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Beat the Weeds and Save Time in the Garden
Posted On 01-25-2010 , 8:47 AM
New gardeners are so often put off gardening at the thought that it has to involve hours and hours of hard work. The popular idea of a low-maintenance garden is one of covering the space with decking and gravel, planted with a few grasses and pots of evergreens.
However, I have discovered an ideal way to help thwart one of the most time-consuming chores in the garden - that of weeding.
This came about almost by accident, as I have a cat who thinks that any uncovered ground is a glorious litter tray! I quickly had to find a way to cover up as much of the soil as possible, but soon realised that ground cover plants gave me the even greater benefit of vastly reducing the number of weeds.
Of course, there are many gardeners who enjoy the time spent weeding, and I admire them tremendously - there are great physical and mental benefits to spending time outdoors among your plants.
But for those of us whose time spent in the garden must be limited because of work commitments or perhaps physical limitations, there is a way to enjoy our plants with a minimum of fuss. Of course, time has to be spent on the initial ground preparation and planting, however, this would probably take far less time than laying decking and gravel!
Weeds are great survivors and they very quickly take over any bare patch of soil. Once they take hold they can very easily smother existing plants and become notoriously difficult to get rid of.
So the idea is to find plants that form dense clumps or spread via their roots to cover the ground. As with most plants, there are ground cover plants for each season when they are at their best, and some that look good all year round.
One word of caution. Because some of these plants spread quickly - which is of course what we want - they also don't actually know when to stop! So you may need to cut them back occasionally to keep them within their allotted space.
<b>What to plant?</b>
I have discovered that plants such as bugle (ajuga) - you can get plants with purple, bronze or variegated foliage; euphorbia - with stunning acid-green flowers in early to late spring; lesser periwinkle (vinca minor); bergenias - commonly known as elephant's ears; as well as small-leaved variegated ivies, all provide year round ground cover. Another advantage of these particular plants is that they are also slug and snail resistant!
In spring and summer, you can use aubretia, arabis, alyssum and candytuft (iberis), which all hug the ground. And particularly useful, and providing some height to a border, is aquilegia - the old-fashioned cottage garden variety - which after flowering retains its foliage in attractive clumps. They also self-seed prolifically, giving you extra plants each year.
Another favourite plant of mine is the hardy geranium. Some varieties do die down in the winter - weeds don't grow much then anyway - but the plants soon romp away in spring and provide ground cover and masses of flowers all summer.
Other useful plants to use for ground cover are herbs. Among a wide variety to choose from are comfrey, feverfew, catmint, golden marjoram and mallow.
So there you have it! Once your ground cover plants are established, you'll no longer have to spend hours on your knees, but can spend quality time in your garden.
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3 Easy Tips for Successful Container Gardening
Posted On 01-19-2010 , 7:32 AM
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.
Feed your plants weekly. Nitrogen, the engine of plant growth, is water soluble and as you water your containers from the top the dissolved nitrogen is leaving from the bottom. I use a fish-emulsion liquid feed with seaweed to provide all the trace nutrients my plants require and recommend it highly. You can use any liquid plant food (like Miracle Grow or Shultz) to promote growth. Compost tea is the Cadillac of liquid plant food and if you make your own compost tea, your plants will respond with bigger and better blooms as well as increased vigour.
And finally, no matter the size of the container, it is important to soak it all the way to the bottom at each watering. Continue watering until water emerges from the pot bottom. This ensures the roots can reach all parts of the container and grow properly.
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First Crops from the Vegetable Plot
Posted On 08-27-2009 , 9:40 AM
First Crops from the Vegetable Plot
Today I have had my first crops from the vegetable plot well one from the vegetable plot and two from the greenhouse.
Now given the fact that most of my runner beans plants have succumbed to root rot due to the very damp weather we have been having, I was amazed this morning when I was able to get to the plants to find that there was a large number of beans ready for picking. I picked 4.5kg about 10 lbs which is not bad for a row that started out as 20 plants and is now down to 5 or so. And there were still plenty of beans waiting to mature and loads of flowers still on the remaining plants, so I am hopefully of at least one if not two more pickings.
I am a firm believer that it is better to freeze beans as soon as possible after picking to preserve as much of the nutrients as possible, there is also nothing worse than going to your store of beans only to find that they have gone limp and yellow. No except for the beans I gave to my next door neighbour the ones I picked this morning are now in the freezer, in fact they were in the freezer within half an hour of picking.
The two crops from the greenhouse were tomatoes (all of three fruits) and a green sweet pepper. Both of which made an excellent addition to the salad I had for lunch, the only thing that could have made it even better was if the salad leaves were from the vegetable plot rather than the shop. By the looks of the plants in the greenhouse I should have plenty more tomatoes and peppers, so I should be OK for those for a few weeks at least. I am looking into installing a solar powered heat sink into the greenhouse to store some of the heat generated by day and then release it at night. The idea behind this is that it will help to extend the growing season by a couple of weeks or so.
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