Kent Horner of C&H Gardens offers these eclectic garden tips “good for every gardener no matter what their predilection.”
For raised vegetable gardens, use cobblestone or fractured rock to hold back the mounded soils instead of blocks or railroad ties. Lifting the garden with natural stone provides the drainage many edible plants require without the phosphorescence of lime on block or the time-wearing decay of railroad ties.
Never let your gardener use his lawn mower on your newly sod lawn. The many lawns your gardener mows daily contain a plethora of noxious grasses and weeds — the seeds of which will be introduced by his mower into your pristine yard, ruining what you have worked so hard to create. Buy a mower to service only your lawn and let the gardener use it when he comes.
Always plant your drought-tolerant or succulent plants on mounds. This will prevent rotting and decay during the wet winter months.
Spread Worm Gold on the soils beneath plants affected by biting, chewing, sucking or chitinous-type insects and water it in. The worm castings are full of a chitin-based solvent and will be absorbed systemically into the plant, permanently driving off the intruders.
Create elevated mounds for interest and good drainage when planting large specimen trees. Leave six inches to one foot of root-ball above grade (which also can be mounded) to create a watering basin. Stand a perforated drainpipe, wrapped in a drain-sock material to prevent soil intrusion, vertically alongside the root-ball of the new tree. Later, just like the dipstick in your car, you can check to see if your new tree is sitting in standing water by inserting the handle of a shovel down the vertical drainpipe to below the rootball.
Kent Horner, C & H Gardens Artistic Landscape & Tree Service, Inc.
760/846-2200 www.plantch.com
