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A friend reminded me of this easy gardening tip – don’t plant too much! It is amazing how many flowers you can get in a space of even two feet by ten feet. Although growing flowers actually does not require a lot of work, you will still need to weed and prune. You are planting flowers to enjoy and to make your surroundings more beautiful, so why plant so much that you become stressed out? Or get behind and end up with a weedy mess?

If you start small, you will enjoy your early gardening experiences more. It will be easy to keep up and have a small, appealing flower bed that makes your whole yard look better. After you have some experience under your belt, you can choose if you want to plant more the following year, or stick to what you already have.

You don’t have to plant all your flowers together, although that does make them easier to water. Some gardeners prefer the flexibility of potted plants. If you want a change in your garden, just move the pots around! Pots also make it easy to adjust the amount of sunlight your flowers are getting at different times of the growing season. And if your home is in an area that experiences cold winters, potted plants are easy to bring indoors when the weather starts getting colder.

A mass of flowers does make a bigger impression than if your plants are scattered all. So even if you don’t want to put all your flowers in one place, you can get the most “bang for your buck” by creating a group of flowers that complement each other in a single location. One of the most impressive sights I ever saw was a whole bank of day lilies on a sunny slope on the side of a country road. In springtime, a whole row of forsythia bushes makes a flaming announcement that spring is on its way, even before the leaves come out.

My mother has a raised garden for cutting flowers and herbs for the kitchen. A “raised garden” sounds very technical, but it is simply raising up the level of the garden by putting soil in a “box” made of boards or bricks. My mother’s raised garden is about knee high. It is easier to care for the plants in a raised garden because you don’t have to bend over as far to reach them. Also, it is easier to concentrate the compost or fertilizer, because it stays in the raised garden rather than leaching out into the adjacent areas. Usually you can put more plants into a raised garden, because you are able to give them better care.

Whether you decide to have a border, potted plants, or a raised garden, start off easy and you will enjoy your garden all through the summer.

There are two approaches that you can take when it comes to gardening. The first is to decide what you want to grow, and then give each plant what it needs to grow. This is gardening the hard way. Each plant requires a certain amount of sunlight, rain, temperature range, and type of soil. Some plants must go through a frost period each year to flower, other plants will be killed by the slightest frost. If the location of your garden is not friendly to the type of plants that you want to grow, you will have to do more work to take care of them.

The second approach to gardening is to take a close look at the micro environment of your garden. Then choose plants that naturally grow well in that kind of environment.This is gardening the easy way, since you will have a minimal amount of work to do to take care of your garden.

What is “micro environment”? Micro environment is the amount of sun, rain, temperature and soil in your own particular location, as compared to the region where you live. For example if you live in a cold northern location, but your garden is sunny and has a southern exposure, you can grow plants that as suitable for a slightly milder climate.

If your garden has many trees, you would want to choose plants that do well in the shade. Another good choice is bulbs that bloom and complete most of their growth before the leaves get to be too thick on the trees.

If your soil stays wet for a long time after it rains, plants that are natural to wet lands or are found near rivers and streams will do well.

A little research before you plant your garden will save you countless hours of work later on.

How can you find out what plants are easy to grow? Look around your neighborhood to see what kind of plants grow wild. Ask your neighbors or your local plant nursery about which plants are easiest to grow or do the best in your area. Or look up the information in a book or website that provides information about specific plants.

Above all, don’t forget to have fun as you plan and prepare your garden!

Now that winter has is coming to the northern hemisphere, we sit peacefully indoors and dreamily think of gardens past.

As a child, the progress of spring was measured by the flowers, which appeared in succession as the days grew longer and warmer. First were the snow drops, which sometimes emerged into a frosty world. Small white flowers, they actually seemed to be more associated with the end of winter than the beginning of spring.

Hyacinths were next, large fragrant flowers in pink, blue or white. The smell of hyacinths mixed with the smell of mud meant that the ground was thawing, and the warmth of spring really was close at hand.

Daffodils meant that the weather was warming. Their light stems meant the flowers moved in a lively way in the spring winds. Although double daffodils have been developed, I still prefer the simple beauty of the old fashioned yellow or creamy colored flowers.

Daffodils might occasionally suffer from a late snowstorm, but by the time the tulips arrived, warm weather was truly in full swing. The tulips came in a fantastic variety of colors, the more riotous, the better. Some people prefer the solid blocks of color found in formal gardens, but I fondly remember the random mix of colors we had in our garden.

The tulips lasted a long time, but they did not stand up well in hot temperatures. If summer came early, the tulips did not last as long as they did in cooler weather. The irises came with the warmth of summer, and were the last bulbs in the spring parade. We had both bearded iris and Japanese iris. Although the bearded iris were larger and flashier, I loved the slim elegance of the Japanese iris.

Even today, when the winter begins to fade, I long to see the spring flowers. Even more than the growing brightness of the sun, they promised that the long cold darkness of the winter would not destroy the promise of new life.