I couldn’t tell you how many times I have bought plants on impulse only to find they don’t really fit my home garden. Now, before I buy plants, I  examine our backyard garden to see what fits in.

What do I pay attention to now?

• I pay attention to things like, how much sun and shade it will get
• Is the soil well drained or waterlogged
• Is the spot I want to plant in sheltered or windswept

The little list above is what I have messed up on in the past so now I know our yard and have done much better choosing the best plants for our home gardening needs.

We didn’t check our soil because it was so obvious that it was all clay and hard as cement, which meant it didn’t drain well at all.We have to add a lot of our soil in order to have it drain but once that was done we had an entirely new home garden that grows more than weeds.

My advice is to test your soil to determine the pH level of your soil and what kind of nutrients you need to add, if any.

Is the soil acid or alkaline?

Some plants prefer soil that is slightly acidic, while others require alkaline soil to grow well.  You can test your soil and then just plant accordingly but we prefer to amend the soil to suit the plants we wish to grow. It’s a little more work but well worth our time and effort as we get a much better looking home garden.

This way we can grow plants, flowers and veggies, that we want. Heck we would be planting mostly water loving plants as our yard just wouldn’t drain for days at a time. Now it drains everywhere and we have all the plants we wanted.

Getting Arrangements You Want

Before you dig in take the time to place the plants you’ve chosen around the garden bed in their pots to see how they will look. Re-arrange them until you are satisfied. It’s so much better than rearranging them after you have them in the ground.

Grouping plants in sets of threes or fives usually looks better than planting in groups of even numbers. Be sure that you have an interesting combination of colors and textures of plants. Tall plants should go to the back, or the centre if your garden will be viewed equally from all sides. Try to keep your plants away from trees. The roots of trees are fiercely competitive and will steal all the nutrients and moisture meant for your flowers.

The right color scheme is one way to maintain the harmony in your garden. Imagine the color of the flowers when they are in bloom. Some colors may clash with others, but can still be planted side-by-side if they have a different blooming season. Foliage color is also important. Many flower plants have silver, grey or purplish foliage that is just as attractive as the flower. This means that they are still attractive well past the blooming season and so have added value.

When I eat or see a nice patch of rhubarb my mind goes back to when I was about 8 years old and had rhubarb for the first time, right from our home garden. Living on a farm we had a huge garden behind the house.

My kid brother, a year and half younger than myself, and I would raid the garden for stalks of rhubarb and then we would break off a piece of the block of rock salt the cows would lick and then enjoy the sensation. My face could contort into some funny shapes but it was so good.

Here in New Brunswick we have a patch of rhubarb out behind our garage. It was there when we bought our home but it’s not in the garden as there was no garden yet. It’s been a few years now and we have a home garden started and now we want to divide the rhubarb patch and move it to the home garden area because the rhubarb will get so much more direct sunlight during the growing season. As it is now it only gets about an hour of sun at high now and then the garage blocks it for the rest of the day.

I wasn’t exactly sure how to divide and replant rhubarb so I had to do some looking through some of my old home gardening magazines but I managed to find a helpful article in May 2000 Canadian Gardening magazine. It was a short little article by Heather Apple called Raising Rhubarb, but it showed me all I needed to know. Those are the articles I like, right to the point.

Propagating Rhubarb Crowns Or Segments

Credit where credit is due, so I will be following Heather’s example, from her article in May 2000, mentioned above.

The main reason we are going to move part of our rhubarb patch is so that it will get full sun instead of an hour or two a day.

We Need Good Drainage And Rhubarb Loves Full Sun

We plan to transplant behind our new home garden where the drainage isn’t the best but with a bit of work, like we did for our garden, it will be great drainage and of course full sun for most of the day.

The soil can be somewhat acidic which works great for us as our soil is very acidic.

Spacing And Depth For Planting Rhubarb – 2 ft Apart – 2 ft Deep

Because rhubarb can grow so large you want to give it some elbow room to grow. For this reason you should give each segment or crown about three feet around it.

Make the hole about two feet across and a foot and half deep. This is the time I actually dig deeper and replace most of the dirt with top soil and compost because our soil is dense clay and needs work.

Be sure to give at least six inches of compost or well decomposed manure in the bottom to give those root the best chance to get strong and healthy. That’s what is going to grow you that rhubarb you want.

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OK, you’d like large, showy plants that will mature together to form an excellent display in your yard. There are two ways of achieving this. The 1st would be to feed the plants with one of many propriety chemical feeds that promote a tremendous development having plants ten times bigger than regular and lots of giant blooms. This can probably work- for the short term.

However, after a moderately short time, the plant will have expended all its vitality and perish. Not the best display ever! It may be problematic to cultivate other plants at that place without further treatments of chemical feed. A costly plan to get into, and also time intensive. What is more, when you spill the feed upon the leaves of your plant, it looks terrible.

The next technique would be to feed the growing areas instead of the plant. It will be neither as easy or as fast to give results, however, it is certainly far better for the surroundings and in the long run will give you superior, more robust plants. This is applicable to vegetables and fruits in addition to flowers.

Most plant life, whether decorative or cullinary, trees, shrubs or plants want those same basic needs for growth. Good fertile soil, water and light. The quantity of sunlight and also types of nutritional requirements change from plant to plant however the basics are the same. We also need little insects to polinate blooms to create fruit and veggies. So in order to produce optimum conditions and produce great plants we must know what the plant needs and supply it.

1st test out the earth. Make use of a meter to determine whether it is alkaline or acid. This affects what kind of plants you can cultivate. There is no point in attempting to grow plants like azaleas in land that is alkaline, and although is is realively not difficult to include lime to soil to deminish its acidity, is quite a bit harder to get rid of it. Manage your land never against it. If you really must grow a plant not suited to your soil, grow it in a pot, however make sure you feed and water it regularly.

