Mud Away - Instantly Clean Off the Grimiest Shoes - Spring is coming upon us very fast… and with spring comes the melting of winter and the joys of gardening…in the mud!

Keep your shoes and your floors cleanYou have been working hard outside, and now its time to come in. But your shoes or boots are filthy, and you want to avoid tracking mud and dirt into the house. At the same time, though, you do not want to leave your footwear outside either.With Mud Away, you do not have to worry about muddy shoes tracking dirt into your home. Now, your shoes and your floors will keep clean even after the dirtiest job. Instantly clean off the grimiest shoesMud Away is incredibly easy to use, and can fit anywhere in the house too.Just place Mud Away where you want, and fill it with water. When you come in from outside, wipe your shoes inside Mud Away.

In just a few seconds, all the grime and mud that was stuck to your shoes will simply disappear.Tough bristles to remove the toughest dirtMud Away is designed to clean off all kinds of footwear, no matter what size your feet are and regardless of how dirty your shoes are.Inside Mud Away are hundreds of tough plastic bristles that can really scrape off the most stubborn dirt. The bristles are located underneath and on the sides of Mud Away, so your shoes get a thorough cleaning.And, Mud Away features extra large spaces for your feet, so that shoes and boots of all sizes get clean, fast!Easy to cleanBecause Mud Away is made from plastic, that makes it easy to clean.

You can literally take it outside and rinse it off with a garden hose to quickly get it clean and ready for future uses.You can use Mud Away in all conditions, through winter, fall, spring and summer, and with all kinds and sizes of footwear too. Its a great way to keep your shoes clean and to help them last longer too! Mud Away makes a great gift for the gardener in your family!

The Winter Garden - Create a Garden that Shines Through the Forgotten Season - For many gardeners, winter is simply a season to endure while planning for the coming spring. The rich floral splendor they’ve enjoyed has given way to dull browns and grays tipped by lonely snow-capped branches. But that doesn’t have to be: there are so many easy and inexpensive ways to add real winter interest to any garden. Two hundred color photographs show the diverse possibilities, along with site-specific design plans. There are suggestions for selecting and caring for a broad assortment of flowers, grasses, shrubs, and trees that boast dramatic winter flair, plus professional choices for cold-hardy container plants. Smart tips include using colored stones, adding bronze and wood accents, and maximizing the effect of winter light on plants.

Thought we would join in the Thursday Thirteen fun this week. Instead of 13 things about Me - I have created The Garden 13 with 13 interesting gardening tips and tricks I’ve come across over the past week.

To start off our second Garden 13 - we’re talkin’ organic gardens! Organic gardens can be attractive and productive. Well-managed soil nurtures healthy plants and pesticide-free gardens have predators to deal with pests. The ten steps below will help you make your garden organic. Since now is the time to be thinking about preparing your garden bed for next year - - here we go . .

Here are 13 fabulous tomato varieties (the first 6 are in my garden):

1. Improving the soil - Whether you have heavy clay or light sand, you can’t do much about your soil texture. However, you can do something about the structure and quality, and any improvements you make to the soil will have a direct effect on the health of your plants.

   Soil conditioners, such as leaf mould, composted bark, homemade or municipal compost, benefit all soils. They can be dug in or simply spread on the surface where the weather and soil-dwellers, such as earthworms, will work them in. Their bulk will improve the drainage of heavy soils and help dry soils to hold on to moisture and nutrients.

2. Garden nutrients - Gardeners worldwide know the value of home-produced garden compost. It nourishes the soil, supplies it with nutrients and improves its structure, giving plants ideal growing conditions. It also helps combat soil-borne pests and diseases.

   The time to apply compost is when plants are actively growing, not during late autumn and winter when long wet spells will wash its valuable nutrients deep down into the earth, out of reach of next season’s crops.

