Controlling Pests in your Garden

Cultivating the garden of your dreams is often side-railed the first morning you step out to admire your garden and notice small, slimy, scaly, crawly things all over your plants. Although this can send any backyard gardener into a tizzy, it is important not to overreact.

Keep in mind that not every insect is a pest. Quite the contrary, actually. Most insects are quite beneficial to a garden. Some insects work to pollinate your garden, while others serve to eliminate possible destructive pests from taking over.  Thus, the first order of business is not to panic and kill every bug you see! Do your homework and determine which bugs are beneficial (ladybugs and preying mantises, for example) and which ones are out to dine on your garden.

The 9 Basic Rules of Peony Care

Rules of Peony Care

1)The first rule of peony care is that established Peony plants  should be fed in early spring and perhaps again half way through their growing season.

2)The second rule of peony care is that  established peonies should be treated with a moderate amount of a complete fertilizer, Apply fertilizer to the soil around each peony clump before the new pink shoots emerge in early spring  Keep the fertilizer off the roots, stems and leaves as it may burn the plant .I Apply miracle grow to my peonies twice a year when I apply it to the rest of my perennial flower beds first when the flower buds are only two or three inches tall and still pink in color and . Repeat the process once or twice during the growing season and they appear to thrive.

Reclaiming Garden Privacy

Garden privacy you don’t miss it till its gone, to steal a couple of lines from counting crows song
“Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you got till it’s gone
They paved paradise and put up a parkin’ lot”

Well it wasn’t a parking lot that stole our garden privacy  I think my family and the rest of our “original neighbors” on our street would of preferred a parking lot, to the new sub division that was thrown up on some spare ground behind our houses the summer before last, robbing us of our backyard garden privacy stealing away our garden sanctuaries .