While you are in your garden, you are taking care of nature, helping the environment and you are even providing some organic food for your family. Moreover, you are making sure that your house looks gorgeous even on the outside. However, you should know how to properly take care of all the flowers, trees, fruits and veggies that you wish to grow and here are some useful tips for your gardening experience.

Prepare the soil

Healthy soil is your foundation for a healthy garden. It should be well drained in order for your plants not to drown, but it should also be moist enough for the plants to grow healthy. Before you plant anything, you should take care of the weeds and check the soil’s composition. The ideal composition for texture and water retention includes one-third of sand, silt and clay. In order to test the composition of the soil, you can conduct a mason jar soil test. If the soil drains quickly and it is too sandy, you should dig in compost. After you have determined the soil is ready, you should cover it with clear plastic for two or three weeks and only then start planting.

Fertilizing

Usually, digging in rich compost is enough for most gardens. However, if your soil needs more boost or you want to make sure it stays healthy, you can use manure, homemade compost tea, seaweed and some organic fertilizers. If you decide to use manure, you have to make sure it is well composted because some manures can contain weed seeds or can burn the plants. For the seaweed usage, you should harvest it during autumn or winter in order to avoid harvesting herring eggs. When it comes to fertilizers, you should avoid some pungent fertilizers (fish or bone meal) because they can attract wildlife into your garden. Additionally, stay away from synthetic fertilizers, because they are bad for the environment; especially for waterways and oceans.

Flowers

If you have some potted bulbs indoors, move them outside. You can place them in planters, window boxes or in your garden and immediately freshen up the whole landscape and brighten up the dull areas in your garden. Before you plant them outside, you should check the moisture of the soil by grabbing a handful and gently squeezing it into a ball. If the ball breaks when you tap it, it is ready for the flowers, but if it stays intact you should wait a few days for the soil to dry. After the soil has dried, you should add two inches of manure or compost which will improve the drainage of the soil and its water retention. Put the bulbs into the soil, rake around and enjoy the fresh new look of your garden. Also, you can prepare the soil in the same manner when planting flowers from scratch and look forward to new colours and decoration. If all this might seem too slow or tedious, there are things to make it better. Of course, you will have the right equipment for the job, but you can spice things up with Peter’s of Kensington and their colourful watering cans and pink gardening tools.

Edibles

Spring is a perfect season for planting some fruits and veggies to refresh you every day. You can plant latent bare root veggies, fruits and herbs as soon as they arrive. However, since these plants started to grow in transit, you will need to take good care of them. Plant them in containers filled with well-drained potting mix and make sure they are in any frost-free location indoors. Once the danger of frost has passed, you can transplant them outside into your garden.

If you’ve been growing and saving some plants throughout the whole year inside, now is the time to take them out. Follow these simple tips for soil preparation and planting of vegetables, and your garden will be sweet smelling and filled with mesmerizing colours in spring.