Many new gardeners don't often understand how important it is to use mulch around the base of their flowers, plants, shrubs and trees. It doesn't matter what kind of gardening you're doing though: flower garden, vegetable gardening, container gardening, or planting bushes and trees, putting mulch around your garden beds will help you in a number of ways.

1. Mulching your garden plants and flowers will help you conserve water. By covering the ground around your bushes, flowers, trees and other garden spots, you're able to help protect your plants from the strong, hot sunlight of summertime, and this helps keep the soil around them moist for longer periods of time.

2. Weed control. Putting mulch around your plants and flower beds also helps prevent weeds from growing and invading your flower beds. Since mulch serves to keep the sun from reaching the soil around the base of your flowers, weeds will have a much more difficult time growing there. And the few hardy ones that do sprout up will be much easier to see and remove.

3. Cold protection. Mulch is extremly important and useful in areas which freeze each winter season. It's particularly important to place a thick layer of mulch around the base of tropical plants when you live in an area that freezes each winter. If you have a thick enough layer of mulch, you can often prevent your tropical plants from freezing and dying due to the cold weather.

Many types of mulch also just add another layer of beauty and sophistication to your garden beds too.

There are a wide variety of materials which can be used for mulching your garden. An excellent organic material is wood chips, shavings, or bark. Since wood is an organic material, it will slowly break down and be mixed into your garden soil, providing more vitamins and nutrients for future years.

Grass clippings or dried leaves which fall from your trees each fall are also excellent natural materials to use for mulching your plants and flowers, as is straw and hay. Since these are also organic materials, they will contribute to the overall richness and fertility of your soil as they breakdown too.

Some people prefer to use mulch materials which will last for many more years at a time though, and some popular ones include plastic, and rubber material made from recycled tires. These often come in the form of circular rings for placing under trees and bushes easily.

Rocks and pebbles can act as a mulch too though, because covering the bare soil around your flowers and plants with pebbles or rocks serves the same purpose: Retaining moisture and preventing weed growth. Traditionally though, most mulch was designed to both protect the plants and flowers while feeding and enriching the soil too.

Tags: Garden mulch, Gardening

Gardeners, by their very nature, tend to like wildlife — unless it's the sort that eat their crops and flowers! But with a little forethought, you can add a whole extra dimension to your gardening pleasure and employ a whole army of helpers in the endless battle against pests.

Chief among these helpers will be birds. If you can encourage them to nest in your garden, a single pair of small birds will stuff more than one thousand unwanted bugs from your garden down the expectant throats of their chicks, daily for several weeks. And this is usually at a critical time of year, when the bugs are just getting ready to attack your fruit blossom and newly emerging vegetables. And here's the even better news: with such a convenient supply of baby food, many species will be encouraged to have a second brood of chicks, so you gain twice over!

So how do you encourage birds to nest in your garden? It's a simple matter of bribery: if you feed them with food scraps and seed through the leaner winter months and then provide suitable nesting boxes, come spring, they are very likely to take up residence, particularly if you continue to make food available to the adults.

Having their own adult food on tap allows them to spend all their time scouring your garden of unwanted bugs for their offspring. Certainly, you will have to spend a little on bird seed, but no more than you would spend on pesticides, and you gain immeasurably by the certain knowledge no chemical squirts have touched the fruit and other goodies growing in your garden. It's a shrewd investment that can't be faulted.

Nest boxes are available in all shapes and sizes, tailor-made for different species. But what they all have in common is the need for great care about their location.

They must never be placed where the full mid-day sun can touch them, otherwise the chicks will die of overheating. Nor should they be placed where icy blasts of air can freeze the chicks. The best position of all is in a shady area facing the western sunset and high enough from the ground to deter four legged predators.

If you live in a country where frogs or other amphibians have a taste for slugs and other vegetable eating pests, a small investment in a wildlife pond in a quiet corner of your garden will pay handsome dividends. Whilst they might lurk in the pond all day in a soporific stupor — don't be fooled. Come nightfall, your frogs will be off for a night on the town to dine out on the slugs and other pests, just as the slugs themselves are about to feast on your carefully cultivated cabbages!

A wildlife pond doesn't have to be too fancy. So a simple shallow depression a foot (30cm) or so deep with gently sloping sides, lined with a piece of butyl rubber (isobutylene isoprene) and with a few oxygenating plants, such as the ubiquitous Canadian Pondweed, is all you need.

And, as Kevin Costner said in "Field Of Dreams": they will come. In fact, you'll be amazed how quickly the pond life will move in — apparently out of thin air — even in an urban area.

So, with the birds tackling the bugs during the day and the frog "night shift" guarding your vegetables by night, you can sleep soundly, ready for another day of enjoying your garden.

Tags: Wildlife Garden

Creating a container garden is a wonderful way to make use of spare patio, deck or balcony space. It's also an excellent way to have a beautiful garden even when you live in a home which has no outdoor yard or garden space too. Many people who live in an apartment in the city for instance, create container gardens on their balcony or patio area, and some even create them using window boxes which are attached to the outside of the building just under their windows.

Container gardens are fun to create for indoor areas too, using a wide variety of plants and flowers that will spruce up your home. In fact, almost any plant or flower can be grown in a container. Plants which grow quite large will need larger containers of course though, and if you start bushes, shrubs or trees in a container you'll eventually need to transplant them outside in the ground unless they are miniature varieties.

Some of the most popular types of container gardens include: Herb gardens in the kitchen or morning room; Annual or perennial gardens on the patio or inside the home; Vegetable gardens on the patio, balcony or deck; And even specialty gardens such as container salad gardens.

Most people have their first experience with container gardens when they buy a beautiful, lush arrangement of flowers or greenery at the store. These containers are usually filled to the brim with new flower blooms, or trailing vines that cascade over the side of the container.

Unfortunately a lot of people find themselves with dead plants just a few weeks after having bought the beautiful arrangement, and they're at a loss as to why the plants didn't live. The answer is simple though. When you buy a ready made container garden at the store which is packed full of blooms and greenery, the container is usually too full for the plants to have the room they need to grow, live, and thrive.

To keep container garden plants alive for long periods of time, you must make sure they have enough room for their roots. Some plants have much larger or longer root balls than others too, so those plants will require larger containers in order to continue growing successfully.

If you really like the way a ready made container garden looks, you can take steps to keep it alive and beautiful in your home. When you buy the garden, simply buy a new, larger container to transfer the garden to. When you get home, just remove the plants from their original container and place them into the new one with additional soil. You may have to separate the plants a bit if they're all tangled together, but generally you can keep the arrangement looking very similar to the way it was when you bought it.

The larger container will give the plants more room for their roots to spread and grow, so your new garden will continue looking lovely for a very long time. As the plants continue growing though of course, you may need to ocassionally transfer them to another, even larger pot. Alternatively you can separate out some of the plants into smaller containers, and you'll have multiple container gardens instead of just one.

Tags: Container Gardening