Gardening Guides

Tips, tools and techniques

Gardening guides are an essential help for any beginning gardener and a source of new ideas and advice to even the most experienced. They collect the wisdom and know-how of hundreds of people who have found their life’s passion in gardening and landscaping, and they allow us to have easy access to it.

Finding a gardening guide is easy enough – you can get them at virtually any store that sells gardening supplies, but finding which ones are the best is the tricky part. You don’t want to spend hours of your gardening time reading and following advice that will turn out to be wrong for you and your garden.

How to Start a Garden

For the novice gardener, actually beginning a garden can be the most daunting of tasks. You need to decide what theme – if any – you want your garden to have. You need to know what the sunlight and weather will consistently be like in the area you are planning to plant in. You need to research what sorts of plants will work best for you and your soil type; the list goes on and on. But how do you know what’s on the list when you’re just starting out? Gardening guides are the perfect place for the novice gardener to find all those little tips and tricks that will make the task fun and enjoyable instead of a scary plunge into the unknown.

Print Resources

One great print source on how to start a garden is The Well-Tended Perennial Garden: Planting and Pruning Techniques by Tracy DiSabato. Ms. DiSabato takes the novice through all the stages they need to plan and begin a truly great garden and also provides a good deal of information on plants.

Another excellent source for information on plants and how to care for them is What’s Wrong with My Plant?: Expert Information at Your Fingertips by Steven Bradley. As any experienced gardener can tell you, one of the scariest parts of starting out is trying to garden without losing your plants. Insect predation, environmental hazards and a slew of other things all seem to conspire to ruin your garden’s plant life. This book will clue you in on how to prevent and reverse those problems.

Online Resources

If you’re looking for something more in the way of an online gardening guide, try about.com’s gardening section – it’s a great place to get gardening tips. Their guide, Marie Iannotti, provides expert advice for novices and even posts informative videos to aid in the learning process.

Another great site is gardenguides.com, which offers expert advice in all areas of gardening and horticultural hobbies. In addition to the hundreds of guide articles available there, gardenguides.com has an active and welcoming gardening community that trades tips and techniques on their forum board. With all these resources at their disposal, novice gardeners can trudge forward bravely and will soon find themselves on the giving end of good advice.