Garden Design, Garden Makeover, Garden Coach
Last month I covered the basics of planning your wildlife garden: Water. Food. Shelter. Don't use pesticides. Do plant some natives (NatureScapeBC.ca is a great resource)--here's a short list of natives for various garden sites. Include a wide variety of plants--flowers, deciduous and evergreen shrubs, ornamental grasses, but enough of all to actually make a statement.... Continue Reading →
It seems a lot of people and/or landscapers are under the misapprehension that when it comes to soil, more is better. This is not always the case. This volcano of soil is doing a couple of bad things to this poor rhodo. Firstly, stems and trunks should never be buried like this. You'll see more of... Continue Reading →
"If You Build It They Will Come" First of all, why should you bother with a "wildlife garden"? Providing habitat for native critters will not only benefit them, but you as well. The more diversity you have in your garden the more you'll appreciate it and get out into it. Which as you know from... Continue Reading →
Rain Gardens--Part 1 I've been reading up on Rain Gardens--timely, in view of the amount of rain we've had here in coastal BC the last two days! A Rain Garden is a planted area designed to collect and gradually discharge storm water back into the ground. The areas from which storm water is collected include... Continue Reading →
Fall Clean up--What not to do. It's pretty late to be talking about fall clean up, but today it's still sunny, and pretty cold for coastal BC (-1 right now), and it's Sunday. So there might be a feeling that it's now or never to clean up the garden. Make it "never"--or at least make... Continue Reading →
I used to think the concept of having a dry river bed in your yard was stupid, artificial, a waste of good planting space, pretentious, and lot of other adjectives I don't have to mention. But having had my vision expanded and exposed to lots more interesting features recently, I'm increasingly a fan. Of well... Continue Reading →
Mostly we hate bugs. Unless they're Pixar bugs. We don't want ants in the house (never mind cockroaches!) Spiders are just plain awful, and beetles look intimidating. But in fact, none of them are bad for the garden. So here are a few (of the many) bugs that we can happily live with. Spitbug Inside... Continue Reading →
The pictures of turf on the package of grass fertilizer is ultra-high maintenance, and unless you're a golf-turf manager, you'll never achieve it. It needs watering, weeding, fertilizing, liming; top-dressing with compost, overseeding; receives lots of harmful chemicals to weed-and-feed (golf course turf isn't subject to the same restrictions as homeowners), and needs a team... Continue Reading →
What's your soil like? Here are some of the possibilities: Clay-ish: rich in nutrients, but very fine particles, so it clumps together so much that there's no air spaces between particles. Doesn't drain very well. Sandy-ish: almost no nutrients, but very large particles, so drains very well. So well in fact it's hard to keep... Continue Reading →
Real Life Garden Solutions 