Gardening Tips
Gardening is a popular activity, relaxing and enjoyable for all who love the outdoors and the green environment. It is important to be conversant with some basic processes that govern the plant kingdom.
A person taking up gardening must be knowledgeable about the fundamentals of how sunlight, shade, soil and water may favourably or negatively affect the plants. More importantly, he should be aware of selection of plants in relation to the garden landscape which he is planning to adorn.
Knowing essential gardening tips will help you to not only create a beautiful garden but have healthy plants that thrive under your care. Indeed, it is a joy to see that the time and effort you put in are well deserved and have resulted in an impressive garden and beautiful landscaping.
The following gardening tips will help your garden look beautiful while allowing you to have a stress-free and enjoyable gardening experience.
Some Essential Outdoor Gardening Tips
Soil Content
The first important aspect of gardening is to know what soil you will be planting in. For clayey soil, you will need peat moss or organic compost to lighten it up. With sandy and loam too, peat moss will give the soil more density. It allows for more nutrients to grow with, thereby giving plants greater stability.
Soil Drainage
Soil drainage will give you an idea of how wet or dry the garden landscape is. This will help you select plants as per the growing environment as well as inform you of how often the plants need to be watered. Using lukewarm water rather than cold water is better for the roots. Additionally ensure that the pots have a drainage hole for excess water to seep out so as not to flood the plant.
Plant Exposure
While gardening, it is necessary to consider the degree of exposure of nature’s elements such as the wind, sun, rain, snow etc. and how they will affect the growth of the plants. Knowing the weather conditions will give you an idea of where to plant hardier plants and how to protect the more delicate ones.
Sunlight
Sunlight is critical for the healthy growth of a plant. Not only does it play an important role in photosynthesis, it tells you how often and how much water different plants will need. Plants that flourish in the shade obviously require less water; care must be taken to protect them from direct and harsh sunlight by placing them near a window or sheltering them with a screen. If you know your soil has poor drainage, select plants that grow well in a moist environment. If your garden landscape has very little shade or protection, look for plants that are hardy or build a fence to protect your plants.
Apart from light and water, plants need to be fed. Depending on what kind of plants you have, the food served will also be different – water soluble, spikes or granular. With all the nutrients, proper sunlight and water, growth of plants is inevitable which leads us to the issue of repotting. Repotting becomes essential when plants begin to blossom healthily and start outgrowing their containers.
The success of any garden will rely on these few concepts discussed above. Taking these gardening tips seriously will help you to improve yours chances of cultivating a beautiful garden while allowing you to enjoy the immense pleasures it holds.
Gardening: A Boon To Health
Gardening in any of its many forms is a past-time which is often associated with old age. It is very stereotypical when thinking of gardening in it’s general abstract form to envision an old, old woman wearing a large hat and holding a watering spout tending to her rose bushes. In reality, however, gardening is not only for the old but for the young and middle-aged as well.
It’s important to realize that day-to-day life among mankind has changed at a staggering pace. We no longer spend large amounts of time in the heat and summer sun. One consequence of this is widespread vitamin D deficiency among our peoples. While Vitamin D can now be easily substituted for a pill, other components cannot be.
Many of us sit around in chairs all day long, whether at a desk, a lab bench, or tending to a retail sales counter it’s absolutely critical to realize this isn’t the way we lived for thousands of years prior to the coming of the industrial world. In fact, our human bodies of flesh and bone really are engineered to be continuously engaged in some form of physical exertion throughout the entire day: picking grains, chopping lumber, and chasing after prey.
So one reason gardening is such a fantastic past-time is that it manages to keep your muscles moving, your heart rate up (both from exertion and exposure to heat), and exposes you to a little sunlight for the bodily synthesis of the compound known as vitamin D. This isn’t short bouts of intense physical stimulation we’re talking about, but more prolonged consistent, moderate exertion.
