A hillside vegetable garden can even be threaded and terraced and there is also place to have streams in the form of waterfalls as well as place to plant some of nature’s most outstanding plant forms. You can also include benches, bridges as well as belvedere that make a hillside vegetable garden very interesting.

Hill Side Vegetable Gardening - Not An Easy Task

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  With Pruning, Timing Is Everything
  It’s a good time to prune many dormant trees and shrubs. However, knowing exactly how, what and when to prune can be bewildering.
  
  
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  Garden Calendar
  A look at upcoming gardening events.
  
  
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  A Stalk On The Wild Side
  Cherry bombs, the exploding kind, must have been named after cherry tomatoes, the edible kind, which burst in your mouth with a charge of candy-sweet juices. Pop one in and another must follow, whether…
  
  
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  Garden Book: ‘Life In The Soil’
  If the earth moves you, then this book is where you’ll get all the best dirt on what lives, what dies and how everything in the soil is connected by an ever-expanding web of life.
  
  

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Raised Bed Vegetable Gardening - Economical Construction

Raised beds are not necessarily expensive to build because the frames can be built from rough cut or even used lumber. The boards can be painted or stained with a non toxic preservative.

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  An Element Of Surprise For Your Salad
  My delight in growing odd edibles has led me down some strange roads, at times wild and exotic, at other times so homely I feel almost foolish to have trod them. This year’s experiment with a leafy green…
  
  
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  Down Under, Gardening Isn’t Lost In Translation
  Foreign travel is said to broaden one’s horizons, but Australia turns it around backward. Let’s start with the sun. There it still rises in the east and sets in the west, but it traverses the northern…
  
  
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  Considering Different Kind Grasses
  How your lawn looks is an important part of your home’s landscape. Just about virtually everyone has a yard, no matter how small or large. You may find that your lawn is offset by a enormousporch…
  
  
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  Garden Book: ‘Life In The Soil’
  If the earth moves you, then this book is where you’ll get all the best dirt on what lives, what dies and how everything in the soil is connected by an ever-expanding web of life.
  
  
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  Use Light Arms On Pests Before Turning To Heavy Artillery
  One of the most controversial balancing acts facing gardeners is the use of pesticides.
  
  

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Before you run out to the store to purchase a complete fertilizer, or, one that contains all three, it is important to understand why your lawn’s livelihood depends on it.

Nitrogen- This is possibly the most important element your lawn needs. It makes the grass grow and gives it its green color. It will also allow for more density, thick shoots, and sturdy growth, thus creating an environment that will naturally fight off pests and bugs.

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  Activities To Light Up The Season
  Educational and recreational opportunities abound during the holiday season. Among the events to sample:
  
  
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  The Cool Truth About October: Shorter Days, Longer Harvests
  When T.S. Eliot wrote "April is the cruelest month," he might have added, "October is seriously underrated."
  
  
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  The Payoff Is Spears For Years
  Nothing is forever, even a good bed of asparagus. But as garden investments go, this one pays off richly for decades to come. Establishing a productive bed takes some work, and some patience as well, because…
  
  

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Fall Vegetable Gardening - Timing

Timing is truly everything when it comes to fall vegetable gardening, since you will want to beat the first hard frost to ensure that you get a good, healthy crop. Some plants don’t even survive the first fall frosts, so they would probably not be good choices for your fall vegetable gardening efforts. To find out what the frost calendar is for your area, you can contact your local extension office. They can give you the best ideas of dates to plant for fall vegetable gardening, as well as a list of potential crops that will work well this time of year. Some plants actually like the shorter days and cooler temperatures of the autumn months, and will reward you with sweeter tasting veggies than you would enjoy in the hotter summer harvest.

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  Activities To Light Up The Season
  Educational and recreational opportunities abound during the holiday season. Among the events to sample:
  
  
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  The Future Of Your Lawn Is Now: Tending Grass In The Fall
  When managed properly, a lawn can slow rainwater, allowing it to percolate into the soil and reduce sediment and other runoff into rivers and streams. Healthy lawns control dust, dissipate heat and noise,…
  
  
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  A Gardeners Nightmare
  Some people are blessed with green fingers. Others are blessed with a talent for murdering plants in cold blood, no matter how hard they attempt to nurture & tend. I fall into the second category,…
  
  
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  Killdeer: Farmers’ Little Helpers
  Some birds are so much a part of farm life they’re considered co-workers. A fortunate barn has barn owls to feast on grain-nibbling mice. Or barn swallows, patrolling for mosquitoes. In spring, killdeer,…
  
  
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  Green Gardening: Use A Lot Of Foam Pipe Insulation When Replanting Cactus
  Garden expert Ann Lovejoy explains how to transplant a large cactus, and offers tips on the best way to force bulbs for holiday blooms.
  
