DIY Gardening & Better Living

Gardening Tip & Hacks

Whether you are brand new to gardening or you have a veteran green thumb, you know that gardening is a rewarding way to spend more time outdoors—or make the most of your indoor space!  While gardening is fun, it can also be very challenging.  It’s a subtle art and science since many plants require delicately balanced conditions in order to thrive.  These gardening tips and tricks are easy, affordable and will help you to get the best results this year.

The best way to keep top-quality, organically grown produce on your table year-round is to grow as much as you can, and preserve plenty to eat for when your garden isn’t producing. This is a worthy goal, as organic, homegrown produce is more nutritious, delicious and sustainable than the typical store-bought fare. To help your garden reach its potential, you can implement so many creative growing and preserving strategies. As you attempt to grow more organic food, be realistic about the time you have to maintain your garden and manage its harvest, and don’t bite off more than you can chew.

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Basic Gardening Tips

Whether you like to get your hands dirty in the garden or not, it’s nice to have a few gardening tips and ideas up your sleeve. Here are some of our favorite tips and tricks for your garden

Choose an idea for your gardening

The first step in starting your journey to gardening expert is choosing what type of garden you want. Will it be a beautiful sea of colorful flowers, a glorious herb garden for the budding chef, a nutritious vegetable garden, or a mixture of everything? No matter what you choose, a good tip for beginners is to start small and slowly create your garden paradise.

Get basic gardening tools

Once you have a plan, you’ll need some basic gardening tools unless you intend on digging with your hands. Thankfully, gardening only requires a handful of tools.

To get started, you will need:

• The Basic Tools. An essential tool for every gardener is a pair of pruning scissors. You will use these to cut back plants and bushes, as well as maintain their health by cutting off dead flower heads and branches. Another useful tool to own, especially if you have larger plants, is a pair of lopping pruners. With their long handles and large blades, you will make short work of larger, well-established plants.

• Digging & Raking Tools. In order to start planting, you will need a series of tools for digging and preparing the soil. For this, you should have at least one spade, a trowel, and a garden fork. The spade and trowel will be used to dig the holes for your plants, whereas the garden fork is incredibly useful for breaking up large clumps of soil or for removing the roots of old plants and weeds. You will also need one or two rakes – one with metal prongs and another with softer, plastic prongs. Metal rakes are great for leveling the soil and removing stones in plant beds. Plastic rakes are better suited for basic garden maintenance, such as clearing your lawn of leaves.

• Watering Equipment. No matter how much it rains, you will still need to water your plants. The best tools for this job are a garden hose and a watering can. Garden hoses are perfect for large tasks, such as watering trees and established plants, but the high pressure is not suitable for smaller plants and seedlings. For these more delicate plants, a watering can with a rose attachment is preferred. Your young plants will thank you for the gentle sprinkling. Large beds can also be watered using soaker hoses or sprinklers.

• Weeding Tools. Since you are putting so much effort into creating your garden, the last thing you want is to allow weeds to gain a foothold. To tackle the weed menace, you will need a forked trowel and a gardening knife. These two tools will allow you to uproot any invading plants with ease.

Pick the right plants

Now that you’ve chosen the type of garden you’d like to grow and bought some tools, here comes the exciting part – choosing the plants. Before you rush off to the garden center to buy everything in sight, take some time to check the soil in your garden. Plants do well in specific types of soil they grow in. There are a few ways to find out what type of soil you have. You can perform a soil test to find out the levels of nutrients in the soil, as well as its Ph level.

Improve the soil

Improving the quality of the soil is not as difficult as you may think. The best advice for beginner gardeners is to work compost into the top 8-12 inches (20-30cm) of soil. The compost will be broken down over the course of a few months, so the best time to do this is late fall, winter or early spring.

Plan, label, & organize

This is the final tip for novice gardeners before getting your hands dirty and it’s quite an important one to follow if you want your garden to be successful.

• Plan. Figure out where each plant will go, paying particular attention to spacing. Plants need their own space. If you place young plants too close together, their growth will be stunted, they will be more prone to diseases, or may simply die out.

• Label. To ensure that you always know what is planted where and to be able to tell people which plant is which, take a few minutes to make some small labels and place them alongside your plants.

• Organize. Another great piece of garden advice is to chart the progress of your garden and keep track of where everything is planted. By adding sketches, pictures, labels, and notes you can make future improvements easily as you will have a reference for how each type of plant fared in different areas of your garden.

Plant young plants

Young plants are better than planting from seeds. Carefully nourished, they are already well on their way when they go into the soil. Transfering from a small pot needs to be handled with care not to damage the young plant :

• Turn the plant upside down.

• Press the underside of the pot until the plant and the soil slide out.

• Once you have freed the plant from its pot, dig a hole in your chosen plant bed deep and wide enough to hold the roots.

• Place the plant in the hole and fill it in with the soil you removed earlier.

• Do this for all of your plants and then water them thoroughly to encourage the roots to spread out.

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Water plants correctly

The aim of watering plants is to provide them with enough water to survive but not so much that the soil becomes waterlogged. The best way to achieve this is to water your plants slowly to allow the water to reach deep into the soil. Ideally, the soil should feel moist at about 2-3 inches (5-6.5cm) beneath the surface.

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Plants at different stages of development also require different amounts of water. Young plants will need to be watered daily to encourage growth and healthy roots, whereas established plants will generally only need to be watered once every 2-3 days, depending on the weather.

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