If you’re getting ready to go on a new garden venture, you need to prepare your soil to ideally house your plants. The best thing you can do in the soil preparation process is to reach the perfect mixture of sand, silt, and clay. Preferably there would be 40 percent sand, 40 percent silt, and
20 percent clay. There are several tests used by experienced gardeners to tell whether the soil has a good composition. First you can compress it in your hand. If it doesn’t hold its shape and crumbles without any outside force, your sand ratio is probably a little high. If you poke the compressed ball with your finger and it doesn’t fall apart easily, your soil contains too much clay.

If you’re still not sure about the content of your soil, you can separate each ingredient by using this simple method. Put a cup or two of dirt into
a jar of water. Shake the water up until the soil is suspended, then let it set until you see it separate into 3 separate layers. The top layer is clay, the next is silt, and on the bottom is sand. You should be able to judge the presence of each component within your dirt, and act accordingly.

After you’ve analyzed the content of your soil, if you decide that it is low on a certain ingredient then you should definitely do something to fix
it. If dealing with too much silt or sand, it’s best to add some peat moss or compost. If you’ve got too much clay, add a mixture of peat moss and
sand. The peat moss, when moistens, helps for the new ingredient to infiltrate the mixture better. If you can’t seem to manage to attain a
proper mixture, just head down to your local gardening store. You should be able to find some kind of product to aid you.

The water content of the soil is another important thing to consider when preparing for your garden. If your garden is at the bottom of an incline,
it is most likely going to absorb too much water and drown out the plants.  If this is the case, you should probably elevate your garden a few inches (4 or 5) over the rest of the ground. This will allow for more drainage and less saturation.

Adding nutrients to your soil is also a vital part of the process, as most urban soils have little to no nutrients already in them naturally. One to
two weeks prior to planting, you should add a good amount of fertilizer to your garden. Mix it in really well and let it sit for a while. Once you
have done this, your soil will be completely ready for whatever seeds you may plant in it.

Once your seeds are planted, you still want to pay attention to the soil.  The first few weeks, the seeds are desperately using up all the nutrients
around them to sprout into a real plant. If they run out of food, how are they supposed to grow? About a week after planting, you should add the
same amount of fertilizer that you added before. After this you should continue to use fertilizer, but not as often. If you add a tiny bit every
couple of weeks, that should be plenty to keep your garden thriving.

Basically, the entire process of soil care can be compressed into just several steps… ensure the makeup of the soil is satisfactory, make sure you have proper drainage in your garden, add fertilizer before and after planting, then add fertilizer regularly after that. Follow these simple steps, and you’ll have a plethora of healthy plants in no time. And if you need any more details on an individual step, just go to your local nursery and enquire there. Most of the employees will be more than happy to give you advice.

By Bill Bergfeld

While tending your garden, one of the most frustrating things that can
happen is to walk outside to check on your plants and finding holes in
their leaves. They all looked fine only hours before so what’s the
problem? The explanation for some of these plant-destroying holes are
garden pests. Some of the main garden pests are slugs, worms,
caterpillars, birds, snails, and the occasional gopher. Although you can
never wipe out these pests entirely, you realize that after all your hard
work in the garden you must do something.

Insects are one of the worst things to have in your garden; they can live
under the soil, in old weeds or piles of leaves, or in any number of
other places. In order to help keep insects away, try to eliminate
places in or near your garden that these insects and other plant diseases
could be living. Remove old leaves, weeds, or any other decaying matter
that could harbor insects and diseases from your yard. Also, regularly
turn your garden soil and break apart any clumps of dirt in order to
eliminate the underground living spaces where insects might be hiding.

Another way to rid your garden of the pests is to use dormant oil spray,
which is formulated to keep destructive garden insects and diseases under
control. It goes without saying, use dormant oil spray when your plants
are dormant, usually around February or early March. Dormant oil spray
is only effective if you follow the application instructions. Make sure
you read the label carefully. Some insects are beneficial to your
garden, so be sure to your bugs before you treat your garden. Your local
Agriclutural Extension Service should have trained personnel on hand to
help you.