   Organic gardeners recycle everything through the compost heap, only discarding badly diseased material. Mature compost looks and smells like good garden soil, but is a phenomenal mixture that is high in nutrients and teeming with the micro-organisms your soil needs to keep it in good condition. If you don’t have one already, start your heap off this year - you won’t regret it.

3. Making compost - Compost-making is a year-round activity. The secret to success is to have a good mixture of material. If the heap is too wet, you’ll end up with stinking sludge; if it is too dry, composting will be very slow. If you’ve got a lot of wet stuff, such as kitchen waste or green weeds, mix it with dry material, such as egg boxes and crumpled cardboard. Old envelopes are particularly good for mixing with grass clippings.

   You can use a container or make a heap directly on the ground. Add to it whenever you like, remembering to avoid very thick layers of anything very wet or very dry. If you have a large quantity of any one material, such as grass clippings or woody prunings, make a separate pile. Wait until you’ve got the balancing stuff to go with it, then add it to the main heap.

   If you’re energetic you can turn the heap around, mixing it all up occasionally - but you’ll get equally good compost by letting nature do the work for you.

4. Weed control - Organic gardens are not unkempt, but neither are they free of all weeds, since many are very useful. For example, nettles support aphids for early-feeding ladybirds. Thistles provide food, in the forms of nectar and seeds, for many different creatures, and butterflies breed in flowering grasses
5. More Weed Control - Once again, the key is to aim for a balance. If weeds are likely to compete with your plants for nutrients, they should be controlled. So-called organic herbicides don’t exist, so other methods must be used: 1. - Keep bare soil covered as weeds will seed in any open space. In ornamental areas, use ground cover plants or a mulch to smother weeds. Mulch around vegetables with leaf-mould or hay. 2. - During winter grow a green manure, such as clover, where you have no crop cover. As well as keeping down weeds, it stores nutrients in its roots. These are returned to the soil when it is uprooted and dug in during spring. 3. - Hoe off weeds as soon as they appear. All the green waste can be added to the compost heap where any minerals and other nutrients they have absorbed during their short growing time will be recycled for the benefit of your garden plants.
6. Seed and plant choice - Always buy plants that suit your site and soil, and choose disease-resistant varieties whenever you can. Seed catalogues offer a huge range of plants, both ornamental and edible, that have natural resistance to all sorts of problems. There are even a couple of potato varieties - ‘Cara’ and ‘Remarka’ - that are resistant to blight.
7. Changing perspectives - Organic gardeners want their plants to grow well, but not at any cost. Rather than rely on an arsenal of pesticide sprays to deal with problems, they use other means to achieve success. They also accept and tolerate a certain level of imperfection.
8. Chemical issues - There are many organic pesticides and fungicides available but these products last only a short time in the environment. If absolutely necessary only use them as a last resort.

   Chemicals, even organically acceptable ones, can cause more damage than we realise. Contact killers can often hit non-pest species, while treatments designed to combat fungal problems can be washed into the soil, damaging worms and other soil-dwellers. The best technique is to deal with problems early on, thus avoiding the need for chemical treatments.

9. Pest management - Don’t rely on just one method of pest control, as the best results come from using a range of techniques. Traps and barriers, naturally resistant varieties, biological controls and crop rotation are just some of the ways to keep pests at bay. Vigilance is crucial. By checking your plants often, you’ll spot problems in the early stages when they are easier to deal with. Often you can allow nature’s armoury of natural predators to work for you. Also, it pays to take good care of your soil, because healthy soil will produce strong plants that tolerate some pest attack.
10. Dead Bugs - My mother-in-law spreds dead bugs across her garden. Seriously. She collects the bugs in a jar. When she gets enough - she grinds them and then sprinkles the dead bug mixture on her garden. The theory? Live insects can smell the dead carcuses of their buggy friends and steer clear of the burial site. For her, it really works!
11. Disease management - There are several ways to combat diseases naturally. Always change the position of your vegetable crops each year. By doing this, you’ll avoid a build-up of soil-borne problems. Keep plants growing steadily by never letting them go short of water. Dry roots lead to stressed plants that are ready to succumb to any disease. Keeping the soil well-composted will help suppress many diseases as well.
12. Encourage wildlife - Organic gardens are vital havens for wildlife. Grow a range of plants providing food and shelter and see how quickly the creatures arrive. Aim to attract as wide a range of wildlife as possible, because greater diversity will produce better balance, allowing natural predators to keep pests under control.
13. Organic Gardening - Organic gardens can be attractive and productive. Well-managed soil nurtures healthy plants and pesticide-free gardens have predators to deal with pests. The ten steps below will help you make your garden organic.

