Choosing the Best Planting Location for Your Antique Roses

Establishing a nice, healthy show of antique roses has a lot to do with the location you choose to place them. Here are some tips to preparing the rose bed. Many antique roses will grow in even poor soil locations, but if you want your garden to thrive, choose a location with well-drained and rich soil. Choose an open area that you know receives at least six hours of direct sun. Morning sun is always preferable. Make sure that the area gets a good amount of air circulation, as this will help prevent disease. Take the time to establish a good bed by practicing good soil preparation. If your soil is too sandy or too heavy, add a good amount of organic material to help enrich or break it up, depending on its condition. Ideally, you will want to prepare the soil bed a few months in advance so that the soil has enough time to absorb the new nutrients. Remember that you want to establish your antique roses in the healthiest soil possible. With this in mind, prepare your rose bed in spring or summer in preparation for a fall or winter planting.

Planting Your Antique Roses

Once your rose bed has been adequately prepared, you are ready to start planting your antique roses. Visit your local nursery in fall or winter for the best selection of antique roses. Remember that any roses you buy in a container will need to be planted using a high quality potting soil, and may require additional fertilizer and water. To remove the rose plant from the plastic planter, simply knock the plant out of the container gently and place it into the prepared planting hole. Do not worry about spreading the roots. Simply cover the plant with soil and water thoroughly.

Follow these Mulching and Watering Guidelines for the Best Results

What are the keys to taking good care of your antique roses? They are simple enough: mulch and water your plants with careful attention. This does not have to be difficult work. As for mulch, add a thick layer of mulch to your antique roses at least two or three times a year. That is all it takes to ensure less water stress, less weed growth, less heat stress and overall richer soil and happier plants. Mulching can be as simple as adding decomposed pine bark, leaf litter, pine needles or store-bought mulch. However, do the earth a favor and use mulch that you can find around the yard. As for watering, give your antique roses a good soaking every 7 to 10 days. Although they make look exquisitely delicate, many antique roses actually tend to be drought tolerant. Still, avoid light frequent watering, as this makes the plant more vulnerable to disease, and will encourage surface root growth. Deep, infrequent watering will help your plant become hardier and will lessen the risk for disease and evaporation.

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Why You Should Avoid Most Commercial Pesticides

Before you decide to start using commercial pesticides around your garden, take a moment to decide if your garden pests are hurting the plant. Why should you consider leaving a few insect populations intact? Insects and other pests are often necessary in order to create a healthy garden. Insects are often responsible for creating organic material, which means that many pests are actually helping enrich your soil matter. It is estimated that of the thousands of insect species in your area, only about three to five percent of these are actually causing the majority of the damage to your flowers, ornamentals or food crops. The crucial thing is to determine which insects are causing problems, and which are just helping to enrich your garden.

Identifying Your Pest Population

The first thing you have to do is identify your pest population. The last thing you want to do is spray away all of your beneficial insect population. This will only put your garden under more stress and possibly incite further damage. Many people who spot an insect in their garden will spray indiscriminately. In most cases, this is a mistake. Here are some tips on easy and safe ways to control specific insect populations that are making their home in your garden.

Controlling Ants – A Common Pest in Many Gardens

Here are some ideas for controlling ant populations in your garden. Vinegar has been known to keep ants away. Pour vinegar into the anthill in order to control the ant population. Another easy way to control anthills is to use boiling water to tame your ant population. There are certain plants that are also known to control ant populations, including mints, onions, Artemisia, tansy, catnip and lavender.

Beetles in Your Garden – Controlling Plant Damage

Beetles have been known to cause plant damage, and they are often known as leaf-chewing insects. There are many plants that you can use to repel beetles. Plant beans, catnip, tansy, calendula, rosemary, nasturtiums, radishes, parsley and petunias in order to keep beetle populations in check in your garden.

Caterpillars Got You Down? Easy Ways to Keep Them in Check

Caterpillars have been known to cause damage, especially larger caterpillars. If you love butterflies, you may not want to get rid of all caterpillars. However, if you find that they have caused significant damage to your plants, here are some ways to keep caterpillars in check. There are certain plants that are known to repel caterpillars, including mints, Artemisia, marigold, basil, calendula, bay leaves, borage, thyme, nasturtiums, onions, tansy, pennyroyal, sage and rosemary.

When Birds Become Pests

Most gardeners enjoy a healthy bird population in their yard, but there are instances when birds can become pests. Many birds are known to pick fruit trees clean. Here are some tips to keep birds from ruining your fruit harvest. Use reflective material like tinfoil or cassette tape across treetops and plants. Hang fake fruit or Christmas tree ornaments on your fruit trees to train birds that pecking is futile. Finally, there are several commercial nets available at nurseries that are designed specifically to keep birds off fruit.

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What is Compost?

But maybe you are new to the world of compost, or need a little refresher. There is good reason why so many experienced gardeners swear by compost. Straight compost can easily take care of all your garden’s fertilizing needs, including fertilizing your lawn, flowers, shrubs, fruit trees and vegetables. Essentially, compost is what is created when organic material breaks down and decomposes in an enclosed area. For instance, in a composting bin, organic matter breaks down with help from the moisture in that enclosed area. Many chemical reactions take place that allow for the decomposition of the material. The combination of heat and moisture create a dark, earthy material called hummus. In essence, compost is nature’s way of recycling used organic material into rich new earth.

Why Your Garden Needs Compost

All good, healthy gardens need the ingredients that are contained in compost. Most notably, compost is composed of nitrogen, along with more than a dozen of other essential nutrients and micronutrients. Compost imbues soil with the micro biotic activity that it needs in order to begin producing. Thus, soil that has been mixed with compost will become more hospitable to plants, feeding the roots of all kinds of plants and creating the kind of environment that will allow your plants to thrive.

How to Make Your Very Own Compost

Start your own compost pile today and you will have good compost in about six months time. Here is an easy recipe for making your own compost. First, choose a spot for your compost. Ideally, you would like to have a bin, but a cleared off corner will do. In general, you want your compost to be composed of 40% browns, 40% greens and 20% steer manure or chicken. Browns refer to organic material that is naturally brown, including sawdust, dry leaves, twigs, straw and paper, including shredded newspaper and junk mail. Greens include such organic materials as overripe fruit, grass clippings, vegetables, landscape trimmings, spent blossoms and blooms, flower stems and others.

Easy Tips for Maintaining Your Compost Pile

Here are some easy tips for maintaining your compost pile. You will want to blend manure into your green and brown material. Try to layer your greens and browns in your composing area. Don’t let your compost pile go dry. Add water periodically and use a pitchfork to turn your pile on a regular basis. Ideally, you want your compost pile to be moist, but not too moist. Aim for it to be about as moist as a wrung out sponge. Every week, use your pitchfork to turn your pile. When you add new organic material to your compost pile, try to layer the browns over the greens.

No Fuss, No Muss Composting for Your Little Garden

There are a lot of easy way to compost with no fuss and no muss. If you don’t have enough room in your yard for a full-scale compost bin in your yard, you can start small. Keep a compost kitchen pail by your sink so that you have somewhere to throw out food scraps. Once the compost kitchen pail is full, you can empty outside in your garden. Let nature take over and do its work. The organic material will eventually break down and enrich your soil, creating food for your garden.

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