Another garden pest is birds. The safest solution to keep the birds away
from your garden is to put a bird feeder in a location away from your
garden plot. Birds will be more prone to eat at your feeder instead of
your garden. In the long run, the money you save in your garden will
offset the expense of the feeder and the bird seed. Another solution is
to use the old tried and true “scare crow”. Also, plastic “owl”
manequins placed strategically atop posts around your garden will deter
bird feeding. Not only can a bird feeder, a scare crow, and some owl
manequins help keep birds away from your garden, they can also become
a new part of your yard decoration. And last but not least, don’t
forget that cats are natural predators for birds and they do a great
job of keeping them out of the garden area.

If you start seeing mounds of dirt around your yard, and your plants keep
unexplainably dieing, you undoubtedly have a gopher problem. Gophers
are rodents, five to fourteen inches long. Their fur can be black, light
brown, or white, and they have small tails. One method of getting rid of
these root-eating pests is to set traps. The key to successfully
trapping a gopher is to locate the gopher’s tunnels and set the trap
correctly. Another way to get rid of them is to use smoke bombs or
gopher gassers. You must place them inside the tunnel hoping that the
smoke spreads through channels ultiimately reaching the gopher. Treated
grains and peanuts are also available for gopher problems, but they
should never be used in or near your garden.

In the long run, you can keep your garden healthier, longer if you just
check it regularly and use proper pest elimination techniques when
necessary. The longer you ignore garden problems, the more your harvest
will suffer.

By Bill Bergfeld

Many people who maintain gardens have a large amount of organic waste coming from grass clippings, leaves, and dead plants. Unfortunately, most people waste money and time having these wastes picked up and transported to a landfill. It isn’t just a waste of good compost; it’s a waste of everything that goes into the process of transporting it (the garbage man’s time, the money you pay for the removal, etc).  There is a better alternative.

All this garbage that people are trying to get rid of can be a comparable or sometimes even better supplement for your garden than any fertilizer or chemical. If you properly facilitate the decomposition of all of the garbage, it will alter itself naturally until it is in such a state that it can be nothing but beneficial nutrition for other plants. Therefore you can turn all the stuff you would have normally thrown away into top grade fertilizer for your garden.

Usually compost is maintained in a pile somewhere in your backyard. Usually the thought of a compost heap brings disturbing images to ones mind; heaps of rotten garbage emitting a horrid odor. However, if you maintain it correctly you’ll be able to produce great compost without producing an offensive odor.

When you are choosing a composting, your objective should be horizontal square footage rather than vertical. Having a really deep pile of compost is not a good idea, because generally the deeper sections won’t be exposed to anything that is required for the process to work. It is better to spread it all out over a large area. (One really clever compost area is the roof of a shed, tool shack, or an out building of some sort.  You can spread your compost material over the roof with boards to keep it from falling off, of course. This keeps the pile out of the way, but presents a problem in routine aeration and care.

A compost heap can consist of any organic garbage from your yard, garden or kitchen. This includes leaves, grass, any leftover food that won’t be eaten, or newspaper (no more than a fifth of your pile should consist of newspaper, due to it having a harder time composting with the rest of the materials). Usually if you have a barrel devoted to storing all of these things, it will fill up within several weeks. It is quite easy to obtain compost raw material, the hard part is actually getting it to compost or degrade.

After you have begun to get a large assortment of materials in your compost heap, you should moisten the whole pile. This encourages the process of composting. Also chop every element of the pile into the smallest pieces possible. As the materials start to compress and meld together as they decompose, frequently head outside and aerate the pile. You can use a shovel to mix it all up, or an aeration tool to poke dozens of tiny holes into it. Doing this will increase the oxygen flow to each part of the pile, and oxygen is required for any decomposition to take place.

If maintaining a compost pile sounds like something that would interest you, start considering the different placement options. The hardest part about maintaining a pile is choosing a spot that provides enough square footage without intruding on the rest of your yard or garden. While odor prevention is easy, compost piles just aren’t a pleasant thing to have to look at whenever you go for a walk in your garden.