Look closely at the fertility of your soil. There are products that can inform you the balance of the nutrients in your land. Next look at it. Does it get water logged when you have heavy rainfall, or has it been effectively drained. And finally, look at your garden during the day. Where is it normally sun – drenched, where is it partly shady and where is it frequently in shade. Various plants appreciate differant amounts of sun. After you have got the answers to each of questions, you’ll be able to develop your plants to their entire potential with very little cost.

Before you plant, carefully prepare the soil. Dig it over to aerate it and remove any weeds and add fertiliser, whether in the form of compost or slow release proprietry fertiliser like blood, fish and bonemeal, or growmore. After that finally put your plants in. Look very carefully at your plants and choose them to fit the spot. Theres no point in placing flowers that require full sunlight next to a wall which will shade them. On the other hand there’s little profit in putting shade loving plants in full sunlight, they will just burn and perish. The whole point of looking after your garden is to obtain a really good show.

If you feed your soil rather than your plants, you’ll grow more robust, healthier plants that will create large flowers over an extended period of time without any intervention on your part. They will be more capable of resisting deseases and deter assaults by predators including aphids and if they are perennials, are more able to endure their dormant time and return the next year looking strong and ready to offer you more satisfaction, for almost no additional cost or effort. And remember, to get really good results you should always start off with the best seeds and plants.

Gardening at home is a great way to help cut down on food costs so it’s a rewarding hobby in more ways than one. The only thing is a lot of people think that you need a lot of yard space to grow a garden, well we thought that.

I can definitely say that gardening has changed my life so I would like to share a couple of home gardening tips that will show you that you can have a garden with just a little space.

We started our first garden in containers. Yup, just a few pots and we were on our way to being home gardeners.

The first thing you need to think about is what basic needs do plants have.

1. Light
2. Soil
3. Water
4. Temperature

That’s pretty much it. Give a plant the right amount light, soil and water along with the right temperature and you can grow your own little veggie garden.

So here a few home gardening tips that will help you successfully grow veggies, even indoors if you want.

1. Your Garden Needs Light

You might have just looked at point #1 and said DUH!! but lighting is vital for a healthy plant. Without the proper lighting you could be doing everything else 100% and still fail, so pay close attention to your source of light.

When we first started gardening it was a pretty small garden and I didn’t pay any attention to the path the sun follows through the summer and ended up with a garden that pretty much had to grow in the shade most of the time.

2. The Soil You Plants Live In

Plants have to put down roots to survive. If the soil you use is too hard you need to change that. We had very clay soil so we dug up the little plot we chose for our garden and then mixed it with about the same amount of peatmoss.

Adding the peatmoss did a couple of things. 1. It allowed the soil to become less dense than the clay was so the plants could sink roots easily. 2. The ground didn’t drain well at all before the peatmoss and now it drains just fine.

3. We All Need Water, Even Plants

Your veggie plants are going to need watering on a regular basis so they don’t dry up and die. But at the same time you don’t want to water them so much that you drown them.

The top of the soil can look dry and people will run for the water but it’s better to stick your finger in the dirt about an inch or two and see if it’s dry down there. Lots of times they don’t need watering so you are just wasting water.

I already mentioned the soil needs to drain well, so pay attention to that when you water.

4. Temperature Is Kind Of Important

The temperature usually isn’t that important during the summer but when you are first planting outdoors in the spring you want to keep in mind the most common date for the last threat of frost.

Here where we live I have heard all my life to plant before June 10th at your own risk. You can plant before that most years but I would put a cover sheet over my plants at night until the threat is gone.

Using Containers For Gardening

I would add that you can grow your home garden in containers, even indoors, as long as you meet the needs of your plants.

The really cool thing about container gardening is that you can move them to the best spot, unlike my first garden.

Don’t be afraid to transplant your veggies into a container that’s big enough so they can grow a strong healthy root system.

We used containers to grow strawberries, tomatoes, peppers, so many things but the coolest thing I have grown in containers was potatoes. We got a lot of potatoes for the size of the pot we used. We hung the strawberry container and let the plant grow to the ground.

I planted the potatoes in the container and in our garden on the same day and harvested them at the same time. The potatoes in the ground were bigger but there were about the same amount in the container, they were just a little smaller, but just as good.

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Last year when I dug our first garden, a section 4×16 feet was to remove the sod or turf first. Once I have the top layer removed I take as much dirt from the sod as I can and then put the rest of the sod in my compost bin to use later.

I know, you could just turn the sod into the ground where it will break down but I really do prefer to put it into the compost bin.

I dug my garden down almost 2 feet so that I could work the soil and add to it, as it was clay that was as hard as concrete. But not any more, it’s gorgeous soil now and it only took a bit of elbow grease to do it.

Note: It’s better to dig the dirt and take it right out of the hole you’re digging. I didn’t do that on my first garden and it was a whole lot more work than it needed to be.

On the second garden I dug up I piled the dirt on a big tarp so that I didn’t have to fight to get the dirt out of our lawn later.

Once You Have Your Garden Dug Up

Now is when your compost comes in handy, if you have a compost bin that is. If not, get one started but for now you can buy the quantity you need but be ready for next year with your own compost.

Our soil was such hard clay that it wouldn’t drain like it should so we added the compost but we also added some sand and peatmoss and now our garden drains as it should. NO MORE DROWNED VEGGIES.

Each year we add more compost to the gardens and each year we are producing more and more. This year our garden will grow large enough that we plan to preserve veggies and fruit for the following winter.