Top tips for successful gardening

If you spent much of this past winter dreaming of a great garden, this is our No. 1 tip to achieve it: Prepare your soil well.

Garden soil prep

Look at your garden soil before you do any planting this spring. Ninety per cent of the success you achieve in the garden is the result of good soil prep.

Your soil should be loose and friable, with the ability to drain freely. If this doesn’t describe your garden soil, we recommend you add generous quantities of organic compost. By generous quantities, we suggest that you add four to six cm (two to three in.) of compost or triple mix to the surface of your garden beds.

Healthy, fertile soil will not only lead to vibrant blooms, verdant foliage and abundant fruits and vegetables, but will also eliminate (or at the very least minimize) the need for pesticides and synthetic fertilizers. Well-fed soil breeds strong, disease-tolerant plants. Insects are less prone to feed on healthy plants as the natural defenses of the plant are working at their optimum.

Lawn care

Be sure to raise your lawn mower cutting height to five to seven cm (two to three in.). Longer grass has deeper roots. It also helps to keep weeds under control by crowding them out, and protects grass roots from drying out. The best method of growing a healthy, weed-free lawn is to produce a thick, healthy grass that will shade out weeds and crabgrass, eliminating the need for herbicides.

First thing you should do this spring is use a spring-tined rake to remove any debris, dead grass and leaves from the lawn. Add these to your compost pile.

Secondly, spread a two- to four-cm layer of triple mix over the lawn, concentrating on depressions and thin areas. Sow a quality grass seed at a rate of one kilogram for every 80 square metres. We cannot emphasize the need to buy good quality seed enough – the contents in the bag represent the future pedigree of your lawn. Keep the area watered and evenly moist until the grass seed germinates.

Water conservation

Spring is the perfect time to plan your gardening strategy for this growing season. We encourage you to think of ways to reduce your consumption of water. Saving water is not only the environmentally responsible thing to do, it saves you time and allows you to enjoy more time away from the garden without worrying about its need for water.

Our top tips for water saving in the garden:

Divert downspouts into rain barrels: Have rain barrels collect rainwater as a source of free, oxygen-rich, warm water for gardens and containers. All plants love it and respond better to rainwater than the cold water from the end of a hose.

Discover the miracle of mulch: We recommend a five-cm (two in.) layer of shredded cedar bark mulch throughout perennial and shrub beds. A generous layer of mulch insulates the soil from the drying effect of the sun and wind. As a result, in the first year you will reduce your watering by up to 70 per cent and weeding by up to 90 per cent.

Water wisely: Apply water early in the morning when less moisture will be lost to evaporation. Our rule of thumb for watering both gardens and lawns are to water deeply, usually no more than once a week. Infrequent but generous watering forces the roots of plants to grow deeper in search of moisture, without starving them for water. Deep roots mean plants can better withstand short periods of drought.

We get a lot of satisfaction out of planning and growing a garden that doesn’t demand a lot of water. This also means that it will not demand a lot of our time. Properly thought-out and executed, a “low-water garden” may be the closest thing that you will get to a “low-maintenance” garden.

Take time to enjoy your gardening experience. It is spring, after all, and Canadians have waited long enough for it.