  

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All organic matter eventually decomposes. Composting speeds the process by providing an ideal environment for bacteria and other decomposing microorganisms. The final product, humus or compost, looks and feels like fertile garden soil. This dark, crumbly, earthy smelling stuff works wonders on all kinds of soil and provides vital nutrients to help plants grow and look better. Decomposing organisms consist of bacteria, fungi, and larger organisms such as worms, sow bugs, nematodes, and numerous others.

Decomposing organisms need four key elements to thrive: nitrogen, carbon, moisture, and oxygen. For best results, mix materials high in nitrogen (such as clover, fresh grass clippings, and livestock manure) and those high in carbon (such as dried leaves and twigs). If there is not a good supply of nitrogen-rich material, a handful of general lawn fertilizer will help the nitrogen-carbon ratio.

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  Lost On The Garden Path? Four Design Rules To Go By
  Good landscape design ideas can be subtle, bold or abstract. A professional designer can offer suggestions, but only homeowners know what will be interesting and comfortable for them.
  
  
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  Squirrel Proofing Your Bird Feeder
  Having a bird feeder is a great addition to almost any backyard, especially because of the beautiful birds that it can attract. The only downside to having a bird feeder is that other animals like birdseed…
  
  
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  Meet Our Experts
  Here is the public-appearance schedule Nov. 15-22 for members of our garden writing team.
  
  
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  Seedlings To Spare? Time To Share
  At the end of spring planting season I often think of the poem by Louise Bogan titled "Women," which begins, "Women have no wilderness in them, /They are provident instead." This comes…
  
  

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Years ago the tradition of garden clubs came into play in the societal world of the Deep South. Ladies would meet regularly at one of the member’s homes in the area and would have lunch or tea time while sipping tea and talking about their gardens and other aspects of life. These sophisticated ladies would wear their beautiful little spring and summer hats and dress to the hilt while spending an afternoon with others who shared their same interests.

Today, some of the same traditions are still holding up in the traditional Garden Clubs throughout the world. However, the dress code is becoming slacker in some areas. Garden clubs have lost their appeal among some of the young women of the day who normally would have been likely candidates for the older women to consider for membership of the exclusive garden clubs.

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  A Bit About Me
  Pete Calderwood from West Yorkshire won our October join prize - a beehive composter
  
  
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  Compost Summa Cum Laude
  If compost is the holy grail of organic gardening, what’s holier than thou? Sifted compost.
  
  
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  The Last Of Summer’s Bounty
  This time of year I’m like the women in Jean-Fran¿ois Millet’s painting "The Gleaners," bent over the mown fields in their kerchiefs and long skirts, gathering scraps of leftover…
  
  

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Searching For The Sun

The small varieties of tomatoes and peppers, can easily adapt to indoor vegetable gardening. They require a warm sunny window or artificial light to grow well indoors. These plants like full sun but you can make up for this to some degree by placing a reflective surface behind your plants. With lots of care and a little luck you can start harvesting tomatoes and peppers in approximately ten weeks from planting.

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  Unearthing Clay Soil’s Virtues
  A hero with feet of clay is one with hidden flaws, but if your garden has feet of clay its flaws are obvious. In spring, clay soil remains cold. Puddles refuse to drain. If you squeeze a handful of wet…
  
  
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  Many Materials Make Good Mulch, But Which Is For You?
  Mulch is practical — it holds moisture and controls weeds. It is also a design element that helps give your landscape a clean, unified look.
  
  
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  Lettuce’s Brief Spring Fling
  Flanders & Swann, the British musical duo, memorably summed up the season that will soon be upon us: "Spring. . . . Missed it last year. I was in the bathroom."
  
  
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  Bulbs Are Key To Low-Maintenance Color Year After Year
  Two of the most common things people ask for when designing their landscape are high color and low maintenance.
  
