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For Your Gardening Pleasure: Tips and Ideas

For many gardeners, tending to growing plants is a labor of love. People with busy lives love the solitude of their gardens. They look forward to digging into the rich earth and watching tender shoots basking in the sun.

Gardening is hard work, though. Successful gardeners have to learn a great deal about such topics as growing seasons, garden pests and soil acidity. They must keep weeds at bay and spend many backbreaking hours enriching the soil, planting, watering and nurturing their crops.

Fortunately, the experts are eager to share their knowledge. If gardening is a new venture for you, you'll find many wonderful tips here to help you get the most out of your new venture.

Basic Gardening Tips: Working With Nature

Gardening is both an art and a science. From the minute you decide to start a garden, you'll need some basic information that will help you make decisions about what to plant and how:

Inspect the area that you've chosen for gardening. You'll need information about drainage, sun exposure and soil composition.
Geography and climate are important basics. You'll need information about weather, growing seasons and the types of plants that grow best in your part of the country.
Mother Nature can send you some delightful visitors: deer, birds, rabbits, groundhogs, insects . . . Unfortunately, many will be attracted to the edibles and flowers that you had planned to keep for yourself. Do you know how to protect your garden without harming the environment?
Assuming that nature will reward your efforts with a bountiful harvest, you should also learn what has to be done at the end of the growing season to ensure that next year's garden is also a success.

Here Comes the Sun

Some plants thrive in sunlight while some enjoy the shade. Make sure your garden plants will have adequate space to spread out and grow. Plants that require "full sun" should get at least six hours per day of direct sunlight. A shade garden can also be lovely if your space and climate are better suited to specific varieties that do best without too much direct sunlight.

A Good Gardener Knows the Dirt

The three main constituents of soil are sand, silt and clay. The ideal garden soil is a combination of all three. Test your soil. Good soil breaks apart easily. If it doesn't, it has too much clay. Add peat moss, compost and a little sand to soil that's primarily clay.

On the other hand, if you squeeze a fistful and it doesn't hold its shape, it's too sandy. Add topsoil or peat moss to soil that's too sandy.

Soil Moisture

You should know the moisture level in your garden's soil. Some of the moisture content is a function of climate and rainfall, but the positioning of your garden plot is also a factor. Is it close to the bottom of a hill, for example? Then it might be wet from runoff for days at a time. Choose plants that thrive in wet ground. Is it an especially dry plot of ground? Then select plants that are happier in a dry spot.

Gardening and Your Health

Gardening is fun. It's also a physical workout. When weeding, planting or raking, you'll be using muscles and stressing joints that should be monitored carefully. Follow these gardening health tips:

Warm up first: gardening is exercise!
Use appropriate equipment. Protecting your wrists and your back is especially important.
Minimize your exposure to sunlight.
Stop to rest at the first sign of pain.

Gardening: Tips and Ideas

The best gardening tips and the brightest gardening ideas are based on one important premise: you can't fight nature. If you know the basic elements of sun and soil, and choose your plants accordingly, your hobby will be a richly rewarding experience.

This section is divided into multiple articles providing gardening tips and ideas on the following: