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Want To Try Organic Gardening? These Tips Can Help
Growing green things indoors and out, bring joy to many people’s lives. Carefully planted and tended for plants can mean beauty in yards and rooms, as well as fresh food on the dinner table. Yet, despite the simple pleasures it can bring, gardening itself can seem awfully complicated. Simplify your gardening endeavors with these helpful hints.
If you would like to create an eye-catching fall garden with a lot of height and contrasting colors, try planting spiky plants like the New Zealand flax, the yucca or tall ornamental grasses. Add drama with texture and color by adding chartreuse plants like the Golden Spirit smoke bush or the Tiger Eyes sumac. To contrast the chartreuse color, plant purple plants alongside the chartreuse plants like the Black Lace elderberry or Loropetalum.
Feed your plants. The way your plants are growing can tell you what nutrients are lacking and need replacing. Some plants take up a lot of nutrients early in the growing season and quickly need a new supply. Look for signs of deficiency such as yellowing leaves and stunted growth. Feed the plant with a general purpose fertilizer, unless it has specific requirements. Foliage plants, for instance, prefer a fertilizer that is high in nitrogen.
Do not allow the garden to go without water. Many people have unrealistic expectations of watering the garden after work everyday, but life gets in the way and that is the end of the garden. Install a sprinkler system to ensure the garden gets enough water. Although this does add expense to the garden, the convenience of it is well worth the money.
Save money by drying the seeds from your annuals to plant next year. Petunias, zinnias and impatiens are just a few of the flowers from which it is easy to extract and save seeds. You will have to extract the seed pod from some flowers, and wait for it to split open. With others, such as marigolds, you will have to open the flower and extract the seeds yourself. After extracting the seeds, let them dry for at least a week. Place them in a jar with a rubber seal, and add silica gel pouches to keep them from absorbing moisture. Store them in a cool, dry location until you’re ready to plant them next year.
Be sure to water a tomato patch no more than once every five to seven days. However, when you do water, be sure to give the ground a thorough soaking. Tomatoes do best if the soil is wet deeply, unlike many plants which prefer a light misting more often. Also, be sure to water the ground, not the plants.
Don’t plant large shade trees in your yard between the curb and the sidewalk. Large trees have powerful root systems. These roots will crawl under the sidewalk, lifting and breaking the sidewalk pavers. The sidewalk can’t be repaired properly without removing the tree roots, which would damage the tree. Smaller ornamental trees will do less damage.
If your flower beds have diseased or dead plants in them, it is best to remove them as soon as possible to prevent the spread of disease. It is a good idea to clean out your flower beds in the fall so that the soil will benefit from freezing over the winter by killing the pests or disease-causing organisms in the soil. Cleaning out your beds in the fall will help prevent the spread of disease to your spring flowers.
Make sure you water your garden daily. If you or someone else can’t do it every day, you may want to look at setting up a sprinkler system. The convenience of having a sprinkler system outweighs the cost of it. This way your garden will be watered every day.
Try mixing various plants that have different heights to create an interesting garden setup. If you use plants that are all the same size your garden will look flat.
From timing of planting to feeding and water levels to access to sunlight, plants can be quite demanding of you even though they never say a word. Keep the tips and tricks in this article in mind in your gardening activities, and you and your plants can keep each other happy.
