A century ago in the United States, many families raised a large crop of vegetables each year for their family’s consumption. Today, while rural family farming is on the decline, the small suburban gardener is becoming more common, with the tomato topping this list of favorite crops.
A hundred years ago, almost every American family grew some of their own produce at home. In rural America, farming families would grow almost all their vegetables, as well as raise livestock for their meat and dairy needs.
It is commonly thought that the winter is not the right time for planting. This may be so in cold climates, but not in the mild winters of a Mediterranean one, where the benefits of winter planting far outweigh the drawbacks.
In cold winter climates where the ground is either frozen or at best rock-hard, planting is unthinkable. This is not the case in the mild winters typical of the Mediterranean climates in Southern Europe, the Middle East, Southern California, or South West Australia. Yet despite the soil being soft and pliable enough to allow for planting, many home gardeners believe, mistakenly, that it is best to delay the planting and wait for the onset of spring.
Most home gardeners are unhappy about using poisons to control pests and disease in the garden. What they should know is that the use of pesticides is largely unnecessary in any case.
With the onset of spring in the Southern hemisphere, and the bursting into life of so many of your garden plants, many unwanted organisms also make an appearance and feed off your favourite flowers, roses and others. The main visitors at this time are aphids and fungi such as powdery mildew. At the first sign of trouble though, do you have to resort to spraying pesticides on the affected plants? Do you want to?
The need to save water in dry climate gardens, involves reducing the size of the lawn. This is best achieved by changing the way we approach garden design.
Water shortages in dry climates are forcing home gardeners and professional landscapers to reduce the area of the garden taken up by the lawn. The trouble is that nothing that can replace a lawn in the field in which a lawn works. Young children cannot play as safely on hard paving, you can’t really play soccer on wooden decking, and it’s hardly practical to lie down on a bed of ground cover plants, as one would on grass.
The use of a pre-emergent weed killer may be tempting, but in the small garden situation, an organic mulch is far safer and more beneficial to the garden as a whole.
As the winter in Mediterranean climates is also the rainy season, weeds can germinate and cover wider areas so rampantly, that the gardener is usually interested in preventing weeds or at least keeping them down before they spread, develop, and really start to cause problems.
Home gardeners in Mediterranean climates tend to forget that their plants need nutrients through the winter. Feeding in the autumn is probably the best time to ensure they receive what they need.
The tendency for many home gardeners is to think of the spring and summer as the principle feeding seasons for their plants. This may be true in cool, temperate climates, but much less so in Mediterranean and other regions that experience hot, dry summers, and mild wet winters.
Plumbago auriculata is one of the most useful landscaping shrubs available to the Mediterranean and dry climate gardener. It is often planted in the wrong place however, which gives this fine plant a bad name.
Plumbago auriculata, or Cape Plumbago, is a somewhat strange landscaping shrub. It has many fine qualities, not least its profuse blooming of sky blue flowers through most of the warm, growing season. For Mediterranean and dry climate gardeners in particular, its capacity to withstand drought, neglect and poor, alkaline soils makes it one of the most useful landscaping shrubs available. Yet it often induces negative reactions from home gardeners. Why is this?
The lawn’s appearance can be made or spoilt by the quality of the edge. Keeping a neat lawn edge is especially difficult in Mediterranean and other hot, dry, climates.
A scruffy, untidy lawn edge is one of the things that really frustrate the average home gardener. Most of us dream of having the neat, clean edge we see in fine public gardens and perhaps in some of our neighbor’s gardens as well. In cool, moist, summer climates, where grasses from seed are generally grown, there’s no great problem in cutting a straight edge with a half-moon spade a couple of times a year or so, and then maintaining that edge with garden shears or perhaps with a mechanical strimmer.
Many home gardeners in dry climates are reluctant to grow roses largely because of their high consumption of water. Here are some tips for having your roses and some water to spare as well.
Roses have traditionally been considered the “Queen of the Garden?. Despite the vast range of flowering plants available to the gardener, the rose at its best, is still unmatched for flower beauty and sometimes for delicious fragrance as well. Yet roses have been falling out of favor over the past decade or so, especially in dry climates, largely because of their relatively high consumption of water.
Roses can be such a magnificent part of the garden, yet the home gardener is too often disappointed with their performance. Correct procedures at planting, go a long way in ensuring decent results.
Roses have traditionally been considered virtually compulsory elements in the ornamental garden. Their star has waned somewhat in recent years, partly because of inadequate design knowledge with some home gardeners, but mainly due to poor horticultural practices that invariably result in disappointing performance and appearance from the roses. Incorrect planting procedures are often the primary cause of failure and disillusion with the “Queen of the Garden?, but carrying out five essential steps properly, can almost guarantee success and years of delight from the rose bushes.
