have all had them. Our child, niece or nephew, or grandchild who suddenly will not eat anything but mac and cheese. If you do not give them mac and cheese, they go into a melt down. It is difficult to handle this situation because the child has to eat, and you know he needs more nutrition.

Teachable and edible moments

In our history, virtually every child understood that in order to eat, the garden had to be tended, livestock had to be taken care of and that products like butter, fruits, and dried foods required a lot of work. Today’s child may grow up in an environment that never introduces them to farming. Yet, farming is essential to him and all of us.

Begin by explaining where foods come from. Let your child help you with the groceries. Teach them about the differences in fresh food versus canned or dried foods. When you have their interest, pull up some places on your computer and show them what area in the world produces the most coffee, citrus, and other foods.

Lead the way

The best way to explain gardening to your child is to put in a preschooler friendly edible garden. You can start with a small patch of ground and select the seeds together. Get them involved. Let them handle the seeds, plant them, and water them. Explain the nutritional needs the garden has and where is comes from. If you don’t know these things, it is a great time to learn. Download some free gardening apps to help you.

Tips to getting your child to try foods

Plant easy foods that your child may like.

Cucumbers, carrots, strawberries, and blueberries are among the choices. These are easy plants, and your child can help plant, water, harvest, and clean them. After all that work, and with some high praise from you, they will want to enjoy eating the foods.

Insect and bugs

Gardens attract bees, worms, bugs, and other critters. Now is a great time to show your child that bugs have a job to do. They are not an enemy. Watch them work in the soil. There is no better way to teach your child that everything has a purpose, and there is no reason to fear.

Use the plate map

Draw a line down the center of a paper plate. Let your child use crayons or stickers to fill up half the plate with fruits and vegetables. The other half is for meat and bread. Let them decorate the plate and then hang it near where they eat. This will help them see that they are eating the right amounts of food. When you give a child just a little encouragement and authority, he will take it to new heights.

Photo copy/site https://unsplash.com/photos/3CErUWqAzmg

Make it a group activity

Let your child’s friends get in on the activity. If you are having a birthday party for your child, consider blank seed envelopes for seed storage and seed packet favors. Your child will be the center of attention, and he will share his knowledge with his peers. There is no better way to get the whole neighborhood on board. Maybe, you can plant a community garden.

Once your child learns first-hand about food and he actually grows it himself, he will be more willing to try the foods. This is a healthy family activity. If more families will do this, we can see an end to obesity in our children.