Smart Gardening -Tips & Tricks

 The more time you spend working in the landscape, the more you will find ways to make things easier and/or faster.

 Also, as with any type of work, you’ll learn from your mistakes.

 The following tips and tricks will hopefully help you save time, money and aggravation as you tend to your gardens this summer!

 If you are thinking about adding new planting beds in your yard, use your mower to establish maintenance free lines.

 Each mower has a different turning radius; by mowing your new bed edge you can easily determine if it will eliminate the need for hand trimming along curves and corners!

 This method also allows you to see what shape the new bed(s) will really be as the grass within them grows up a bit; once ready to move ahead with preparing the bed simply spray herbicide within the new lines to kill the grass.

 If you’ll be planting perennials any time soon and will be mulching the bed, don’t throw out the plant pots!

 Instead, when it’s time to spread the mulch, turn the pots upside-down over the perennial plants to speed up the mulching process.

 You can put mulch on much faster this way, as the pots reduce the need to tuck mulch carefully around each plant!

 Once the mulch is down, pull off the pots and touch-up around plants as needed.

  Another tip when it comes to mulching has to do with weed barrier fabrics and shredded bark mulch.

 Shredded bark decomposes over time and weeds will easily begin growing right on top of the weed barrier.

 It is a waste of your time and money to put weed barrier under bark mulch; I would reserve this product for use under stone mulches.

 If your yard is like mine, all the recent rain storms have littered your lawn with small sticks and other wind blown debris.

 Cleaning it up can be easy with a small modification to a hard-toothed lawn rake – take two sewing thread spools and push them onto the outer two rake prongs (one on each end).

 This will allow the rake to catch the debris, but not the grass for a quick clean-up!

 Those of you who keep a picnic table out in the lawn know what a chore it is to move the table to get the grass clipped beneath it.

 Make the move easy by mounting a pair of small caster wheels at the bottom of the legs on one end of the table.

 Now you’ll be able to lift one end of the table and roll it off to the side in no time!

 Everyone should own a 6’x8’ tarp for landscaping!

 If you’re digging a hole, you can place soil on the tarp until you finish the job, reducing clean-up afterward.

 Tarps also come in handy when pruning, raking, and generally cleaning things up around the yard.

 Drag the tarp with you and toss clippings and/or debris on as you work; this eliminates the need to double back and clean-up later.

 Many of these tips are common sense…sometimes it just takes someone else to point them out so you can take advantage of them too!