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My Best Gardening Tips

My best gardening tip: Don't give up! Some years are just better than others when it comes to gardening. Tip the scales in your favor with patience and determination. Just like playing the stock market with dollar cost averaging, your garden will have greater success overall if you provide consistent weeding, fertilization, and watering.

As a kid growing up in Ohio, I was very familiar with gardening by the time I had a yard of my own. My Grandmother was the most avid gardener in our immediate family and her most often repeated gardening tip was to get out there and do what needed done everyday. That gardening tip seems to save time in the long run as a few minutes each day doesn't feel the same as hours on a weekend or holiday.

We've lived at this location for over 18 years now and plenty of plants have come and gone in that time. Some years back we had an annual vegetable garden that just got to be too much work. Here's another gardening tip: don't rely on your children to do any actual work in the family garden if they aren't thoroughly indoctrinated with the whole gardening idea. When our children were little they really seemed to enjoy working in the garden. The older they got, the less interested and more absent they were from gardening chores.

Whenever we tried to encourage them or give them a helpful gardening tip, they thought they had heard it all before and got exasperated, irritated, and eventually quit altogether. Don't be discouraged though; this reaction to any helpful gardening tip didn't start until they were into their teens. By age 15 they were both as far away from the family vegetable gardening effort as they could get. We hope they come back to it when they have children one day and offer gardening advice themselves.

Over the years I've been able to add a lot of perennials to the four sides of our house where shade, or lack of it becomes a concern with many common plants. For example I have hostas planted on the north side as there is no direct sunlight on that particular bed. After years of dividing a few plants, this year the hostas looked really good until a hail storm came through in July and just shredded the broad leaves. I could not find any gardening tip on what to do with shredded hostas, but they survived and grew. I expect they will be even more spectacular next year.

The front of the house faces west and gets full sun for a portion of every day while the south side gardening zone is full sun all day and gets quite warm as the bricks are heated up. Early bulbs like tulips and daffodils don't do well in those raised bed gardens. They come up too soon and the blooms don't last very long due to the heat build-up. Over the last few years I've added in heat tolerant perennials that love full sun and the south side really benefited from that gardening tip I picked up along the way.

Now the desired plants have grown large enough to shade out nearly all weeds which is another great gardening tip: plant with an end result in mind. You don't have to go so far as to draw out an exact planting scheme from a gardening catalog, but if you keep the resulting gardening idea in mind when planting, you will have better long-term results.

My raised bed gardens were built using cobble stones removed from the old streets in Milwaukee some years ago. They stack well without mortar and retain the soil even during heavy rains. The only gardening tip I can give you about building raised beds is to use materials that you have available and hopefully compliment the style and building materials in your home. My goal was to add interest to the south side of our house so I used alternating raised beds of various heights and plants that offered either both vertical and horizontal lines. 

You can build raised bed gardens out of a variety of materials. The only costs for us were the soil to fill them, and the plants which were purchased over a period of three years. Spreading out your planting and even garden construction over a period of years saves money and allows you to have time each year to work on adding something new to the yard. And that is just another gardening tip that comes from years of gardening experience.

Author Credit: 
Mary Campbell is an avid gardener, writer, collector, photographer, and general hobbyist. Her writing topics include articles like gardening tip.  

Copyright 2006 © Mary Campbell

Gardening Resources:

• Gardening: A Greener Backyard
  
  
• Northern Gardening Tips

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