  

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Map Your Garden And Plan The Addition Of Plants

Plangarden is a wonderful vegetable gardening software that has drag and drop graphic interface that is able to show your vegetables as rows or even individual plants and there is also no problem encountered in starting up the program to map your garden and plan which vegetables need to be added. In addition, by using this vegetable gardening software, you are able to print out a visual representation of your entire garden plan in a few minutes, thus allowing you to spend more time out in your garden in a more productive manner.

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Latest Gardening News …

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  With Pruning, Timing Is Everything
  It’s a good time to prune many dormant trees and shrubs. However, knowing exactly how, what and when to prune can be bewildering.
  
  
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  The Grounded Gardener: If You’ve Grown A Fab New Plant, Dig In For A Time Of Testing
  Notice something odd in your garden? Has a seedling come up that looks different from its nearby parent? You may have a new plant sensation on your hands, says Master Gardener Marty Wingate
  
  
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  This Is Margo . . . And These Are Plants She Shouldn’t Eat
  My friend Margo, a black pug dog, loves to get out in the yard and run. She is usually a good girl. She sniffs everything, but she doesn’t chew on stems or sample leaves and bugs.
  
  
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  Speckled Over, These Greens Shine
  It has been a long time since lettuce just came in green. Now there are red ones, too, such as Merlot and Outredgeous, and they just keep getting redder at the tips. Some are even spangled with red spots….
  
  

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If you’re an adult over 30 then it is likely you remember when vegetable gardening was very much a necessity in some homes. It’s likely you had a grandparent or even a great-grandparent who you remember fondly for their gardening techniques and attention to detail in gardening.

Vegetable gardening has almost dissolved in many areas of the world. However, there is no reason to believe that planting a vegetable garden has to be a thing of days gone by. You can learn to plant a thriving garden and you can do it without too much effort in the learning process.

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  Spring Calendar Teems With Garden Parties
  Take advantage of a lecture, workshop, tour or other educational opportunity this spring.
  
  
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  Tidings Of Compost And Joy
  On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me . . . a truckload of well-aged horse manure.
  
  
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  Busy As A Bee: Sharing Space, With Caution
  Gardening can be a solitary activity, and pleasantly so. But on a recent sunny day, harvesting lavender, I found myself in the middle of a bustling marketplace. The blossoms were surrounded by butterflies,…
  
  
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  The Joy Of Savoy Cabbage
  For the life of me, I can’t figure it out. The produce bins aren’t piled high with Savoy cabbage, even though this is the perfect time of year to enjoy it. Granted, it has a more delicate leaf and therefore…
  
  

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The purposes of cultivation are three to get rid of weeds, and to stimulate growth by (1) letting air into the soil and freeing unavailable plant food, and (2) by conserving moisture.

Soil primarily had its beginning from rock together with animal and vegetable decay, if you can imagine long stretches or periods of time when great rock masses were crumbling and breaking up. Heat, water action, and friction were largely responsible for this. By friction here is meant the rubbing and grinding of rock mass against rock mass. Think of the huge rocks, a perfect chaos of them, bumping, scraping, settling against one another. What would be the result? Well, I am sure you all could work that out. This is what happened: bits of rock were worn off, a great deal of heat was produced, pieces of rock were pressed together to form new rock masses, some portions becoming dissolved in water. Why, I myself, almost feel the stress and strain of it all. Can you?

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  Strategies To Beat The Heat - And Drought - Of The Long, Scorching Summer
  What started as a cool spring in the Washington region has turned into a hot, dry summer.
  
  
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  Cutting Back Now To Bring Rich Growth Later
  The weather this spring has been a bit confusing for both people and plants. Here are some recommendations for what the plants need now:
  
  
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  For Local Apple Lovers, It’s Crunch Time
  It was a good apple year in England, California and especially Maine, where a sunny spring favored bee activity. Poland’s yield, on the other hand, was down because of cold spring weather. An Easter freeze…
  
  
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  In Fine Form - And Function
  Any healthy, well-tended vegetable garden is beautiful, but some are works of art, and the one at the Chateau de Villandry in France’s Loire Valley is considered the Mona Lisa of potagers. It forms only…
  
  
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  Tools To Make Life Easier In The Garden
  New gardening products are always hitting the market. Here are a few items that can make your time in the yard easier and more enjoyable. Some of the best are aimed at improving your personal comfort and…
  
  

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