Some Gardening Tips to Save You Money

It’s easy to spend a fortune every year creating a beautiful yard. These five tips can help save you money in both this, and future gardening seasons.

1) Plan your vegetable garden according to what your neighbours are planting so you can share your vegetables when they’re ready for eating. Often I’ve had too many of one kind of vegetable and couldn’t give away because my friend’s were ripe at the same time.

2) Select perennials rather than annuals for your flowerbeds. As they multiply each year, cut them back and exchange with your friends so you both have lovely gardens and save money at the same time.

3) Compost your kitchen scraps, as well as your coffee grounds. The end result is much better than any potting soil you can ever get buy from a nursery or hardware store. The price is right, and this is definitely recycling!

4) Instead of using mulch, try pebbles or small rocks in your garden as ground cover. This will save you lots of cash since you won’t need to buy mulch in the spring and fall of every year.

5) Spend more money now by purchasing better quality gardening tools and you will save in the long run. They will last for years, saving you dollars because you don’t need to replace them every planting season. Same goes for gardening gloves - make sure you buy the best you can afford so they last all season.

I hope you’ll find this helpful and I wish you “Happy Gardening!”

Five Tips for Better Lawns and Gardens

If you’re lucky enough to have a lawn with a good topsoil base, much of the hard work of keeping a lawn beautiful is already done for you. But many of us do not have this luxury, and besides, even with a good topsoil base, you still have to do work to keep your lawn and garden beautiful.

To help achieving and maintaining such a beautiful lawn and garden, here are five suggestions for you to follow:

1) The best time to mow a lawn is when it is cool and dry. Wait for the morning dew to dry off, and before the afternoon heat takes hold. Alternatively, late afternoon or early evening following a watering in the morning is also a good time.

2) Simple, but effective weed control can be achieved on your lawn by mowing often during spring. This will prevent dandelions spreading by eliminating the yellow blossoms and preventing seed formation. Mow high during late spring and early summer. This will allow grass blades to shade the ground, and will help prevent crabgrass from sprouting.

3) A hedge is a much better boundary divider than a fence. It will provide better privacy and keep pets and children in – or out. It will attract birds to its shelter, and provide a great backdrop for plants and flowers.

4) Bring the beauty of your garden to you; plant hyacinths near walkways and doors. Their magnificent perfume will swamp the spring air and make your garden really come alive.

5) Add your garden to non-garden items, such as lampposts and mail boxes. Surround these items with flowers planted to take advantage of the earliest to the latest flowerings. You could have white snowdrops, purple and gold crocus, blue hyacinths, and various coloured tulips. You could also surround the posts with rocks to provide added interest.

Your lawn and garden should be a source of pride and beauty. You don’t need to spend lots of money on expensive fertilizers and herbicides, it’s more important to have the right tools on hand for your gardening and a little commonsense and thought can go a long way to making your lawn and garden a much better place.

Designing Gardens – the Basics

You can always move plants around your garden and as your ideas and taste change,  your garden can grow with you. There are some simple elements of garden design. Think of designing your garden with living art in mind being creative and free to try whatever suits your taste. There are no limitations to the creativity that's within no comparison or fear of failure. Although gardening successfully requires learning certain skills, when all is said and done a garden's beauty is truly in the eye of the beholder. Just go for it and let your garden be the expression of you.

Garden design and its principles used may be called by different names.  There are three basic concepts when combined together will bring about good garden design. Ultimately your gardens' design is up to you and should reflect your own personality and flare.

Order, balance and proportion are the basic structure of the garden. Order is symmetrical through repeating plants or colours. Bold or bright additions bring balance as well as adding some texture. Texture is an important ingredient. Gardens come to life with different textured plants much like the human race. All different but flowing together and being brought together through unity, harmony created comfort and peace.

When all of the parts of the garden are flowing together it is captivating and ones' spirit is caught up in the beauty.

Using a limited colour pattern, repetition of plants and a clear focal point creates this environment. Theme gardens are very soothing: all one colour, butterfly gardens or cross gardens keep you flowing in like unity.

You'll also hear a lot of talk about starting your garden with good bones. That basically means creating an outlining foundation, with trees, structures, paths, etc. for the rest of the garden to build off of. Evergreen is a favourite of the good bones.

Having a focal point is a big benefit for every garden. With no focal point the eye starts to wonder here and there without every getting a grasp of a main feature. This is not creating the harmony you desire for your garden or creating any curb appeal. Beginning gardeners seem to pick the same flowers or foliage over and over again which has no visual interest. Planting an architectural bold leafed plant can restore this visual interest instead of the monotony of likeness.

Last, but not least, is adding colour to your garden. Experimenting with your favourite colours is a good way to see what works best for you. The best advice to heed though is to start out with 2-3 colours to keep the artist palette limited. You can always add new colours to your garden by eyeballing it along the way. This way you keep the living painting flowing in the harmony you wish to relate to. You then will have a peaceful retreat that you have created and enable others to share that intimate part of you.