Caring for Your Garden

By now you've done the hard work of preparing your garden; improving the soil, planning and placement of seeds and seedlings. Now the challenge is to provide proper maintenance care for it.

Gardens need to be watered regularly. Water-stressed plants are more vulnerable to attack by disease and insect pests. How much watering depends on your plants' requirements and the weather. A good soaking every two or three days is sufficient when the weather is cooler, but when it's hot and windy, the garden should be watered every day. Water early to prevent mold problems. If the soil is particularly dry, give it a light soaking to loosen the soil, and then go back over it with a heavier watering to let it soak in instead of run off.

Weeding is another vital garden task. It's best to remove weeds while they're young, before their roots systems develop fully. Just one mature weed can produce up to 250,000 seeds. Pull them by hand when they're young or next to your plants with a hoe in the rows of your vegetable garden, or mow annual weeds as soon as they flower.

Like any other living thing, plants need food. A top dressing of organic mulch once or twice a season is sufficient. If you use a liquid fertilizer, plants should be fed lightly every week or two, according to package directions.

Pest control requires close scrutiny of your garden on a regular basis to identify pest problems and target approaches for ridding your garden of them.

As plants mature, you'll need to control their growth by pruning, thinning, dividing and staking.

There's a lot of hard work involved in maintaining a garden, but the beauty and bounty are worth the effort.