Unique Tips for Your Spring Gardening

1. Plan! You should plan out what you want to do, where you want to plant, what you want to plant, and how much you are looking to spend. Once unique aspect that you can plan for is "what do you already have around the house that you can use in the garden?" Have a lot of rocks? Use them as a border! Have an old beat-up hose? Stick some holes in it and use it as a leaking hose! You just have to use your imagination!

2. Write it down! When I began my spring gardening, I took out a piece of paper and made a sketch of my house plan. From there I decided where I wanted to have a garden space and what type of plants I wanted there. This gives me an idea of what it would look like and more importantly how much it will cost me. Another good reason for making a sketch is that you can make a schedule of how long it will take and lets you be able to break up your time by the beds that you are planning for, which leads me to my next topic:

3. Plan your Time! Decide how much time you can spend on your garden, then break it up by the hour, or the day, or the weekend. My wife and I wanted to created two beds right outside our back door, add some flowers to our front yard, and plant two new trees. We figured that we could get this done in three days, and we did because we planned well.

4. Working the Dirt! Now that you have everything planned out and sketched, and you have your shovel in your hand ready to go, you need to start tilling up the dirt. This is pretty simple. What you need to do is put your shovel into the dirt, then dig down and pick it up and flip it over. Just do this for now, covering the entire bed that you are working on. The bigger the shovel the quicker this can get done!

5. Breaking it Up! Once you have turned the dirt now it is time to break it up so that it is manageable for planting. Take your shovel, whether it is big or small, and break up the big clumps of dirt that you just turned over. This will make the soil more manageable for when it comes time to plant. Extra tip: you might want to add some fertilizer into the dirt that you are breaking up so that the plants get more nutrients and grow better and quicker!

6. Planting! Now you want to plant your plants in your newly turned up bed. First take your smaller shovel and dig a hole in the ground. Then you want to take some potting soil, you can get a big bag of it at your local gardening store, and add a handful to the hole you just dug up. Then take your plant out of the container that it came in and move your fingers through the dirt to help loosen the roots, and place it in the ground. Next add the soil around the plant making it nice and even around your new flower. Follow this step with all of the plants that you want to plant in this bed.

7. Border! Once you have all of your flowers in the ground, you may want to create a border for your bed. You can do this with bricks or rocks or any other material that will create a nice border for your bed. Dig a small trench around the bed, and place your bordering materials, in my case rocks, in this trench. I had a rock structure in my back yard that I wanted to take down, so I decided to reuse the rocks as the border for my beds! Then put some of the dirt that you dug up back around the rocks so that they hold into place. Get creative at this point. A lot of people just add the plastic or tin lining around their beds, and this just looks so boring! Add some FLARE to your garden; find a unique border to use!

8. Water! Finally you want to water your garden. It is important to water your garden so that it gets enough nutrients to let the flowers and plants grow. You should probably water your garden every other day unless it is raining that day.

I hope that these steps will help you to create a more tranquil, lush, and unique garden for this spring season and spring seasons to come! Remember to be creative, not only in just the border, but remember that you may have some potted plants around the house, and all it takes is a little bit of paint to change those ugly, old, boring, orange clay pots into a fun, fantastic, colorful addition to your garden!