Rock gardening is an easy way to make your lawn and garden beautiful, yet keep it very low maintenance. Rock gardens are particularly useful for areas of your yard which tend to be quite dry, but they're also quite beautiful in water run off areas too, because you can design them to look like miniature river beds.

Creating a rock garden isn't too difficult, but there is some planning involved. The first step to planning your rock garden is to select the area which you plan to place it. You'll also want to decide on the types of plants you'll have in your rock garden, and what kind of rocks you'd like to have as well.

In most cases, little river rocks and pebbles are excellent to use for a general rock garden bed. You may want to select your rocks and pebbles based on color or uniformity of size and shape, or you might want to simply go out and collect a variety of interesting rocks to put into the garden instead.

The most attractive rock gardens usually have a base rock bed of small pebbles and stones though, and a variety of plants cropping up between them. Then larger, more interesting elements are placed into the rock garden as focal points, shade areas, and to simply make the rock garden more attractive.

Some rock gardens for instance, have a few larger rocks or even small boulders placed in strategic areas to create both interest and variety in the garden. Placing small boulders in your rock garden also makes it easy to add a small fountain or trickling stream too, plus you'll be able to plant moss and other interesting plants on the boulders themselves close to the water.

Once you've chosen the location for your rock garden though, you'll need to fully clear the area as best as you can. Remove all weeds and as much of the roots from previous weeds and plants as you can, then remove any other unwanted debris. You'll be left with a fairly mundane dirt lot, but this is the blank canvas you'll be able to create your beautiful rock garden in.

After the garden area has been cleared, you'll need to place your plants into this area. Unlike other gardens though, a rock garden tends to have small plants that sprout up here and there. So you don't want to place too many plants, and you don't want them to be too close together either. Just scatter a few in various areas of the new garden plot.

After you have your plants in the ground, if you plan to place larger boulders in the rock garden, put those in their chosen locations first. Then start spreading your base rock or pebbles. Make the rock layer as thick as you'd like, and be sure to get the rocks in close to the base of your new plants and boulders too. Rock garden plants usually like to climb over, around, and through the rock bed that you create, so don't be afraid of putting the rocks too close.

Now you simply need to place any finishing touches or focal points into your rock garden. You can place water elements, interesting pieces of wood or even old wagon wheels if you'd like.

Tags: Rock 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 raised garden beds is a wonderful way to get a garden started easily. When you plant your flowers or vegetables in raised garden beds, you don't have to pull weeds first, turn soil, or dig out a lot of rocks and other debris. Instead, you simply choose the location you want your garden bed to be, lay down your bed retainer walls, and fill it with dirt.

Raised garden beds are popular because they're easy, but also because they allow you to start growing seeds and small starter plants earlier in the season. A raised garden bed will become warmer earlier in the season than a ground based garden bed, and that allows you to start your gardening earlier in the year.

The first step to creating your raised garden bed is to choose the materials you'll use for the walls of the bed. There are a wide variety of materials that can be used to create your garden bed. Rocks for instance, can be piled together into a rock wall design. Bricks can also be used to create a more formal looking garden bed too. Wood or railroad ties are easy, attractive and sometimes even free too.

Regardless of what you choose to create your garden bed with, you'll need to gather enough materials to make the bed as high as you'd like it. Some people like to create garden beds just a foot or two tall, while others create tiered garden beds which have multiple levels ranging from a foot or two in height, to four or five feet at the tallest level. How you design yours is completely up to you of course, and your budget.

Once you've decided on the materials you'll use to create your raised garden bed, the next step is to choose the location for the bed. Where you place your garden bed will depend on how much space you need, and how much sunlight you'll need too. If you're building a raised garden bed to plant a vegetable garden for instance, you'll want to place the bed in a location which gets at least five to six hours of sunlight each day.

Now that you have your materials and location chosen, it's time to build the bed. And all you need to do is simply lay out your material in the design you want for the garden bed to create the bed frame. Once the frame for your garden bed is ready, then you just need to fill it with soil. Put enough soil into the new garden bed to bring it to at least one or two inches below the top of your garden bed frame.

All that's left now is planting. You can plant small starter seedling plants in your bed, sow seeds directly, or put more mature plants in, whichever you prefer. After planting your plants in the new garden bed, surround them with some type of mulch material such as tree bark or dry grass clippings, so the plants and bed won't dry out too quickly during hot spells.

Tags: Vegetables, Flowers, Raised garden beds