5 Tips to Keep Your Garden Organized

July 3, 2017

Gardens aren’t always simple to manage. They take plenty of hard work and dedication to maintain. As the seasons shift, you will need to be mindful of changes that might occur in your garden as well, like yellowing leaves, wilting plants, or new blooms. If you keep your garden organized, it can make maintenance a lot easier.

Even with the hard work, in the end, gardens always pay off. There comes satisfaction in a job well done, and having beautiful flowers or crops to enjoy makes it well worth the effort. As the growing season continues, you may find yourself needing to clear out plots, implement additions, or reorganize sections completely.

Here are a few tips to keep your garden organized in the coming seasons:

1. Keep a Notebook

A very cheap, but very helpful tool for garden maintenance is a notebook. Keep a sturdy notebook with jottings, measurements, and even pictures to help you track the growth and changes of your garden. It is difficult to keep track of everything by eyeballing alone. Having pictures to refer to will give you concrete proof of what changes your garden is undergoing, and how to go about controlling them.

2. Plan Ahead

It never hurts to plan ahead for what you want in your garden. It’s important to figure out when to sow, when to plant outdoors, and when and how much each plant should be watered. Don’t forget to look at important seasonal change dates too! Planning ahead is an essential step for how to start a backyard garden as well as keeping one organized, maintained, and growing.

The first fall frost, first winter frost, and the like can have drastic impacts on your garden. It wouldn’t do to get a late start, and then have your plants die before they have a chance to live! A notebook will help you keep track of these things, and give you an estimate of when to expect to see your plants flourish.

3. Create and Maintain Boundaries

Cages and trellises will create boundaries for your flowers, and tell you when they need to be trimmed. Use mulch as their foundation. This will help control mud in the garden, keep weeds down, and conserve moisture, all of which will aid in your plants’ growth. Mulch helps with weeds, but that still doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t check for them yourself. Weeds, if left to their own devices, will become large. They may also spread or produce seeds throughout your garden that could destroy any structure you may have set up. Keep them small and maintained!

4. Monitor for Disease

Keep an eye out for disease. Diseased plants can very quickly infect other plants. Rarely they can be treated, and usually it takes much more work to do so than to just remove the plant entirely. Even leaving a small trace of the plant behind can still risk infection spreading to the rest of your garden. Make sure that you are diligent in removing all contaminated plants as thoroughly and quickly possible.

5. Regularly Prune Your Garden

Although not the most enjoyable part of tending to a garden, pruning is an absolute necessity. And, knowing how to prune your garden is essential.

When you prune your garden, you are searching for dead or overgrown sections to cut away. Not only are they a blemish to an otherwise colorful garden, but they are a literal dead weight that can stifle growth. Dead leaves or twigs can attract pesky insects that eat away your living plants and can even harm them by simply by rubbing against each other.

Here are some tips on how to prune your garden quickly and effectively:

How to Prune Your Garden

1. Research Your Plants

Pruning differs from plant to plant. These basics to start you off on the right foot. Pruning is best done when plants are dormant. This will require you to look up information for each of your plants in order to know when it’s time to go about pruning. It’s also useful to do research for specific plants that may require special procedures.

2. Look For Warning Signs

Don’t know when your garden needs pruning? Here are some signs to watch out for: dead or broken branches, stems and leaves, and branches that entangle. The latter branches will scrape against each other, exposing bark and leaving them susceptible to disease and pests.

The sooner you notice these issues, the easier it will be to fix them.. If left unattended, these problems become much more difficult to control. Pruning now saves you time, and keeps your plants from suffering!

3. Cut at Angles

When you are working on trees and shrubs, make sure to cut dead leaves at an angle, and not too close to buds. Buds are found where plants branch off into leaves and so you will typically find dead debris there.

Make sure to get rid of all the dead matter, but remember to avoid the buds! If you cut too close, they may dry out. New growth will cease, and disease could set in.

4. Make Sure Plants Are Spaced Properly

If you have too many plants crowded into a single area, it’s helpful to thin out stems. To do so, remove stems that have decreased in flower production or have grown much taller than the others.

If your stems are still crowded, then move onto the next step. Prune other candidates down to their bottom bud to allow sunlight to evenly reach all the plants.

Pruning tends to be a lot easier when your garden is organized. If you keep up with these simple steps to help keep your garden organized, they will help keep your garden looking as beautiful as ever!