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: Gardening, Garden mulch

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

Xeriscaping is the act of creating naturalized gardens using plants, flowers, shrubs and trees which are acclimated to the particular area you live in. Xeriscaping is becoming very popular, because when you create your garden based on flowers and plants which grow naturally in your area, you end up needing to water and care for them much less.

Xeriscaping is particularly useful for creating gardens that need little to no watering, and it's used the most in the desert southwestern area of the United States, because water is quite scarce in those areas.

When most people start thinking about how to create a garden which uses little to no water other than natural rainfall amounts, they immediately think of creating a cactus garden. And cactus gardens can be quite beautiful in and of themselves, but this is not the only way to create a beautiful garden which doesn't need supplemental watering from you.

One excellent way to help reduce the amount of water your plants need for instance, is to buy special water crystals to add to your garden soil. These crystals are designed to absorb and hold water for long periods of time - usually about two weeks - so that you can water your plants less yet still have them be healthy and beautiful.

The water crystals absorb water each time you water your garden, then they slowly release that water to the plants over time. You can buy potting soil which already has these crystals added, or you can buy the crystals themselves and add them to the existing areas of your garden they're needed most.

You can also help your garden plants and flowers conserve water by simply giving them a good thick layer of natural mulch. Use dead leaves, dry grass clippings, sawdust, wood chips, or even tree bark pieces to cover the ground around your plants. This covering will help keep the soil from drying out so fast, thus you won't need to water your plants as often even in the dry heat of summer. The mulch will also keep your plants from being ravaged by the bitter winter cold as badly too.

There are of course, many types of plants which require very little water to thrive too, and they're not all cactus plants. Cactus are plants which probably have the lowest water needs of any kind of plant though, and there are many which are quite beautiful throughout the year. Most cactus plants create blooming flowers, and many of them change to various colors in different seasons too.

Besides cactus plants though, other gorgeous plants grow quite well even in the worst of the drought seasons. These low water plants are often very unique too, and they really make your garden stand out from the neighbor's. Some of the best plants to use for low water gardening needs are the Desert Mallow and the California Poppy. These often have flowers which range from light peach to orange in color, but you'll sometimes see them in other shades as well.

The leaves on these plants may seem a bit strange to someone who has never seen them before though, because they're a paler green color and they're a bit hairy. These plants draw butterflies and hummingbirds though, so they'll be an excellent addition to your xeriscaping garden plans.

Tags: Low Water Gardening, Xeriscaping