EZ Gardening For Beginners

Do you wish you had a garden that could provide you with brilliant year-round color and fragrance? Do you love to garden, but fear that your green thumb is not as green as it could be? Have no fear, if you love to garden but can’t seem to get your plants to thrive, here is a handy guide to choosing the right kind of plants that will make your garden a true show-stopper.

Choosing the Right Plants is Key

Many novice gardeners spend a lot of time and money on plants that simply will not thrive in their garden. The key to establishing a healthy, lasting garden is choosing the right plants. If you don’t know already, figure out what planting zone you are located in. This is very important, because you might otherwise spend money on plants and seeds that are simply not intended to thrive in your specific climate. Although many plants can be adapted to a wide range of climates, make it easy on yourself. Choose plants that work in your climate. However, despite this warning, there are many hardy perennials that can be planted in a variety of gardens across a great diversity of climates. Before you get started in designing your own perennial garden, find out what winter hardiness zone you fall into. Also, check the back of seed packets to make sure that the plant will thrive in your growing conditions.

Your Secret Weapon: Plan Your Own Perennial Garden

As a gardener, your secret weapon to establish a lovely garden in no time will be the use of many hardy perennials. There are many different kinds of perennial plants, each with its own particular set of growing requirements. Some perennial plants are much easier to establish than others, and it is up to you to choose the plants that are most suited to your growing conditions. Fortunately, you will find that each planting region has its own set of hardy perennials that are suited to your particular growing conditions.

The Cost of a Colorful Year-Round Garden

Walk into your local nursery and you will notice that there is usually a pronounced difference in the cost of plants. The colorful annuals that come in that standard black plastic six-pack may be tempting, but if you were looking to establish a low-maintenance year-round garden, you would be better off resisting these colorful temptations. These colorful annuals will only last one season, and then it is up to you to replace them. Perennial plants, on the other hand, will continue to grow and, if you’re lucky, bloom throughout the season. It is no wonder that perennials are more expensive than annuals. They may not look immediately colorful, but stay with these plants and watch them grow.

A Short List of Easy and Low-Maintenance Perennials

Here is a short list of perennials that are appreciated for their hardiness, color and wide adaptability. These include the Peony, which will generally grow in zones 3-8. Many lilies are remarkably well adapted to a variety of climates, and will provide color throughout the warm growing season. Choose Siberian Iris, the Bulb Lily and the Daylily, all of which have been known to grow in zones 3-8. Other lovely perennial flowers that have become a staple of gardens across the country include the low-maintenance Purple Coneflower (also known as Echinacea, highly regarded by some as a medicinal herb), the Stonecrop and the Black-eyed Susan. All of these can be grown in zones 3-8. Finally, for zones 5-8, the Cranes bill is a hardy perennial that has even been grown successfully in zone 3.

You don’t have to get down and dirty to get that beautiful garden you have always wanted. With raised garden beds, gardening is simpler and more comfortable than it has ever been before. Raised garden beds have a lot of advantages over traditional gardens, and they can be the perfect choice for you if you are looking for unique ideas for your garden design.

What exactly is a raised garden bed? Instead of planting plants directly into the ground, a raised garden bed is an enclosed platform that raises your plants a few inches off of the ground. These raised garden beds are usually enclosed with wood, so you essentially have little mini gardens instead of one larger garden directly in your soil. For this reason, many people turn to raised garden beds for reasons of lawn design. The raised garden beds can be designed in any geometric shape you like, so they can be used to create a pleasing design in your yard.

But there are many other benefits to using raised garden beds. One of the most important benefits is that they help you plants grow better. Every plant needs some air to get to its roots to grow properly. With a traditional garden, even though you make allowances for this fact and try to keep the soil loose enough so that air can flow down the roots, you can’t help but compact the soil in some areas as you move around the garden tending your plants. It is impossible to not compact the soil at all when working in a regular garden, and so your plants will be losing precious oxygen. With a raised garden bed, you don’t have to walk around your garden when you are working on it, so your soil is never overly compressed and your plants can thrive.

