Home Hyped

Winter is the saddest time of the year for anyone who loves landscaping and garden design: the flowers are still waiting to be born, the snow or frost is still settled on the ground, and the garden is bare from top to bottom. Add to this the gray of winter, and it can be depressing indeed to wait for spring. However, if you are excited about spring, then you can still get your garden ready with or without groundhog day just coming around the corner. As soon as you see that your garden is coming alive, and that the frost is melting away, then you can start preparing it for spring.

The first step is to rake your garden. Raking will remove any leaves or twigs that might be stuck in the ground from last autumn, and it can take away any debris that is left over from winter. Raking will also clearly show you how healthy your lawn is, if it was damaged by the winter frost, and if you may need to buy new soil in order to prepare your landscaping ideas for the plants or flowers that you want to grow.

You will also need to aerate the soil. Aerating allows you to loosen the soil, and thereby let water, fertilizer, and air in. By aerating the soil you give your plants a greater chance of being healthy and absorbing nutrients. Aerating is especially important if you use your soil throughout the year. There are many ways for you to aerate the soil; in fact, there are now power aerators available that take away the effort of manually removing plugs of sod from your soil.

As soon as you have aerated your soil, it is time to top dress your lawn. That is, you need to spread peat moss over your lawn by scraping a thin layer of it over the soil with a rake. The process of top dressing actually puts your lawn in the best condition to receive plants ? in fact, peat moss will strengthen your grass, so that it will live throughout the year without you having to worry about diseases or weeds. Top dressing also reduces the amount that you need to water or fertilizer your grass.

Weeding is not the best job in the world, but if you do it well, you can help your plants grow better in the future. The best time to start weeding is early, before the planting season begins. You need to go after those nasty weeds before they even get the chance to crowd out your plants, so use a weeder, or a tool that will not tire out your fingers. You can start by taking out weeds with broad leaves, such as dandelions; go for tools that will allow you to take out even the weed?s roots with the littlest effort possible on your part.

Thanks to diseases or even to animal urine, most lawns and grassy gardens have bare patches that can make the entire yard or landscaping area look bare. One way to improve this situation is to repair your lawn in the early spring, when temperatures are low enough to allow grass to grow properly. You will need to clear out the patch, aerate the soil, and then sprinkle seeds. Fertilize this area, keep it moist, and then treat it as you would the rest of your lawn as soon as the new grass sprouts.

Most importantly, start tuning up your gardening tools. After months of being left in your garden shed, your gardening tools might be blunt, or you might need new tools to replace them. Make sure that the garden tools that you will be using are in top working condition, so that you can have great gardening all spring long. Soon, you will have a great garden that will chase all your winter blues away.

Tags: getting ready for spring | getting ready for spring | spring preparations | spring preparations | top dressing | landscaping | landscaping | gardening | gardening | landscape | landscape | lawn care | lawn care | aeration | aeration | weeding | weeding | garden | lawn

del.icio.us Digg Furl Reddit

This entry was posted on Friday, July 10th, 2009 at 9:18 pm and is filed under Home furniture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.