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Your DIY Garden Maintenance Guide
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Complete care and maintenance of your garden includes weeding, watering, feeding, pruning your garden and your lawn, patio and deck as well. For maintaining your garden efficiently you will require some basic tools like spades, rakes, forks, trowels, trimmers, a watering can, gardening gloves etc. Depending on your needs you may hire chippers, a mower and may be a chainsaw and various other tools.
You will constantly need the spade and fork for work like removing large sized weeds, soil aerating and digging fresh beds. Buy any type you like but for durability and lightweight stainless steel in the best material if you can afford the price. Secateurs will help you in deadheading and pruning. Best among the many types of secateurs available is the 'bypass type', which has a scissor type action and can be used for trimming hedges, cutting herbaceous plants and awkward grass areas.
Weeding the garden is a necessary and laborious task. However, for things like weeds 'prevention is better than cure'. The best way to do this is to suppress light reaching the soil. The best way to do this in to spread mulch over a weed membrane laid on bare soil. Individual holes will have to be cut in the membrane to accommodate your plants. The membrane will allow water and air to reach the soil but will block sunlight. As mulch you can use wood chippings, cocoa shells, pebbles, ornamental gravel or organic mulch that can decompose to provide the soil with nutrients. Another way of weed prevention is to plant ground cover plants in the border among your specimen plants. These will form a ground covering with a beautiful natural look and deny light to the weeds. You must ensure that the border in initially weed free. However, all this does not mitigate a strict weed removal policy for your garden.
For maintaining your plants in good health you need to feed them. Healthy plants will need lesser maintenance as they become more disease resistant. For plant nutrition you can use fertilizer either as powder applied directly or as liquid through watering and sprinkling systems. This will let the plants get the Nitrogen, Potassium and Phosphorus, which is so vital for their strength and growth. Organic fertilizer, however, is always preferable over chemicals.
Your lawn is an important area that needs equal attention. Simply mowing will not suffice. For a healthy, attractive lawn, you will have to fertilize, aerate, top-dress, weed and control moss formation depending on your climate and location. It is important to remember that mowing and lawn care stimulates growth. However, do not remove more than one third of the length of the grass during each mowing.
You must always keep your patio clean from algae and moss. Apart from creating a dirty look these may cause slips and accidental falls. Use a hard brush and water or pressure wash to clean thoroughly. Wash your deck when it is weathered with a stiff brush using water a commercial cleaning product and then hose it down. Let it dry for three or four days and then apply two coats of deep penetrating tinted oil that will soak into the wood. Allow a half hour interval between coats.
For more Information go to www.gardenstarstore.com
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