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    Garden Potpourri: Gardening Tips from the Easy-Growing Gardening Series: Easy-Growing Gardening, #12
    Garden Potpourri: Gardening Tips from the Easy-Growing Gardening Series: Easy-Growing Gardening, #12
    Garden Potpourri: Gardening Tips from the Easy-Growing Gardening Series: Easy-Growing Gardening, #12
    Ebook125 pages1 hour

    Garden Potpourri: Gardening Tips from the Easy-Growing Gardening Series: Easy-Growing Gardening, #12

    By Rosefiend Cordell

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    About this ebook

    Whether you are new to gardening or simply an experienced gardener who wants to learn more, Garden Potpourri is a good place to start. This book, a compendium of wisdom from the eleven books in the Easy-Growing Gardening series, is a quick read full of gems for the beginner gardener and more advanced students of the soil. From simple tips for starting seeds and preventing damping-off disease, to favorite roses, to principles of garden design, to organic soil practices, Garden Potpourri is full of ideas to teach you how to master the art of gardening. One-click to increase your gardening know-how today.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRosefiend Publishing
    Release dateAug 18, 2020
    ISBN9781953196323
    Garden Potpourri: Gardening Tips from the Easy-Growing Gardening Series: Easy-Growing Gardening, #12
    Author

    Rosefiend Cordell

    This is the gardening pen name for Melinda R. Cordell. Former city horticulturist, rose garden potentate, greenhouse manager, perennials factotum, landscape designer, and small-time naturalist. I've been working in horticulture in one way or another since 1989. These days I write gardening books because my body makes cartoon noises when I move, and I really like air-conditioning. Good times!

    Read more from Rosefiend Cordell

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      Book preview

      Garden Potpourri - Rosefiend Cordell

      The Easy-Growing Gardening Series

      ––––––––

      Don’t Throw in the Trowel: Vegetable Gardening Month by Month

      Rose to the Occasion: An Easy-Growing Guide to Rose Gardening

      If You’re a Tomato, I’ll Ketchup With You: Tomato Gardening Tips and Tricks

      Perennial Classics: Planting and Growing Great Perennial Gardens

      Petal to the Metal: Growing Gorgeous Houseplants

      Gardening Month by Month: Tips for Great Flowers, Vegetables, & Houseplants

      Leave Me A Lawn: Lawn Care for Tired Gardeners

      Japanese Beetles and Grubs: Trap, Spray, Control Them

      Stay Grounded: Soil Building for Sustainable Gardens

      Genius Gardening Hacks: Tips and Fixes for the Creative Gardener

      Design of the Times: How to Plan Glorious Landscapes and Gardens

      From Don’t Throw in the Trowel: Vegetable Gardening Month by Month.

      At last, help for home food gardeners. The simple, month-by-month layout of Don't Throw in the Trowel will help gardeners grow a bounty of vegetables, fruits, and herbs. Grow luscious tomatoes, zucchini, cucumbers, melons, and more, and enjoy all the fresh produce (and give the surplus to family and friends) that your garden grows using these easy tips. Don't Throw in the Trowel: A Month-by-Month Vegetable Gardening Guide is a fun read for every locavore who wants to cart tomatoes out of the garden by the wagonful.

      Even if you've never been a farmer or a gardener before, this vegetable gardening book covers everything you need to know to get started. Here you can find specific information about starting seeds, transplanting, mulching, organic fertilizers, dealing with pest and disease problems, compost, and of course, information about different vegetables and helpful advice on how to grow them. You can also find information about square foot gardening, beneficial insects (and insect pests), easy ways to keep weeds down, and ways to extent the growing season into the winter months using cold frames and floating row covers.

      What's more, the methods used in this book are those to save time (and your poor back and joints). Gardening can hurt sometimes – as the author can attest after having been felled by a bad back during her horticulturing days. This book is full of ways to keep you from ending up the way she did. Many organic methods actually help make gardening easier. For instance, putting down a thick layer of mulch early in the year helps you keep weeds down, reduce watering, add organic matter to the soil, and keep the plants cool in the summer heat. Grow heirloom vegetables for a reliable, colorful crop – and you can keep using the seeds from these plants years after year.

      Most of all, this book also leads you on a month-by-month tour of the vegetable garden, so you can keep up with what needs to be done this month – and look ahead so you can be ready for next month.

      How to Start Your Seeds

      I got my seeds a month ago. They aren’t doing much in the bag, and it’s a little early to plant, but I just like to take them out and look at them. My daughter takes the bean seeds and goes around the house shaking them like maracas. I like to imagine what the garden might yield, though the little pessimist that lives in my mind keeps bringing to my daydreams images of blight and drought and cats leaving smelly presents in the mulch. And yet hope spring eternal.

      Before you start your seeds, before you haul out the pots and the potting soil, take a moment to invest in a notebook. This notebook will be your best buddy through the whole process, recording things like seed-sowing dates, how well each batch of seeds germinated, seeding methods that worked (or didn’t), and things you plan to do differently next year. If you already have a gardening notebook, use that. Notebooks are so handy.

      Then, get out a calendar and look at the seed packet or the catalog and find out how long it takes from the time you plant the seed until the day you can put the plant in the ground. Then look at the calendar and count backward from your last frost date. That will be the date when you should plant those particular seeds, more or less.

      Seed germination rates and seedling growth will vary from greenhouse to greenhouse. Some greenhouses have more light or warmth, while others don’t. This will affect how soon your plants will be ready to go in spring. Sometimes the plants aren’t ready to plant in May simply because you didn’t get the seeds in early enough. By keeping track of your planting dates, you can readjust the seed to finished product time next year.

      To start seedling flats, I use a sterile, seed-starting soilless mix that’s high in vermiculite – seeding mixes tend to be a light and fluffy compared to regular potting soils – and get a bunch of trays (or flats). I prefer to use those black trays you see in greenhouses, the ones holding the six-packs or four-packs of flowers – but they are pricey! Clay pots for starting seeds require more soil than necessary, especially if you’re going to end up transplanting the young plants into a different pot. Egg cartons are cheap and easy. Peat tablets (the ones that expand when you add water to them) are neat. If any of these methods work for you, then go for it. The rules you should follow are the rules that work best for you.

      In my opinion, trays are the best for an operation where you need lots of plants and you need to work fast with them. Also, trays are easy to wash and store.

      So, fill the tray about half-full of soilless mix and tamp it down to make a flat surface for the seeds. I used a small board, cut to fit the inside of the tray, to tamp the soil. If you don’t have a board, your hands work fine.

      Sowing seeds both large and small

      Scatter large seeds across the top and cover them with soil. The smallest seeds can be the cheapest, but they can also be tricky to handle. Alyssum, which has small, flat seeds, will blow away if you sneeze.

      When I worked at the greenhouse with George Ferbert, he showed me a little trick when seeding flats: he’d add a little bit of sugar to the seeds before he sowed them. The sugar shows up against the black dirt so you can see where the seeds land. Lobelia seeds, however, are tinier than even the sugar crystals. When I add a little sugar to the cup of seeds to see where they hit, the sugar crystals stick out of the Lobelia seeds like boulders in sand.

      But if you mix the tiny seeds with a half-teaspoon of sugar, that helps the seeds scatter out, it keeps them from clumping too

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