Thread: Flower Gardening

These are the top five tips on flower gardening if you are a beginning or seasoned gardener.

1. Start small
If you have never gardened before, do not have a bunch of beds dug up. Have one bed. It is a lot better to focus on caring for one bed than it is to have 6 ratty looking beds. Try it out and see if you love gardening or merely like gardening.

2. Do not get every tool known to human kind
Get good basic tools. If you really feel that you need a certain tool, see if you can borrow it to try it out before buying it. Otherwise you will be like the guy next door with 18 tools, all rusting in his shed while the weeds overtake his yard. I finally figured out what the problem is. People get the notion that they will have the most amazing gardens and think that they can create it in a week. Or a month. The secret about gardens is that they are slow growing and not something for people who need instant gratification. But in the fast paced world, where everything is instant, it is human nature to get the latest tool in the mistaken belief that it will speed up gardening. You might as well try to speed up a sunset. It happens when it happens and not a second sooner.

3. Prepare your soil
If you have trouble digging into the ground in your garden to be, imagine how hard it will be for a seedling to work its way through that hardpacked soil. I see people rent or borrow a rototiller and till up their bed and I want to stop and tell them, remove the sod first. What is the point of tilling sod with grass and weeds right into your garden. The roots will survive and you have just added all that grass and weed to your flower bed so you can spend the summer pulling it out blade by blade. I have to digress a moment to tell about the man next door who was in a rush to get a huge garden going and borrowed a Kubota tractor with a tiller attachment. The town is on a bay and his big back yard opens out onto a cliff with a 20 foot drop. We watched as he started up the Kubota and began riding it over towards the fence. With the tiller down. Yes, he ground up a path across his yard. Then he noticed people yelling at him and stopped. He hopped out of the machine and saw what he was doing to his yard and reached in apparently to raise the tiller but instead he put the machine back in gear and it took off on him, heading for the 20 foot drop. He did manage to grab the wheel and crash it into the fence instead. This brings me to the next in the tips on flower gardening.

4. Keep it simple
Know what you are doing before you do it. Gardening centers can be helpful but it is best to look at your neighbors garden – well, only if it is a good garden and see what grows there. This will guarantee success in your own garden and that will encourage you to stay with this delightful hobby.

5. Water and sun are necessary
Make sure that the garden gets lots of sun. Six hours a day is a minimum for most gardens. And make sure that you can easily water the garden. This usually means having it reachable by a hose. You cannot count on rain to do the job.

awesome!!!