losing my gardening virginity!

all_smilz

Hi,

I have a small garden maybe 18 by 24feet..... Its mainly grass and weeds at the moment..... its south facing and gets a lot of light. I have no idea what the soil composition is, but it doesnt get all puddley when it has been raining for weeks and i live on top of a small hill in the city.....

Basically i am looking to plant a few shrubs and flowers at the sides and in the bottom corners and maybe eventually put in a wee patio that i put potted plants on....
Here are the flowers i really like

lobelia, lupins, ROSES (Those old sweet smelling traditional cabbage ones), lavendar, sweet william, tulips, hydrangeas, lillies, sweet peas- basically pretty and traditional.

I dont have a LOAD of time to do gardening when i work so i want hardy and easy to care for plants, preferably that i can sow/plant now....

also, i have a few lavendar in the front and a small rose bush.... i planted loads of bulbs last year but nothing grew only weeds... i am considering getting some mulch and putting it down but will bulbs grow up through it? should i pot and grow things seperately and plant them and THEN mulch over them to keep the weeds down? I am sorry for all the dumb questions..... all advice appreciated!

The Sweeper

First of all, you'll have to control the weeds and grass. You can use a line trimmer (also called a whipper snipper or a strimmer), which is a hand-held device with a very long handle, the end of which is a rapidly rotating disc that feeds out plastic wire that spins quickly and cuts everything down.

If you cut everything back to ground level, then rake all of the cut pieces into a large heap - this can be the start of your compost heap. That's what I'd do first, just to get a proper idea of the size and shape of your garden, which will look much different when you've cleared the growth.

The next step is to investigate the soil type. Pick an innocuous spot, and try digging a hole. How difficult you find it will be an indication of just how much work your garden is going to be. If your soil is heavy, wet and sticky, almost like putty in some places, it could be clay soil, which is difficult to work. If it's loose enough, rich brown and you see earthworms, it could be a lovely, rich loam. There are other kinds - sandy soil, sandy loam, different clays and so on.

It's always a good idea to do a soil acidity test. You can buy a test kit from your local garden centre. Follow the instructions on the kit - usually you mix a little soil with some of the kit concoctions and then note the colour change and compare it to a chart that indicates acidity or alkalinity. This is useful depending what sort of plants you like because some will do a lot better if the soil acidity is adjusted to suit them.

So now, you have a clear garden with scrubby ground cover and an uneven surface and you know your soil acidity. This is where you can plan your garden. You can use a graph pad to plot out the space you have and jot up a few ideas before you go out there. That, and you may find that once you've cleared the undergrowth the prospect of doing more work is unattractive and you might want to hire someone. Gardening can be a little like joining a gym - you start off with great intentions, but it turns out to be more work than you thought so you put off doing it. The advantage of gardening is that you can pay someone else to come in and do the work - that doesn't work so well with the gym.

A standard, low-maintenance idea is often to have garden beds around the edges and a lawn in the middle, with a patio area at the back of the house that meets the lawn. (Hackneyed and boring to some, maybe, but it can be very pleasant.) However, the sky is the limit and you might find yourself bitten by the gardening bug and creating a complex layout in the future!

If you want to work in stages by yourself without retaining a landscaper, it's doable, but you need to be realistic and not bite off more than you can chew. Depending how difficult your garden is to dig, you might be able to remove the sod to make a few garden beds over the course of a weekend, dig the beds, mix through some good organic material (mushroom compost for instance), plant up and mulch over with something like pine bark chippings to keep the weeds down. You can edge the beds with literally anything you like, (edging materials from the garden centre, stones, house bricks, wooden borders, plastic board etc.) or don't edge them put use a tool like a sharp shovel or an edging knife to put a neat edge on the garden bed. Soil preparation is key when preparing a garden bed, and the more work you put in at the start, the easier your maintenance will be and the better your plants will do.

The order I'd personally do is beds first, then lawn - partly because you're doing it yourself, and can take your time if you do it in that order, and also because once the beds are finished, you can then work on a lawn without needing to tramp all over it to get to your garden beds. There are lots of threads on this forum already about how to achieve a perfect lawn.

When planning what to plant where, be aware of the lifespan of the plant, whether it's deciduous or evergreen, and the potential spread it will have when fully grown. Don't, for instance, buy a sapling tree that's four feet high and in five years will be 18 feet high and completely blocking the light to your garden, as well as dumping leaves all over it every Autumn - unless that's the effect you want to have.

Don't use deciduous plants as a screening plant, or you'll have no screen through the winter. Don't plant a five foot tree in the centre of the garden without realising it then makes cutting the grass a pain in the bum. Don't plant something that will throw a section of the garden into complete shade when it's grown, again unless that's what you want. Leave enough room for plants to reach their full size when planting beside each other. Don't plant some insidious thing that'll take over half the garden if you're not willing to cut it back each year.

Regarding the bulbs you've already planted, usually the rule of thumb with a bulb is you plant them to a depth that's the same as their diameter. You can always dig up what you've planted earlier this year and relocate them, ensuring you plant to the correct depth - most bulbs will need the cold of overwintering before they come up next spring anyway.

In terms of potting separately, a good way to save money when gardening is buy everything at tiny tube stock size and wait for it to grow - but the results do take a while! You can use pots to bring on plants to a stage where you can be sure they'll survive if planted out, but beware of allowing them to get too large in the pot (whereupon their roots start to spiral and they find it difficult to thrive when planted out). However I find that with growing from seed, sowing where they're to grow can be a lot easier - transplant shock can kill a lot of seedlings, and starting off seedlings on your windowsill can be a sure fire way to ensure they get leggy and fall over and die, or don't survive the climate change of being planted out.

Try taking cuttings from your lavander out the front to create a few bushes for the back garden. Roses are cheapest as bare root stock over winter, but buy from a reputable nursery or you'll end up spending money on a collection of thorny sticks.