Looking For Easy Solutions

Great weekend gardeners don't necessarily grow fewer shrubs, flowers and vegetables than other gardeners; nor are their properties necessarily smaller. However, they do have a knack for growing plants that can take care for themselves. This is key to becoming a successful gardener, wekends or otherwise. Choosing these easier pants for the right place is eqaully important. Organizing your garden so that high maintenence areas are concentrated together reduce your garden chores considerably, as well.

Like most things in life, once someone shows us the "hot-to", we learn there is truly 'a better way'. I'd like to give you some sound advice that does just that before we get to the nitty gritty of building your beautiful backyard garden.

Slow But Sure Does It!

First, let's realize that taking on the enterprise of gardening should be done slowly.

That's truly the most valuable, cautionary word I can proffer to you. Being ambitious is fine, but being overly ambitious will cause you to require too much of yourself in any one given season. Trying to renovate your entire property all at once can cause you to not complete anything.

If you attempt too much at once, you actually may be creating worse problems, the exact opposite of what a successful weekend gardener needs! I know one such example of this overblown enthusiasm getting in the way of concrete, well paced plans. In a desire to attack his yard with a vengence my cousin (yes, the inveterate weed puller) hired a professional tree care company to yank out most of his offending trees and overgrown brush. They also cut down dying, deceased, and unwanted trees, such as mimosa, and turned them into wood chips, which he used for mulch. He went full-steam ahead on the weeding too.

In the end he had a property that screamed for landscaping. Clear ground that, by the time he had gotten rid of most of the offending plants, found that it was too late in the season to do much planting. He also didn't have the energy or budget to replant the cleared areas. Weeds started reappearing in places where he didn't spread mulch and he ended up realizing he had really made matters worse by his ill-placed and over-blown enthusiasm.

Next time, I'll talk about a critical step---doing the obvious.