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Container Gardening Tips for Newbies

Container gardens can create a natural sanctuary in a busy city street, along rooftops or on balconies. You can easily accentuate the welcoming look of a deck or patio with colourful pots of annuals, or fill your window boxes with beautiful shrub roses or any number of small perennials.

Whether you arrange your pots in a group for a massed effect or highlight a smaller space with a single specimen, you’ll be delighted with this simple way to create a garden.

Container gardening enables you to easily vary your color scheme, and as each plant finishes flowering, it can be replaced with another. Whether you choose to harmonize or contrast your colors, make sure there is variety in the height of each plant. Think also of the shape and texture of the leaves.

Tall strap-like leaves will give a good vertical background to low-growing, wide-leaved plants. Choose plants with a long flowering season, or have others of a different type ready to replace them as they finish blooming.

Experiment with creative containers. You might have an old porcelain bowl or copper urn you can use, or perhaps you’d rather make something really modern with timber or tiles. If you decide to buy your containers ready-made, terracotta pots look wonderful, but tend to absorb water. You don’t want your plants to dry out, so paint the interior of these pots with a special sealer available from hardware stores.

Cheaper plastic pots can also be painted on the outside with water-based paints for good effect. When purchasing pots, don’t forget to buy matching saucers to catch the drips. This will save cement floors getting stained, or timber floors rotting.

Always use a good quality potting mix in your containers. This will ensure the best performance possible from your plants.

If you have steps leading up to your front door, an attractive pot plant on each one will delight your visitors. Indoors, pots of plants or flowers help to create a cosy and welcoming atmosphere.

Decide ahead of time where you want your pots to be positioned, then buy plants that suit the situation. There is no point buying sun lovers for a shady position, for they will not do well. Some plants also have really large roots, so they are best kept for the open garden.

If you have plenty of space at your front door, a group of potted plants off to one side will be more visually appealing than two similar plants placed each side. Unless they are spectacular, they will look rather boring.

Group the pots in odd numbers rather than even, and vary the height and type. To tie the group together, add large rocks that are similar in appearance and just slightly different in size. Three or five pots of the same type and color, but in different sizes also looks affective.

With a creative mind and some determination, you will soon have a container garden that will be the envy of friends and strangers alike.

Creating a Garden

The first thing in garden making is the selection of a spot. Without a choice, it means simply doing the best one can with conditions. With space limited it resolves itself into no garden, or a box garden. Surely a box garden is better than nothing at all.

But we will now suppose that it is possible to really choose just the right site for the garden. What shall be chosen? The greatest determining factor is the sun. No one would have a north corner, unless it were absolutely forced upon him; because, while north corners do for ferns, certain wild flowers, and begonias, they are of little use as spots for a general garden.

If possible, choose the ideal spot a southern exposure. Here the sun lies warm all day long. When the garden is thus located the rows of vegetables and flowers should run north and south. Thus placed, the plants receive the sun’s rays all the morning on the eastern side, and all the afternoon on the western side. One ought not to have any lopsided plants with such an arrangement.

Suppose the garden faces southeast. In this case the western sun is out of the problem. In order to get the best distribution of sunlight run the rows northwest and southeast.

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Trimming the Hedge

Trimming the hedge is one of those jobs I look forward too. Unfortunately today was going to be the last time that I get to prune this particular hedge. This particular hedge has been one of my little projects this year because it looked to short and scrappy and provided a minimal amount of privacy.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time taking care of it as I wanted it to fill out as fast as possible. Since January it has grown so much and I am now proud to say it’s looking so beautiful.

The trim today made the hedge look so impressive, even one of the neighbours complimented me on how good it looked. That gave be a real buzz, I can’t wait to see the owners face. The hedge makes the front of the house look so inviting.

I am sure the owner will be overwhelmed to see the rest of her plants flourishing. The Bouganvillea is full of leaves which is in flower and the Lemon tree has doubled in size and is bearing fruit.

I hope the next person that moves in will care for the plants as much as I have and will have the opportunity to eat some nice lemons.

New alien plants database for Europe

Alien plants in Europe are taking hold and growing in numbers every year, and new database to help identify them has been created.

The Europe Aliens website isn’t about little green men from mars, but instead its a serious attempt to catalogue alien species to allow Europe wide control mechanisms to be put into place.

The threat to biodiversity is the reason for this, too many alien plants in Europe means that many endemic species are struggling to survive and thus altering the entire ecological balance.

This new database also makes it really easy to spot which particular variety of plant has made itself at home in any particular area, some aren’t quite so dangerous, while others can be devastating.