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

Organic gardening is the process of growing plants, flowers, vines, trees, bushes, shrubs, fruits, vegetables and anything else you can think of in a completely natural way. In other words: No pesticides, chemicals or harmful substances are used in the entire gardening process. Organic gardening is most used for fruit, vegetable, and herb gardening, because people don't want to have pesticides and chemicals on the foods they eat.

Organic gardening starts with the preparation of your soil. Since you won't be using chemical fertilizers in an organic garden, you'll need to make sure you're soil is as healthy as it can be, so that it can provide all the nutrition your garden plants will need as they grow. Preparing organic garden soil takes a little time and effort, but it's really worth it in the end.

You can create organic garden soil by mixing in healthy rich compost material. Some organic gardeners prefer to create their own compost using special bins or containers. In some places though, you're able to buy organic compost material from other gardeners or garden centers. It's fairly easy to get a start on creating compost though, even without using a special composting bin.

All you need to do is add a few things to your garden bed soil, and let those additives sit for several weeks before you plant. Everything you add to the garden soil should be natural though, because the nutrients are created as these organic items decompose.

First you need to loosen and turn the soil in your garden bed. Then add some organic materials to the bed such as used coffee or tea grounds, sawdust, shredded newspaper, fireplace ashes, or fruit and vegetable matter from your kitchen. You can add one or more of these items at once, but you don't have to add all of them if you don't have them. The smaller you make the material before adding it to the garden bed though, the faster it will turn to compost for you. So if you're using kitchen scraps for instance, try chopping or grating them into smaller bits before tossing them into the garden bed.

After adding the organic material to your garden bed, turn the soil some more so those new items are mixed in and covered decently. Then about two to three times each week, go outside and water the bed, then stir it around a bit again. After about three to four weeks, your bed should be ready to start putting plants or seeds in.

If you prepare your organic garden area in the fall though, before the first hard frost or freeze hits, the soil will be much richer and more ready for planting in the spring.

Tags: Organic Gardening

When you're ready to start planting a garden of any kind, the first thing you'll need to do is actually plan where things will be planted in your yard. By planning your garden first, you'll be able to create a beautiful landscape out of your yard, while making sure all plants and flowers compliment each other in color, height, texture and more.

You'll also be able to make sure you're not creating problems in your garden, that may make things difficult later in the growing season. If you're planting wildflowers which grow as tall as two feet for instance, you won't want to plant those right in front of a tulip garden which has flowers that will only grow to about ten inches in height.

One of the first steps needed in garden planning is to choose which flowers, bushes, shrubs, or plants you'd like to have in your garden. Choices are made for a variety of reasons too. Some people choose their flowers and plants based on color, while others may choose what to put in their garden based on how easy the plant or flower is to grow. Still others will plan gardens based on various needs their yard areas have.

If you have an area of your yard which isn't easily accessible for watering for instance, you might want to consider creating a small cactus garden, or planting flowers which require very little supplemental watering throughout the year. Likewise if there is an area of your yard which seems to be the first to flood when rains come, you'll want to plan a garden area for that space which includes plants and flowers who thrive with lots of water.

Once you've chosen the kinds of plants and flowers you want to have in your garden, the next step is to make sure you know what the sunlight, soil, and water requirements are for those plants. Plants which have similar needs for sun, soil and water should be planted in similar locations. If you try to plant a shade loving plant right next to a sun loving plant, one or the other of those plants is likely to die soon. And sometimes both with die, if the location you choose for them isn't quite appropriate for either one.

Now that you have your plants and their garden locations chosen, the next planning step involves how to arrange multiple plants into one garden area. And this part is fairly simple. If all of the plants you've chosen for one area of the garden will be about the same height once they're fully grown, then you can choose any layout design you'd like for them. You can plant like colored plants together for instance, or stagger the colors for a variagated look.

Usually there are some plants which will grow taller than others in your garden though, and when this is the case you'll need to make sure you plant the tallest growing plants towards the back, and the smaller ones in the front. This way the tallest plants and flowers won't hide the smaller ones once they're fully grown.

Tags: Flower Garden, Cactus Garden, Garden Planning