Garden Tips

How to make a great garden

Great garden tips about preparing the soil, planting, watering, fertilizing, and pruning your garden plants.

Mankind has been planting and tending gardens for hundreds of years. It used to be a necessity to grow food for sustenance.

But nowadays most of us buy food that is produced by the large commercial farms.

We are spoiled by all of the available foods at the supermarkets. But there is something very fulfilling about planting and tending you own garden. It may be either vegetables, flowers or landscape plants. Gardening is fun and easy.

BASIC GARDEN TIPS

Soils

If you have a clay soil the compost breaks apart the clay particles so the soil will drain and not remain soggy. If you have sandy soil, it drains so fast that the plants have a hard time getting water. The organic matter helps retain water so the plants have enough moisture. If you have a nice loam soil you are lucky, but it is always good to add some compost.

If you are planting a larger area like a flower bed, vegetables or even a lawn, cultivate the organic matter and some fertilizer into the entire area. If you are planting a tree or shrub, mix the organic mater into the planting hole.

Planting

If the plant is root-bound, it is already under stress and it is best not to buy it. A tree or shrub that is root-bound will have roots going around and around in the pot. If you plant it that way the roots will continue to grow around and around. They won't straighten out by themselves and they will eventually strangle themselves. So don't buy them to start with. Also, don't buy a tree or shrub that seems to wiggle in the pot. It might have just been potted up or have a lack of roots. If you pick it up by grasping to trunk near the soil and it starts to come out of the pot; leave it there. Don't buy it.

Dig the hole first before you take the plant out of its container, you don't want to expose the fine feeder roots to the air any longer than necessary. If they dry out too much, they will die. It's not the big fat roots that pick up the moisture and nutrients out of the soil. The fine feeder roots do that job. The bigger roots are just for support and transport systems.

A good garden tip is to dig the sides of the hole straight up and down vertically. Don't have the hole wider at the top and narrower at the bottom. If you do the roots will just grow around and around in the narrow bottom of the hole. Dig the hole wider than the container the plant came in. You want to give the roots plenty of room to grow, especially if you have hard soil. Your garden tip is, a small hole won't grow good roots.

If you are planting a bare root tree or shrub make a mound in the bottom of the planting hole and spread the roots down over the mound of soil. Then they will continue to grow out and down.

Plant the plants at the same depth they were in the containers, not deeper or shallower. Some plants are very sensitive to being planted too deep. Strawberries are an example of sensitive. If you plant them too deep, they will die. Tomatoes are an exception to this rule. A good garden tip is to put a lot of their stem underground. They like it. They will grow new roots along the stem that is underground. that makes a stronger plant because it has a bigger root system. Then they can produce more tomatoes.

Whew! A lot of writing, but I want you to have a successful garden! I want to give you enough garden tips to make you a great gardener.

If you happen to get a plant with roots going around and around in the container, straighten them out before planting. No, don't take the soil off of the roots. With small plants you just pull them with your fingers. Pull off the matted roots that were bunched up at the bottom of the container. This is just for small plants, like bedding plants up to a 3-4" container. If you have a large plant with big roots going around the outside of the soil ball you treat it differently. Try to gently straighten them out. If you can't make two or three vertical cuts down the outside of the root ball just cutting deep enough to sever the circling roots. Don't cut too deep and try not to knock soil off of the roots.

Put the plant into the hole and fill soil around it. Firm the soil down around the plant with you hands for small plants. Firm with your foot around large plants. You want to make sure there is good contact between the roots and the soil. That way the plants will be able to pick up the water and nutrients out of the soil that they need. If they have air around their roots, they can't get anything out of the ground.

Watering

For smaller plants you can water them after they are planted. It is easier to get the water a short distance down into the soil. But with a tree it takes a lot of water to get it down to the bottom of their roots. That's why I like to water them in the hole while I am planting.

Newly planted plants should be watered abut two to three times a week, depending on where you live and your climate. Garden tip; do not water every day. Unless maybe you have a hot drying wind. Watering every day encourages the roots to stay close to the surface of the soil. Then they have to be watered every day and if you miss a few days they are in trouble. Leaving time between the watering encourages the roots to grow deeper looking for water. This results in a stronger root system.

Fertilizing

Garden tip; use a balanced fertilizer that has its number all the same like a 6-6-6. The numbers stand for nitrogen-phosphorus-potassium. Nitrogen feeds the leaves. Phosphorus feeds the roots and flowers and fruit. Potassium is used for other plant processes. If you use a high nitrogen fertilizer (a high first number) all you will get is a bunch of pretty leaves and not many flowers and/or fruit.

