Do Your Own Landscaping Design

authoradmintime14 May 2011categoryLandscaping

Know what I love about getting the garden all cleaned up, it stays that way for much longer than when you get your home all cleaned up.

More and more people are turning to landscaping their gardens, not just planting a tree here and a shrub there but looking at their garden as they would look at the inside of their home. More thought as to the overall look and appeal and how plants can compliment each other.

The results are very rewarding. There is so much help too if you are not confident in the planning, your nursery, wonderful landscaping books, TV and radio shows and the Internet are all there waiting to guide you.

Be careful with books, make sure the book is for your area and the plants suggested for a design are suitable for your part of the world.

It’s fun to get a graph pad and do your own design, give it a try and you could surprise yourself.

One word of advice, if you purchase plants from the big chain stores and they have been in air- conditioning or inside a building even with the shade cloth inside/outside style of shop, never take the plant home and put it in the garden straight away.

Take about three weeks acclimatizing the plant. Keep the plant inside or on an enclosed patio and gradually over the three week period, increase the outside time and decrease the inside time. Doing it this way you have a better chance of the plant surviving and growing into a beautiful specimen for you.

You can quite often pick up some bargains in the plant department, doing the acclimatizing can save you money.

Gardens like everything else has trends. These trends usually follow the interior decor trends. This is a good thing as the outside and the inside will compliment each other.

If your home is cottage style, then a garden along the cottage lines would look great and you would have the flowers to decorate your home to add to the look. A modern minimilistic interior then a minimal no fuss landscaped garden.
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A Better Weekend Gardening Experience

authoradmintime22 Dec 2010categoryGardening

It’s vital to start the process of having a hassle-free garden. This article gives you that first step and helps achieve some sound understanding of what you face as a weekend gardener. Our goal is to create a garden that practically takes care of itself.

Unlike my neighbor, Fred.

Fred never found a way to escape the prison of responsibilities and hard, never-ending work required by a high-maintenance garden.

If you want to avoid Fred’s fate, you need to start by making a critical examination of the maintenance of your yard and garden.

Start by taking a stroll around your property and make note of how much time you take to tend to various areas.

• Which plants require the most care, right now?
• Are there areas that please you and take less care?
• Are there some areas that you love so much that no matter how much maintenance they take you’d not want to change them?
• Can you visualize any areas being scaled down in size, or that can be improved with a low-maintenance design or gardening technique?
• Where is the problem weeding area?
• Which is the most difficult mowing area of your lawn?
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3 Easy Tips for Successful Container Gardening

authoradmintime01 Jan 2010categoryGardening

Here are several tips for creating a wonderful hanging basket or container this summer. The first is to use an artificial soil composed mostly of peat moss. Good soils such as Fafard or Pro-Mix use perlite, peat, and other ingredients to produce a soil that will not compact over the summer. Real garden soil compacts and turns into concrete under the pressure of regular watering. And when it does, plant roots stop growing because they require good open spaces to move into and absorb nutrients. Hard, compacted soils do not grow good plants so do not use real soil in your containers. I re-use my artificial potting soil from year to year. I dump it out of the pot. Chew it up with a shovel to cut up all last year’s roots and add approximately 10 % by volume of compost. The compost increases air spaces and gives plants a boost in healthy nutrition.
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