Happy Gardening!

Whether you’re planting only one shrub or fifty annuals, it’s important to prepare the soil. This is true even if you’re planting in an existing flower bed. Prepare new flower beds well. In existing flower beds, work a few spadefuls of soil ammendment, such as compost, into the area you’ll be planting. Especially if planting annuals, work a slow-release fertilizer into the ground. Annuals are hungry, fast-growing plants that thrive when given plenty of nutrients.

Before planting, make sure your plants are well-watered and not wilting. If they are looking droopy, water them in their existing pots and wait a day for them to recover. If a plant is a bare-root, soak the roots in cool water for several hours before planting.

To plant, remove the plant gently from its pot. If the roots are wrapped in circles or are thickly knotted, loosen them with your fingers. If the roots are very large and tough, you may even need to slice through them slightly with a space to loosen them.

Position the plant so the soil level is the same as it was in the pot. If the plant is bare-root, plant it at the depth specified in the package.

Difficult as it may sedem, pinch or trim off any flowers. They’re taking energy that would be better put into establishing the plant’s root system for bigger, better and more flowers later on. You’ll lose a few pretty blooms initially, but you’ll be rewarded with a healthier, longer-blooming plant.

Water the plant well. If it’s a shrub or a rose, position a hose at the base just barely at a trickle and let it run for half an hour or more. For annuals and perinneals, water so the soil is soaked a foot down.

Keep the plants well watered for the first two weeks, checking them daily for soil moisture and signs of wilting. Once they’re established, they’ll need less water.

Hot Tips!

Get those roots going! When planting, it’s a good idea to add something that will get the roots off to a FAST start. Well-developed root systems make for healthier plants that are better at taking up water and critical nutrients. A so-called starter fertilizer is heavy on phosophorus, which encourages growth. Another way to get roots going is to use a root stimulator. Root stimulators contain hormones that encourage rapid root growth.

Happy planting!

We spent the day today started a new vegetable garden in our backyard. I wanted just a small garden in this spot, for starters. I started by following my own advice and graphed the garden out on a piece of paper first. Once I graphed out the size of it - - which turned out to be 12 foot by 15 foot . . I then listed out each of the vegetables that I wanted to plant in this garden.

My list:

1. Tomatoes
2. Cherry Tomatoes
3. Grape Tomatoes
4. Green Beans
5. Peas
6. Onions
7. Carrots
8. Broccoli
9. Cauliflower
10. Cucumbers
11. Lettuce
12. Various Herbs

Once I had that list - I researched each plant to determine the spacing needs for each plant. This way - I knew ahead of time how many plants I could put in a row, and how much space I would need. Some plants are crawlers (cucumbers) - - others are root plants that don’t need a lot of room (carrots, onions) - - others are climbers needing trellises or cages (tomatoes, beans, peas).

Armed with this knowledge - we set about the task of creating the bed, first. We chose a nice location in the yard that was sure to recieve a good 6-8 hours of direct sunlight during the day. We used steaks and string to mark off the exact area we needed and started digging the edge.

Once we had the edges defined, we tilled the ground about 12 inches deep. Turning up all the soild and grass. Luckily, we didn’t find any stones or rocks in the ground at all - - we found real excellent and rich sandy soil that would be perfect for our garden.

