A Checklist of Essential Gardening Tools for the Beginner

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A Checklist of Essential Gardening Tools for the Beginner

While experienced gardeners may be able to put garden tools to best use, it?s essential that beginning gardeners with fewer established gardening skills have the correct tool for every garden task they need to perform.

Here’s a list of tools most garden center and nursery experts recommend:

Two shovels: One should be a spade with a pointed tip and the other a flat-headed model. Both should have wooden handles at least four feet long.
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Creating Border Gardens

Creating Border Gardens

Creating a border garden is a wonderful way to improve the overall look of your yard in general, and create dividing lines between specific areas or sections. If for instance, you want to divide your front yard space from the back yard, you could put a border garden in that will look pretty and define the space, without taking up a lot of room or completely blocking the view.

Border gardens look particularly nice when placed around the outside edge of a lawn or yard area though. These small garden beds will define the border of your property, make it look much more appealing, and are usually less expensive than installing a full fledged fence. Plus the border gardens usually accent the yard instead of blocking it from view inside or out.

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Wintering for your Rose Garden: An Important Fall Routine

Wintering for your Rose Garden: An Important Fall Routine

Getting roses to over-winter successfully is no small feat if you live in a very cold climate. However, it can be done regardless of where you live, especially if you buy and plant very hardy rose varieties such as Explorer, Parkland and Buck roses. Many of the old fashioned roses will also do quite nicely?there?s a good reason they have been around as long as they have!

The trick to keep roses alive but dormant during the winter is to protect the bud graft from freezing or being damaged. You can do this by planting the bud union deeply when you first plant your roses. Then, after the last rose of summer has fallen from your plants, cut the canes back to the ground and remove all fallen leaves that have any trace of black spot or mildew and burn them.

The second is to add protection to a bud union that is above the ground by bringing in soil from another part of the garden and making a pyramid of soil around the plant to cover the canes after cutting the canes back to 12 to 18 inches above the ground. Called ?hilling? by most rose gardeners, this system works best when you spray the clipped canes with a lime-sulphur and dormant oil combination before you hill them up to defeat problems with fungi.
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