Learning how to to garden can seem like more than what you can handle, but like many other things, it is not hard to research and learn how to do. Hopefully, these tips will help you to improve your gardening skills and become an expert gardener.
Pick your plants with an eye to maximize the yield you can get. A hybrid designed for your weather, and resistant to local diseases, will give a better yield than non-hybrids.
Baking Soda
Do not spend your money on chemicals to fight mildew. All it takes is a liquid soap, water, and baking soda mixture. Spray this onto your plants about once per week or until it subsides. Baking soda will bring no damage to your plants, and will treat the mildew in a gentle and efficient manner.
To grow properly, plants need adequate levels of CO2. In general, higher amounts of CO2 are related to better plant growth. Greenhouses provide the best levels of CO2 for plants. To achieve optimal growing conditions, keep the levels of carbon dioxide high in your plants’ environment.
Plant bulbs if you want spring and summer flowers. Since bulbs are easy to grow and resistant to poor weather conditions, they will grow without fail year after year. Specific types of bulbs usually bloom at specific times of the season, so if you make appropriate selections, you can be rewarded with blooms from the early part of spring to the later part of summer.
Whenever you are planting a veggie garden, it is vital that you place them in a location where sun shines down on them for six or more hours per day. Most vegetables that can be grown need that much sun to grow well and quickly. This is true for flowers as well.
Start your garden off right with seeds, not plants. Starting from seed is far less harsh on the environment than using plants you buy at the nursery. It’s better for your garden, in particular, because transplants have high failure rates; whereas, sprouting a seed and growing a plant in the same conditions is better. Additionally, it’s better for the environment, because the plastic pots used by most greenhouses are generally not recycled and are cluttering landfills.
Spread a little bit of organic mulch, around two inches worth, in and about each vegetable plant. Mulch will retain water so that you won’t have to water your plants as often. It will also prevent the growth of weeds. This can save you a lot of time and effort in pulling out the weeds.
Learn the ideal times for harvesting your vegetables. Different vegetables have different, ideal times that they should be picked for best flavor. For example, baby peas and zucchini taste best when they are picked young. Yet, in reverse, tomatoes must wait for prime-ripeness before they are subject to being picked. Thus, you ought to familiarize yourself with the best times to pick the produce from your garden.
When you’re dealing with a veggie garden, pest control may be difficult. Do not spray harsh chemicals on the vegetables you are going to eat. Instead of resorting to these harmful chemicals, you can keep garden pests at bay simply by paying close attention. When you see bugs, remove them by hand before they have a chance of spreading.
Broad-spectrum pesticides are really not the optimal choice for pest control in your garden. In addition, these pesticides destroy the good insects which eat pests. Since these pesticides often affect the good bugs more than the bad, using them can actually increase your pest problem. In the end, you may resort to using even more pesticides in order to erase the problem.
Garden for fall colors. That doesn’t have to be it though. The fall season is probably the most colorful of the year in terms of foliage. Maple trees produce yellow and red leaves, just like Beech and Dogwood trees. Some very good shrubs to choose are barberry, hydrangea, and cotoneaster, which is a member of the rose family.
Use smarts when watering your garden. A soaker hose will save you time because you won’t have to individually water each plant, like you do with a regular nozzle, or a can that you need to constantly refill. To protect your plants, keep the flow on the soaker down. It can water the plants for two hours so that you can do other things.
It can be extremely fast and easy to plant perennials into your garden. Slice under the grass with a spade, flip the layer you have lifted over, and spread three inches of wood chips on top. Give the area a couple of weeks, then dig into it and plant your new perennials.
Pine Needles
Pine needles should not be overlooked as a great source for mulch. Some plants do better in soil with high acidity as they are highly acidic themselves. When you have any plants like this, it’s very simple to just collect pine needles to use in your bed. Go ahead and cover the beds you have with needles a couple of inches and while they decompose, they actually disperse some acid into the soil.
Now, admit it, gardening isn’t as complicated as you thought! Like most topics, gardening has a great deal of information to be learned and the advice is readily available from a number of sources. Sometimes, you need a starting place. Hopefully, this article will serve that purpose and set you on the path to a beautiful garden.