Once the area was tilled - - we removed the top 3 inches of soil from the area and replaced it with a compost mixture with rotten manure for a good fertilizer base.

The whole process of edging the area, digging it up, tilling it, removing the top 3 inches and replacing with compost took us approximately 4 hours to complete. We would have kept going, except the skies were warning us to pack it in and head inside. We have quite a doozy of a storm coming our way!

Tomorrow, weather providing - we will finish the bed off by edging it with the brick that we bought from our local garden center:

We decided to put an edge around the garden to keep a good separation of garden and grass - since our grass is very rich, thick and fast growing - we don’t want it growing into the garden!

I’ll post updates on our garden progress as time goes on.

Arbors are old fashioned favorites that have become popular once again. I love them and use them throughout my garden to create some lovely borders and shade with some very gorgeous climbing flowers and vines.

An arbor can be large, with a grid overhead and enough space for a sitting area. Sometimes arbors are long and narrow, designed to follow a path. And sometimes they are only wide enough to accommmodate a bench or porch swing or other modest seating.

The most common type of arbor looks like a little doorway. And that’s exactly what it is, and attractive entry to a place at the beginning or end of a path or even to straddle a path somewhere along its middle.

Avoid the common mistake of plunking one of these doorwaylike arbors in the middle of the garden - - that’s like putting a door in the middle of a room!

Arbor Materials
Arbors are made of a variety of materials: wood timbers, lumber, metal and vinyl. Wood is a favorite, and an excellent material, but it presents a maintenance problem because an arbor, with its intricate design, can be hard to paint.

Many gardeners leave the wood unpainted, perhaps treating new wood with a deck sealer. Others add a traditional coat of paint, or use a stain to give the wood color while preventing the peeling problems that occur with paint.

Erecting an Arbor
large arbors can be securely mounted in concrete to prevent settling. Small arbors can benefit from being seated on concrete pilings, too, though teh cnocreate can contribute to rot problems with wood structures.

Kits are available that secure the arbor to the ground with chains and ground screws. One of the easiets ways to secure a wood arbor so it doesn’t settle or blow over is to screw two sturdy flat steel strips or stakes a couple of feed long onto each of the four corner legs and insert teh stakes securely into the soil.

Popular vines for arbors and trellises:
Black eyed Susan
Chocolate vine
Clematis
Jessamine
Morning Glory
Moonflower
Passion flower
Climbing roses
Jasmine, star
Sweetpea
Trumpet honeysuckle

As you plan your garden, ask yourself some basic questions:

1. How much time do I want to spend gardening? figure an average of about a half hour a week during the growing season to maintain a 5×20 foot flower bed. And figure about one half to one hour a week for every 50×100 foot stretch of lawn
2. What’s my budget? Plants, tools and supplies can add up very quickly. Make a budget and stick to it.
3. What are my growing conditions? how much sun and shade fall on various parts of my yeard? What’s my soil like? How wet or dry is the climate at various times of year? What are record temperature lows and highs?
4. What look do I want? Formal, coutnry, English cottage, native, manicured, eclectic?
5. What’s my region’s style? What sort of gardens and hardscape materials look at home in my part of teh country? Drought-tolerant native plants? Lush, tropical plants? Prairie natives? Mountain wildflowers? Weathered wood? Bluestone? Granite? Brick?
6. What’s my lifestyle? How do I want to use my garden? As a retreat? As a place for entertaining? Will children play there? Will pets have access?
7. From what angels do I most often view my garden? From the patio? From a particular window overlooking the backyard? From the sidewalk leading from the garage to the back door?
8. What are my favorite colors? Will the flowers and plants look good with the existing structures, such as the house, fences and garage?
9. What animals do I want to attract or deter? Birds, butterflies and hummingbirds are usually welcome guests, whereas deer, rabbits, racoons and ground squirrels are usually not

Gardening food for thought.