Beautify Your Garden With This Excellent Information.

If you have just started out as a gardener, you probably have visions of a beautiful, bountiful garden and lots of enjoyable hours tilling the soil and reaping the fruits of your labors. While this can surely be the case, very often, gardening is lots of hard work followed by baffled disappointment - at least until you know what you are doing! Here are some ideas to help you cultivate your green thumb as quickly as possible.

Combining different selections of plants in a garden area holds the interest and adds to the enjoyment of the viewer. Merge contrasting plants to craft interesting combinations. Add big leaf plants with fine leaf plants and combine them with plants different in texture and color to create the most eye catching and interesting landscape garden.

Plant your garden in stages. Put in a new vegetable every week, or plant vegetables with different maturation speeds when you do your planting. This helps prevent you from having a large harvest all at once, and will better allow you to enjoy the fruits (and vegetables!) of your labors.

If your soil is highly alkaline, try mixing used coffee grounds into the soil. The coffee grounds are a very inexpensive way to add acid back into the dirt. Improving the pH of your soil will make your vegetables and greens taste even better!

Exercise

To avoid injuring yourself while gardening, be sure to do some warm-up stretches before starting your project. Most people may not think of gardening as exercise, but injuries like pulled muscles frequently occur in the garden. You should also be sure to move around and not stay in one position for a long period of time.

Growing your own vegetable garden, whether large or small, offers many benefits. You will eat better! Fresh vegetables offer more vitamins than those which have been processed. Planting and doing upkeep on your garden will also help provide exercise which leads to better fitness. It will also save you a significant amount of money at the grocery store!

Nutrition

When youre picking vegetables from your garden, choose to harvest them when they are at the peak of ripeness for the best flavor and the most nutrition. It is best to pick vegetables and fruits in the early morning, because they are still full of moisture and nutrients. With only a few exceptions, anything that youre not going to use right away can then be preserved by chilling in the refrigerator.

To give your plant great nutrition without spending a lot of money, use leaves! Leaves are one of the best plant foods available. Try covering any exposed soil in your garden with small, shredded leaves. This will enrich the soil and will allow it to provide better nutrition to your plants.

Remember to mulch before the first freeze. Spread compost or shredded leaves around the garden, mulching under shrubs, hedges, roses, and on top of the crown of any tender perennials. A layer of compost spread on bare ground will help to protect any bulbs, corms or plant roots. By springtime, this compost will have been taken into the ground by worms, and your soil will be full of nutrition, ready for new planting.

By following these tips, you should be able to get a good start on your gardening hobby. Keep in mind that container gardening is a very easy and controllable method of gardening that is just great for beginners. You can plant almost anything in a container garden, and if you are a renter, you can easily take your garden with you if you move. Just remember to keep your container garden well watered since it will have no resources to draw on other than what you give it.