There’s another reason gardening is highly beneficial: the majority of our foods that we consume these days are tainted with industrial chemicals and compounds of one form or another. Many of the chemicals used in the production and distribution of food have only been in existence for a few years, and as a consequence, the full extent of their effects on human health cannot possibly be known at this point. By growing vegetables yourself you actually eliminate the bizarre health variables introduced into the food supply by the food industry. Growing vegetables without fertilizers and other harsh chemicals is really quite easy. All it takes is a compost pile. You just take the food scraps you have from your kitchen, grab free coffee grounds from your local starbucks, and let it sit for a while. Afterwards, put the partially decomposed compost in your garden and reap the rewards.
Gardening in Clay Soil
Gardening is clay soil isn’t as bad as you would think. Yes it takes allot of work to improve it but the rewards will be great. Clay soil has the ability to retain moisture and allot of nutrients that other soils can’t. The downside is that clay doesn’t drain well and has pour aeration. This can all be corrected with the adding of organic matter to the soil.
Clay is classified as a heavy soil. To improve clay soil you need to understand it’s characteristics. All soil is made up of sand, silt and clay partials. Clay is the finest of the partials, silt being intermediate and sand being coarse. The positive side of having clay in soil is it is negatively charged which gives it the ability to hold onto or absorb positively charged elements like ammonium, calcium, magnesium, potassium and other essential trace elements that plants need to thrive from. This process is called cation and is what makes clay a relatively fertile soil, unlike sand which isn’t negatively charged and can’t hold onto or absorb the essential nutrients and moisture needed for most plants to survive.
Improving the structure of clay soil is the only way to improve it to make it more easily workable. You will need to know the percentage of clay, silt and sand of the soil to properly do this. Soil with more than a forty percent clay partials is generally classified as clay soil. To find out what the percentage of clay in your soil is you simply need to take a sample.
In collecting a good soil sample it needs to be a good representative of the garden area. If the soil looks different in other locations of the garden you should take samples of the different areas separately.
To collect a good accurate sample that represents your garden you should pick a area and scrape away about the first inch of soil. Then dig a hole with your garden trowel about six inches deep. After you dig the hole take a slice of soil along the side of the hole the full depth and place the sample in a plastic sandwich bag. Label the bag if you are sampling more than one area.
Then the sample needs to be sifted and dried. Spread the soil sample on a tray or dish and break up any clumps. Let the sample completely dry for a day or two. Once the sample is completely dry you will need to sift the roots and small stone out of the sample and breakup any clumps of soil. You can use a wire mesh or even an old colander.
Once you have sifted the sample the next step is to take the sifted soil and place it in a jar or a test tube and add a tablespoon of dry dish detergent. The detergent will help to keep the soil particles separated. Now fill the jar or test tube with water, tighten the lid and shake the jar to dilute all the sample. Check and make sure that there is no material stuck to the jar. it should only take a couple minutes of shaking to get the sample diluted. Then place the jar on a level surface and let it settle. You will start noticing the sample to start separating within an hour but it wont be completely settled out for at least a day.
After the sample has settled you will notice the layers to the sample. The heaviest layer will be the sand on the bottom, silt will be the middle layer and the clay will be the top layer. Measure the total height of all three layers and then measure each layer separately. Once you have all four measurements you can start to figure out the percentage for each layer. For example if the total amount of the sample in the jar is four inches high and the top clay layer is two inches you take the two inches of clay and divide it by the four in total height to get the percentage for that layer. 2″ divided by 4″ equals .5 which is 50% clay.
A good loam or topsoil should have no more than 27 percent clay anything higher will drain sourly. If the percent of clay is high in your soil the best way to amend it is with organic matter. Don’t work with clay soil when it is wet. It will only turn into clumps. When clay is dry you can break it apart and mix compost into it. The organic matter needs to be worked into the soil as deep as you can get it. Once you get the soil where it is workable you can start planting your garden. This process isn’t a one time job. You should keep adding organic matter into the soil in the fall when you finish gardening for the season. In the fall a planting of a green manure will also benefit the soil and can be turned under in the spring with additional compost to add more organic matter to the soil.