Take a garden tip from some of the commercial growers. For large trees and shrubs you can get tablets of time-released fertilizer that will last a year. Then each year just bore a hole and put new tablets in the ground. Water and fertilizer need to go into the soil at the drip line of the trees. That is where the feeder roots are.

Smaller plants may be fed with a liquid fertilizer applied through a hose. Or put time-released granules around the plant. You may put some in the hole when you plant medium to large plants. Just make sure the fertilizer does not touch the roots. Cover the fertilizer with just little bit of soil. Then as the new roots grow, they will find the fertilizer.

You may also use composted manure around the plants. This is what people have done for centuries. Or you can put fish into the ground where you plant your garden. I did this a couple of years when we were commercial fishing. We brought some trash fish home and put them in the garden. Boy did we get some wonderful crops. The Indians really knew what they were doing. They had an inside garden tip. If you don't have fish you can use fish emulsion or manure tea. They all work.

Fertilize several times during the growing season. Check your fertilizer container and see what how often they recommend. It will depend on what strength fertilizer you are using. No fertilizing is needed during the winter.

You may plant bulbs in the fall at their recommended planting time. Put bone meal (high phosphorus content) into their planting hole for robust bulbs and lots of spring flowers.

Garden tip, never fertilize a dry plant. It will pick up too much fertilizer and burn the plant. Water one day and then fertilize the next day or two while there is still moisture in the soil around the roots.

Pruning

Pruning is just to keep the plant safe and healthy. Let's keep it simple.

Cut or pinch the old flowers off of your garden flowers so they will keep producing more flowers. Some flowers trim themselves naturally and you don't have to do it. If they are a onetime bloomer like daffodils or day lilies cut off the old stems and/or leaves when they turn yellow. As long as the leaves are still green leave them on. They are feeding the plant so it can store nutrients for the next year's flowers. Water and minerals come up from the roots, but leaves make carbohydrates for the plant’s growth.

A garden tip for spring blooming shrubs need to be pruned after they bloom. Don't prune them in the fall or winter or you won't have flowers the next year. The flower buds for next year are set in this year's growth. So if you prune them in the fall or winter you are cutting off next year's flowers.

A garden tip for summer blooming shrubs like Crape Myrtle are pruned in the winter. We can do this because they set their flower buds on the current season's growth and then bloom from those buds during the same season.

The garden tip for pruning trees is do it in the late fall after the leaves have fallen, the sap has gone down and they have gone dormant. First you would cut out any dead or diseased wood. Remove any crossing branches that are rubbing on each other. Other than that just generally shape the tree. Remove any branches that come out at a 90 degree angle from the trunk. Because of gravity they are in danger of falling. Good branches should leave the trunk at an upward angle.

There are two types of pruning; thinning and heading back. Thinning is cutting the entire branch off. Heading is cutting part of the branch off.

When a heading cut is made the remaining part of the branch will sprout and grow again. If there are still some leaves left on the uncut part of the branch. If it is cut back just leaving a bare branch, the branch most likely will die because there are no leaves to feed it. And there is a chance when it dies it will carry rot or disease back into the good branch that it is attached to.

If there were some leaves on the branch below the heading cut it will sprout and grow again. Many times it will grow multiple sprouts. This is what happens when a hedge is pruned with hedge clippers. The plant makes multiple sprouts and produces a smooth green exterior on the sheared plant.

But if you look in the interior of the plant, you won't see as many leaves. The dense leaves on the outside shade out the interior of the plant and the interior leaves die. Only certain species of plants will tolerate formal pruning with hedge trimmers. Some plants never grow sprouts from a headed branch, such as some coniferous plants.

Thinning on the other hand is where the entire branch is cut off all the way back to where it joins onto the main branch. It will never grow sprout again. Thinning makes a natural looking plant. I prefer the natural look.

Some fruit trees require heading or other specialized pruning, but I am not going to cover that here. Not grapes or berries either at this time.

Pruning is one of my pet gardening peeves. I dislike seeing lollipop looking trees and shrubs. Why not just leave them natural looking. Formal pruning has its place around some formal and/or public buildings. Many people think that is the way to prune, but I don't care for it. Why torture the plants?

I have one last garden tip for you, Grow and Enjoy!

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