Because you don’t have to fret about leaving enough space around your plants to walk around (and you don’t have to worry about the soil becoming compressed), you can plant more plants in a smaller area. This also means you will have less weeding to do, because you can cut down on the area available for weeds to grow.

Raised garden beds can also help the health of your plants through efficient soil drainage. As any gardener knows, having soil that is too wet can be more dangerous to some plants than having soil that is too dry. Drying out the soil is a major concern for gardeners after heavy periods of rain, and in some areas of the Deep South, the soil may too wet all the time to plant certain types of plants. However, with a raised garden bed, moisture drains out quickly, meaning a hard rain is no problem at all. Further, a raised garden bed can make the soil that is too wet to grow anything into soil that has just the right amount of moisture for certain plants.

Another benefit of raised garden beds is that you can change your mixtures of fertilizers and other growing agents from bed to bed. There is no more trying to find the middle of the road combination that will give all of your plants some of what they need. You can group plants into beds with other plants that have similar fertilizer requirements, so that each plant is getting exactly what it needs to thrive. Likewise, you can cut down on the use of pesticides because you only have to apply them to the garden bed, instead of spreading them out over a large area.

All of these benefits of raised garden beds translate into plant growth that is around two times as productive as traditional gardens. If you are serious about your garden, consider raised garden beds.

Bamboo is one of those plants that strikes fear in the hearts of gardeners. It looks great, and many people would love to make this exotic plant a part of their garden, but everyone has heard at least one scare story about taking over entire gardens, running to neighbors’ yards and beyond, destroying everything in its path. So, what exactly is the truth about bamboo? Is it a plant eater, destined to make your garden its own, or can bamboo plants reside peacefully beside all of your other plants?

The answer is a little bit of both. There are some kinds of bamboo plants that have a mind of their own and will take over your entire yard (and then some) at will. There are other kinds of bamboo plants, however, that can look great in your gardening scheme, and better yet, can grow there safely. These two different kinds of bamboo fall into two main categories – runners and clumpers.

As you might guess from the name, runners, also known as running bamboo, is the kind of bamboo that takes off running as soon as you plant it. What happens with this kind of bamboo is that is spreads rhizomes underground if there is a crack in the branch when it is plants (and there will almost always be a crack a in the plant, no matter how careful you are). These rhizomes can travel remarkable distances through the soil, well beyond your yard, and the bamboo will begin to grow wherever the rhizomes travel. Because the rhizomes create one big plant, despite the fact that the above ground growth may be spotty, it is nearly impossible to stop once the spread has begun.

If you live in a temperate area and want bamboo, however, runners are you only choice. The good news is that with the right planting techniques, you can manage runners. When you plant your bamboo, surround the plant with a plastic edge of at least 2 feet under ground – this will keep the rhizomes contained.

The other kinds of bamboo plants – clumping bamboos, or clumpers – do not have the runaway root structure of runners. This kind of bamboo plant spreads a little bit each year, but it overgrows only by a few inches, which is comparable to other perennial plants. The downside of clumpers is that they primarily thrive in tropical zones. There are some hybrid versions that can live in colder weather, but these can be extremely expensive.

If you want to give bamboo a try in your garden, make sure you know what you are getting. Many gardening centers, either through ignorance or design, attempt to sell running bamboo as clumping bamboo. A good rule of thumb to know is that unless you are purchasing bamboo in a tropical area, the bamboo on sale at your local gardening center will always be running bamboo. If you are unsure, plant your bamboo with a plastic underground enclosure anyway, which will not harm clumping bamboo and will stop running bamboo before it starts.

The best way to purchase bamboo may not be in a gardening center at all. Unless your local shop specializes in this relatively exotic plant, your best bet may be to purchase online. That way, you can buy your plants from a reputable dealer who is qualified to tell you exactly what you are getting. For the sake of the rest of the plants in your garden, dealing with a professional can be the best way to make sure you are handling your bamboo properly.

If your bamboo begins to run in your garden, call out a professional gardener immediately. The roots will spread into your neighbor’s yard and can cause costly damage, and you will not be able to stop it on your own. A professional gardener can help save the day.