Saturday, February 23, 2008

Gardening in a greenhouse:

A refuge for plants and gardener
With a greenhouse you can garden all year around and experiment with ail kinds of plants that you have little chance of growing out in the open garden. A
greenhouse is also a nice, cozy, private place for the gardener whose gardening time Is often interrupted by demands from other family members. If you're
going to buy and install a greenhouse, it's worth getting a good one.
T
here are a great many garden tools on the market. Some are necessary, some are helpful, and some are a complete waste of money. If you're a beginning gardener, approach all this equipment with caution—be sure that you're going to enjoy
being a gardener before you spend a small fortune on tools. Remember, too, that one of your motives in being a gardener Is to save money by growing your
own vegetables; you'll have to grow a lot of lettuce to pay for a $300 rototiller.
When you decide which tools you need, buy the best you can find and take good care of them. As in so many other activities, it's a long-term economy
move to buy good equipment right away—ask any serious cook. Good tools work better and last longer than the cheap kinds that fall to pieces the first
time you need them to do any real work.
The first test of a tool is how it feels in your hands.
Is it well-balanced? Can you lift it when it's full as well as when it's empty? Gardeners and gardening tools come in different sizes and weights; since you'll be
working together, you and your equipment should be compatible.
In caring for your tools, there are three basic rules that are often stated and seldom followed:
1. Clean your tools before putting them away. It may be a bore, but it's even more boring to have to clean them before you can use them again.
2. Have a regular storage place for each tool. Visitors will be impressed by your orderliness, and you'll be able to tell at a glance if you've put everything away or if you've left some small item out in the rain to rust.
3. Use each tool the way it was meant to be used.
For instance, a rake—even a good-quaiity rake—^won't last long if you consistently use it to dig holes or turn soil. You've got a perfectly good spade for those tasks.
Follow these three simple rules and your tools will give you long, efficient, and economical service.

BASIC GARDENING TOOLS
The following are the basic tools of the gardener.
You may not need them all. Consider the type and amount of gardening you do, and choose the implements that best suit your needs.
Shovel and spade. A shovel has a curved scoop and a handle with a handgrip. It's used for lifting, turning, and moving soil. A spade is a sturdy tool with a thick
handle (and a handgrip) and a heavy blade that you press into the ground with your foot. The blade is usually flatter and sharper than the shovel's, and often
squared off at the bottom. A spade is for hard digging work; it should be strong but light enough to handle comfortably. A nursery shovel or nursery spade is an excellent all-around tool in the vegetable garden.
Spading fork. A spading fork is also used for heavy digging, and its two to four prongs make it the best tool for breaking up compacted soil, lifting root
vegetables, and digging weeds. The handle is sturdy and has a handgrip; your foot presses the prongs into the ground. Forks with flexible prongs are called pitchforks; the ones with sturdier, rigid prongs are called spading forks.
Rake. A rake with a long handle and short sturdy metal prongs is used for leveling and grading soil, stirring up the soil surface, and removing lumps, rocks, and shallow-rooted weeds. It's an essential tool for the home gardener. You can also get rakes with longer, flexible fingers. This type is not as versatile as
the first type, but it's good for gentle cultivating, cleaning-up chores like raking the leaves, and collecting trash from between plants.
Hoe. The hoe is a tool with a flat blade attached at right angles to a long handle. It's used for stirring or mounding the soil and for making rows, and it's one
of the gardener's most necessary tools. It's also used for cutting off weeds and cultivating. Trowel. This is a short-handled implement with a
pointed scoop-shaped blade. It can be used as a hand shovel or spade and is useful when transplanting young plants into the garden.
Hose. A garden hose is essential for carrying water to your garden. Hoses are usually made from rubber or vinyl; rubber is more expensive, but it's
worth the initial extra cost because it's far more durable than vinyl and much easier to work with.
Make sure your hose is long enough to reach comfortably to all parts of your garden. An effective hose should probably be no less than 50 feet long.
Choose the planter best suited to your needs.
Planting row guide. A row guide is simply two stakes with a line marked at six-inch intervals stretched between them. It helps you mark straight
rows and plant seeds or plants evenly and quickly. A row guide you make yourself works every bit as well as an expensive store-bought one. To make your own,
just tie a good string line (as long as your garden at its longest point) between two stakes, and mark the line every six inches with colored markers. Come
plantingtime,setupyourguideandpiantalongit.The straight rows of plants you get when you use a guide are easier to weed, water, and harvest than random
plantings.
Plant cages. Although these are commonly referred to as tomato cages, you can also use them to support vining crops like cucumbers and squashes.
They're usually made of wire or covered wire and come in a variety of sizes. They contain the plant in a manageable space and keep it off the ground. Round
cages are the most common, but you can now buy square ones that are a lot more convenient because they fold flat for storage. When you're buying cages, make sure that they're big enough and sturdy enough for the plant variety and that you can get your hand inside to harvest your crop.

TOOLS FOR CONTAINER GARDENING
If you're a container gardener, special tools—in many respects scaled-down versions of regular garden tools—are available for your use.
Hand cultivator. A hand cultivator helps you control weeds. One type has three prongs. The pickax kind has one single-pointed end and a double point on the other end. Choose whatever type you like best. Hand hoe. This has a shorter handle and a smaller blade than a regular garden hoe.
Trowel. No container gardener should be without a trowel—it's even more useful here than in a full-size garden for filling containers, transplanting, dividing clumps of plants, and leveling soil.
Watering equipment. A watering wand makes it easier to reach the less accessible corners of your container garden. The wand is a hollow metal tube that attaches to the end of your hose, and it lets you water the back rows of your container garden without reaching over and possibly crushing the front
rows. If you're an indoor gardener, you will also make good use of a small watering can, and a spray-mister to freshen foliage. Any household spray
bottle makes a good mister, provided it is thoroughly washed out first.
Soil is the thin blanket that exists between sterile rock and the sky. Soil supports all life and is itself, in some measure, the product of living things. For all that, we often treat the soil like, literally, the dirt under our feet. We've developed this careless attitude partly because for generations soil has been dirt cheap. There was never any problem about having enough of it. This is no longer true; good soil is getting harder to find. You can no longer take it for granted that you'll find good garden soil lying around in your backyard. If you live in a residential
or industrial area, you can be pretty sure that after the developers left, not much good soil remained. It was probably removed and sold before the construction began, or buried under the excavation for the foundation of the new buildings. Unless you're a farmer or a commercial grower, chances are you simply lay out your garden in the most convenient spot and make the best of whatever soil happens to be there. But even if what happens to be there is less than ideal, there's a lot you can do to turn it into a healthy, productive garden.
Understanding soil and how plants grow in it will help you make the most of what you've got right there in your own yard.

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