Gardening Guides
Free articles that give you the know-how to be your own gardener. New articles added often. Some of these gardening and design tips can apply to any location. Bookmark this page and visit it frequently.
Four weeks to a New Garden
In just four weekends you can go from bare soil or grass to a garden. Just follow this step-by-step process.
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Design your Garden with Permaculture Principles
It seems there are two big reasons people are reluctant to do more with
their yards: money and time. But you can save a lot of both if you take a little time to
consider how your yard fits into the environment around it - and you can let Mother Nature
do some of your gardening for you.
The fancy word for thinking about and organizing intelligent ecological design is "permaculture,"
coined in the late 1970s. It was first intended as an alternative to destructive industrial
agriculture, but its principles make absolute sense for the home gardener as well.
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Monsoon Planting in the Desert Southwest
Three Sisters Gardens should be ready by monsoon rains. The three sisters
- corn beans and squash - were the survival foods of the native peoples of Sonora. By early
July, your three sisters garden pits should be dug and filled with good compost, seeds should
be in the ground waiting for the rains, and you should have straw ready to cover the soil once
the seeds have sprouted.
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Rainwater Harvesting
Rainwater harvesting is the principle of collecting and using precipitation from a catchments
surface by gathering and storing rainwater.
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Lawn and Garden Care From Your Kitchen
Our winter rains brought lots of beautiful wild flowers, blooming cactus and
Palo Verde trees and the wicked weeds. While some people may be tempted by the seemingly simple
solution, herbicides, their environmental effects outweigh any benefit. Herbicides are chemicals
used to kill weeds in agriculture as well as household gardens. Herbicides are toxic to most mammals
(that means you, me, your dog, and your kids) as well as to the beneficial insects that you want to
encourage in your garden to keep away harmful pests.
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Pets and Poisonous Plants, Fruits and Veggies
Many of these plants are in households now or will be sometime in the future. Just
because they are in this list doesn't mean you should get rid of them. Most of these plants must be
ingested to cause problems, but as we all know our pets behavior can be unpredictable. Whether you
actually remove these plants from your home and yard are up to you, but watch your pets around them.
Be especially diligent about cleaning up any plant debris like fallen leaves, flowers or trimmings.
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Proper Watering
We all need to make sure we are watering our plants, trees and vegetables properly and
responsibly. I venture to say that some of you water too often and at the wrong time of day. So here are the
basic watering rules. Water for longer periods with a slower flow (water seeps in deeper) and less frequently.
But you didn't think it would be that simple did you?
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