Your back yard garden can be a plentiful source of luscious fruits and nutritious vegetables. There’s nothing better than eating fresh veggies in your salad, and you can pick more than you need and store extra using a food sealer to keep it fresh for longer. In this article you can learn a lot of tips when it comes to horticulture, and how to be successful at it.

Bees are great for your garden as they promote pollination. Some bees are destructive, as is the case with carpenter bees that bore into wood to make their nests. Generally speaking, bees help your garden so it’s best if you leave them alone.

Plant a variety of annuals, biennials and perennials to keep your flower beds bright. Fast growing biennials and annuals can enliven a flower bed while letting you change up the look each season and year. They can be used to fill in gaps in your garden between the perennials or shrubs so your garden looks fuller. Notable collections include sunflower, marigold, hollyhock, rudbeckia, cosmos, and petunia.

Clay Soil

Clay soil can be very hard to work with, and you will often find that it sticks to the shovel. To make digging clay soil easier, try applying a light coating of wax, either car wax or floor wax, and then buff off and commence digging. By waxing the shovel head, the clay will not be able to adhere to the surface.

Plant cool-weather edibles in the fall. A hollowed out pumpkin can become a festive container for kale and lettuce. After cutting an opening and removing the meat and seeds from inside the pumpkin, use Wilt-Pruf, sprayed throughout the inside and cut edges, and prevent rot from occurring. Once you’ve done that, you can plant!

Try using chicken tractors to fertilize your garden area. A chicken tractor consists of a chicken coop that can move, but is sheltered with an existing open floor. The chickens can eat plant matter and insects, then the fertilizer is dropped right on the ground. When finished with one section, the tractor can be moved a bit to fertilize the next area in your garden.

All soil is not the same. You need to check the soil to make sure it’s the best for what you’re planting. Have a soil report done. It is cost effective and you can make necessary adjustments, based on the report, to your soil so it is correctly enriched to encourage plant growth. It is worth having this information so that crops do not get ruined. Most Cooperative Extension offices provide this service.

Try to grow some wheat or cat grass around your cat’s favorite plants. You could also place something that will cause your cat to go away from your plants, such as citrus peels or mothballs.

If you would like to have flowers in your garden that last through the spring and summer seasons, plant bulbs. Bulbs are generally very simple to grow and hearty, as well; they will continue to grow for years. Specific types of bulbs usually bloom at specific times of the season, so if you make appropriate selections, you can be rewarded with blooms from the early part of spring to the later part of summer.

Your vegetable garden should get at least six hours of sun daily. Many veggies require this amount to properly grow at a faster pace. Some flowers also require direct sunlight for a portion of each day.

Planting Calendar

Keep track of your garden by creating and maintaining a planting calendar. A calendar of this nature helps tell you what to plant when each seasons comes. It can prepare you in advance so you know what to purchase and when. You can make a planting calendar using a computer program, or with paper.

Find some plants that will give you a higher yield. Traditional strains are often out-performed by hybrids that have been bred for cold tolerance or disease resistance.

Do you like mint, but not how they ruin your garden? Keep the growth under control by growing them in a large gardening pot instead. You can then plant the container down in the ground if you like, but the walls of the container will hold the roots captive, and keep the plant from taking over your garden!

Beneficial Bugs

When horticulture, avoid the use of strong broad-spectrum pesticides. Broad-spectrum pesticides will kill insects that are helpful to your garden as well as the harmful ones. Beneficial bugs usually have more sensitivity towards pesticides than bad ones. Therefore, if the number of beneficial bugs drops, the problem with pests can get bigger. This might result in you having to use even more pesticides to get rid of the pests.

As stated in the beginning of the article, horticulture is a great way to grow fresh and delicious fruits and vegetables right in your own backyard. When you can include the fruits of your labor in your meals, you’ll be proud and satisfied. Keep the tips you just read in mind when planting those seeds.

Plant heather to attract beneficial insects. Bees will go straight for these plants in the spring. Since a heather bed is normally left undisturbed, ground beetles, spiders and other beneficial insects tend to live inside it. Keeping this is mind, you need to wear gloves when you prune your heather!