[?] Subscribe To
This Site

Practical Garden Tips

These practical garden tips will be timesaving and allow you to spend more time on the fun and creative aspects of home garden like designing your garden,creating a garden journal, or just relaxing in your backyard oasis!

Put wet newspaper underneath mulch or rocks for an extra layer of protection against weeds. The newspaper breaks down over time and can be replaced before adding more mulch the next year. It helps save the environment too because you are not using chemicals to kill the weeds.

Like a coat of fresh paint re-energizes a room - Refreshing your mulch puts the pizzazz back into your landscaping and gardens. It’s such a simple and usually inexpensive (about $3.00 a bag) thing to do that often gets overlooked.

If you think that your gardens or landscaping look tired and lack that ZING that it used to have and you can’t put your finger on what the issue is….. add fresh mulch. I recommend that you do this every year- every two years at a minimum and you will be amazed at the difference!

Create a dry rock bed for those crazy wet areas that are draining right through your garden and washing everything away.

Plant the tallest flowers in the back of the garden .This sounds like a no brainer, but it’s surprising how many beginning gardeners don’t think about this until its too late.

If you’re planting a garden that will be viewed straight on or from a front vantage point, take care to think about which plants are the tallest and put them in the back of the garden. (Remember the family photo sessions at Thanksgiving where the tallest are in back?)

Also think about the size and blooming time of each plant .This is where information on those plant tags or the back of the seed packet comes in handy. Always read them so that you know when the plant is expected to bloom and how large will it get.

You didn’t throw the instructions away did you? Just checking.

Planning ahead will avoid a garden that blooms all at once and then having nothing but dead flower heads for the rest of the season. Not a pretty picture.

Planting the flowers closer together than what is recommended on the plant tag or seed package is sometimes a good idea.

I know that this goes against what some others say!

As a beginning gardener,I used to follow the instructions to the letter on the seed packets or plant tags. If it said plant 2 feet apart, I did.

But......this never worked out for me. I had gaping holes in my garden and would wait all season for the flowers to fill in. (Usually right before the fall frost my garden would finally fill out!)

I prefer a fuller garden so now I plant the annual flowers closer than the recommended space.

More tips

Return from Practical Garden Tips to Home Page

footer for practical garden tips page