Container Gardening Tips for Newbies

Container gardens can create a natural sanctuary in a busy city street, along rooftops or on balconies. You can easily accentuate the welcoming look of a deck or patio with colorful pots of annuals, or fill your window boxes with beautiful shrub roses or any number of small perennials. Whether you arrange your pots in a group for a massed effect or highlight a smaller space with a single specimen, you'll be delighted with this simple way to create a garden.

Container gardening enables you to easily vary your color scheme, and as each plant finishes flowering, it can be replaced with another. Whether you choose to harmonize or contrast your colors, make sure there is variety in the height of each plant. Think also of the shape and texture of the leaves. Tall strap-like leaves will give a good vertical background to low-growing, wide-leaved plants. Choose plants with a long flowering season, or have others of a different type ready to replace them as they finish blooming.

Always use a good quality potting mix in your containers. This will ensure the best performance possible from your plants. Find out more at EASY GARDENING

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Vegetable Garden Secrets!

So If you've read this blog a while you know that I am way into my plants. I've found some one who is like about his vegetable garden.
He is Frank Rockwell and he has been way into vegetable gardening for over 30 years. I've He has so many ideas and insights into gardens that I've never heard before. He has tips on everything, for instance:

• Mulching: He has "eight benefits of mulching" to share.
• Techniques on Drainage
• Picking the right spot for a vegetable garden
• Working with clay soil.
• Repelling worms and pest.
• The best seeds and where to get them.
• The 4 rules of crop rotation

I'll tell you it just goes on, this guy knows everything! He's got a great personality too. His website is cute. He talks about how kids love to see his vegetables and how much he likes that. Explaining how he has manged to get gardening down to such a simple science, he says: "Frankly, I'm cheap... I'm lazy... and to tell the truth... I ain't that bright!"
(D'oh!... I hope my wife isn't going to read this!)"

Check if out if you get the chance!: Home Vegetable Garden Secrets

The Gardener's Handbook: "And Other Plants"

I am the type who has to go read and research everything. "Looking into" things is a hobby of mine. So when my plants look a little off or a brown spot develops I go right to my plant library and start looking. Of course, there is the internet , where all answers live. Sometimes though I can't just "find" my answer. For instance right now I have some brown spots and leaf wilt that could be a couple of different things. It makes me wish I had grown up gardening or that I was a farm girl. I hate not knowing the answer. I wish I had some all knowing master gardener friend who would tell me what to do. I wish there really were a "plant Doctor" and that he would come right out!

I am a city girl and was always an apartment dweller. What I know i picked up throughout the years. I was not raised gardening But lately I can't stay out of the dirt. This excerpt sums it up:


The Gardener's Handbook: "And Other Plants"
The Simple Pleasures Of Flowers
And Other Plants

A flower garden provides you with a magnificent retreat where you can relax after a stressful day. Similarly, it adds beauty and value to your home when done right.

Not only that, you can actually take care of problem areas in your yard with a little creativity and a few flowers, shrubs, and trees.

Whether you are planting a flower garden or a vegetable garden, planting trees or strawberries, from my gardening and planting tips you will discover that one of the great satisfactions of gardening is just getting out there and getting your hands dirty.

Gardening is a great activity for reducing anxiety and reducing stress as you feel yourself getting closer to nature."

Ferns

I have never had success with ferns. It really annoys me. I mean they grow naturally on the forrest floor and do not seem to be very fragile in nature. They're like a dime a dozen around here. Not in my house though. For some reason they just brown and keel over when I get near. I bought a beautiful "Squirrels Foot Fern" (they have little fuzzy brown shoots that grow on the bottom)- it was a real splurge, it wasn't marked down or anything. Within two weeks the leaves started to go. I misted it for while and when it still declined I moved it to the basement so it was in a humid environment. I checked the Internet, my books, my friends, the guy at a local nursery, they all gave me usual fern advice. Keep them in a humid environment, spray them, they like it cooler, etc. Nothing worked! The poor thing died a slow death. My mother gave me one of those great ferns in a hanging basket and advised me to hang it in my bathroom with low light. Dead. There is one growing outside, under my porch. I stay away from it and it comes back year after year.
Its like knowing someone doesn't like you and not being able to figure out why. I tried to let the "squirrels foot" see that all my other plants like me and appreciate my care, he didn't see it. I am understanding too. I really have no problem adjusting things to help a plant be comfortable. If they want to northern light, fine, a little afternoon sun, no problem. I can water once a week or twice, its all right. I watch for who prefers to be alone and who likes company. My african violet does better near the TV- I can deal with that. But there is no communicating with a fern once it has given up. They really just kind of surrender and can't be rallied. I don't give up that easy and I wish my plant wouldn't either.