Gardenkeeping

The basic idea that gardens are to live in, rather than just to be decorative or to grow flowers in, has taken a long time to emerge. The garden of today is an extension of the home… an outdoor living room.

With this change in use has come a change in “gardenkeeping.” We begin to realize that the garden should be kept, just as a well-run house is kept. That brings us to new conceptions as to what can be done in the planning of the garden, and in the mechanics of keeping it in order at all times. We want it clean, uncluttered and attractive for our own use and enjoyment, and as a place to entertain our friends, whether they be of the invited variety, or “just-dropped-inners.” As a result, we seek to achieve more efficient and less laborious gardenkeeping.

To start at the beginning, let’s consider for a moment the planning of the garden, which includes, of course, its replanning. Here are some basic targets to shoot at:

Tie the garden to the house as intimately as possible, physically by doors and terraces or patio and visually through view windows. This is a great stimulus to good gardenkeeping.
Develop the overall garden plan along simple lines, with different areas that flow easily into each other. This will make it a lot easier to use power tools such as the lawn mower, hedge trimmer, weed eater and hand tools such as the fertilizer spreader, wheelbarrow or cart. Many an old garden, split up with hedges, paths and disconnected flower beds, can, without too much work, be rearranged along a more modern, work-saving pattern.
Houses are carefully planned for comfortable living and easy housekeeping; the planners even measure the number of steps from refrigerator to stove, from stove to table, and from table to dishwasher! The garden? Rarely is any serious thought given as to how suitable it will be for living. A barbecue devoted mostly to an occasional burger cook out does not make an outdoor dining room. We have three outdoor dining areas, and they are all in fairly constant use, according to the time of day and weather conditions, from spring until late autumn.

keeping the garden for outdoor living

Avoid grass edges on flower borders and hedges that must be trimmed. Edging tools, weed eaters and hedge trimmers help save time in this laborious chore, but it is even better to eliminate it, where possible, by using edgings that take care of themselves, such as sedums, cerastium, or dwarf phlox, and hedge plants such as barberry, dwarf yews, box-leaved holly (Ilex crenata) and its variety globosa, a dwarf, compact form. Lawn edging placed along paths or flower borders or around trees, is a great labor saver, and brick edgings may be used.
lf your place is small, don’t plant big trees, such as maple or oak, which are hard to prune and eventually rob lawns and flower beds of nourishment and moisture, making their care more difficult. Many nurserymen are now specializing in small trees and developing dwarf forms of larger ones. Such common species as dogwood, golden raintree (Koelreuteria paniculata), Viburnum Lentago and mountain-ash provide limited areas of shade without growing out of bounds and each has one or more decorative features of flowers and/or fruit.

With the garden efficiently and attractively set up as an actual part of the house… the outdoor half, so to speak let’s take a look at some of the ways to keep it running smoothly with a minimum of effort. The outdoor living area differs from the inside one in that it is an abode which is alive. Its floor, walls, and furniture are living plants. Nature … usually… supplies the water to keep them clean, but the rest is up to us.

Feeding

First of all they must be fed regularly. Fortunately most of them will keep healthy, happy and contented with one good meal a year. In our garden we find it easiest to provide this by giving one big picnic just after the general spring garden cleaning. This cleaning usually begins with the first warm, really inviting spring days, before much growth has started, and includes such things as raking up fallen leaves, broken branches and other winter debris.

Following this operation, all bare soil surfaces are loosened with hoe, scuffle hoe or small cultivator. Many gas powered hand tools are great time savers. Over-wintering weeds are taken out with the roots and removed to the compost “material” pile. The real compost pile is built later… if we get around to it! We also use “rough” compost for mulching.

As a general purpose fertilizer we use 5-10-5; the formula may vary for your soil. At the rate of about 3 pounds per 100 square feet, it is applied by hand to rose beds, perennial borders, and among bulbs, but with a fertilizer spreader on lawn areas and the vegetable garden before it is dug. Some things may need an additional feeding or two later on. The acid soil lovers require special treatment, and large trees may require deep (below the soil surface) feeding. But by and large, lawns, shrubs, perennials and vegetables do well with this one-shot, general purpose feeding.

It is well, however, to keep on hand such fertilizer materials such as Milorganite for quickly available nitrogen, and for transplanting. It should be kept perfectly dry.

Mulching

Landscapers and gardeners have long known the great value of mulching. A mulch is any material spread over the soil surface, between or around plants. Commonly employed for this purpose are dead leaves, straw, rough compost, sawdust or other organic by-products (such as corn husks, chopped corncobs or sugar cane) which eventually disintegrate and become part of the soil. Mulches are useful in at least half a dozen different ways:

They conserve moisture in the soil
They keep the soil temperature lower in hot weather
They add humus to the soil as they disintegrate and thus encourage the development of beneficial bacteria
They keep down weeds

Then, too, many of them, such as peatmoss provide a clean, well-groomed appearance in the flower beds and borders. For some purposes, such as mulching rose beds, we’ve used mulch which remains “open” and allows ready penetration of air and water, whether from rain or from an artificial oscillating “rainmaker like our sprinkler system.”

Water

Water is the cheapest fertilizer if we consider as fertilizer anything “which renders fertile” (a dictionary definition). Yet, not one garden in a hundred is provided with a sufficient supply to attain its potential maximum in the growth of plants. Many scientific experiments have demonstrated that an adequate supply of water will decidedly reduce the amount of fertilizers required especially of chemical fertilizers.

In applying water the usual “little and often” method is extremely wasteful. Most lawns, for instance, are given “sprinklings” that moisten the soil to a depth of only one-half to one inch instead of the four or five inches that should be penetrated. To reach to this depth without wasteful surface run-off and puddling, water should be applied slowly over a long period. This is equally true of bare soil surfaces. To get slow, even distribution, we use oscillating-type sprinklers, or the “jet spray” type of perforated hose, instead of rotating sprinklers that throw big, heavy drops and apply water more rapidly; than it can be absorbed by the soil. Having water piped to convenient outlets about the grounds materially cuts down the time and labor involved in watering and makes gardenkeeping easier and more efficient.

Sanitation

Sanitation in the garden is as important as it is in the house. The first step is general cleanliness. If faded flowers and dead or dying foliage, and especially any diseased parts of plants (which should always be destroyed), are promptly removed, many potential sources of trouble will be eliminated. For the looks of it alone, make a habit of collecting dying flowers just as you empty ash trays.

In case of attack by any insect or disease, control measures should be taken immediately. A day’s delay may mean the difference between success or failure in the fight to save the victims. The equipment for control in a small garden need not be expensive, but it should be the best of its kind and always kept clean. and ready for use. The modern multi-purpose materials for control, especially of insect pests, have been a great boon to the gardener. Some diseases are a more difficult problem because often they are well established before becoming apparent. If a disease appears which you cannot identify, lose no time in consulting some authority in your garden club or your agricultural county agent.

Practically all of our spraying is done with a backpack sprayer. It combines the great advantages of maintaining a constantly even pressure, of being easy to clean and of never (well hardly ever!) getting out of order.

Above all, remember that your garden is for fun! If you go about it in the right frame of mind, your garden and landscape keeping, too, can be fun. If you keep sprayers clean, and tools sharp, and use mulches generously, much of the drudgery will disappear. If it doesn’t well, perhaps you are attempting too much. Then more shrubs and grass, fewer flower beds and specialties, will be in order.