Favorite Gardening Tip

We’re just coming out of one of the most beautiful, snowy winters Utah has had in years and gone straight into the moodiest, rainiest spring that has greened everything up and brought out the loveliest blooms. The birds sing out their choruses each morning and dew drops are sprinkled over the grass as the sun sleepily stretches over the mountains to warm the earth.

The last big snowstorm, I had to build a snowman to celebrate.

Okay here’s our secret to easy gardening:

We’ve been watching our garden flourish with all the water, and thanks to our hard work the past five years, this is the least we’ve ever had to weed. Our secret? Very thick mulch. No landscaping tarp, no endless spraying of poisons (we did do that at first to get it under control before the mulch, morning glory is a huge pain in the tushy and we had a giant battle with it in a corner of our yard for several years). I feel like landscaping tarp would be a good idea if you could afford to do your entire garden at once, but we couldn’t at the time and we are still constantly moving plants around or adding more bulbs. We would always be cutting more holes in the tarp to add plants. So landscaping tarp doesn’t make sense for us right now in our flower garden, but we are considering redoing our vegetable beds and laying down tarp before building up the raised beds. We try to keep four inches of mulch over our entire garden. It’s really helped keep the weeds down as I’ve said, but it also makes any weeds that grow very easy to pull out. They have to grow at least four inches to reach sunlight, so the roots are very leggy and flimsy. It also keeps the soil moist which saves tons of water, especially in Utah’s dry climate, and the potato bugs and worms love it. Our soil was so crappy when we moved in because we live on an ancient lake bed (lots of clay) but the layers of mulch have started to decompose at the very bottom and we now have healthy soil without needing a constant coat of fertilizer over the whole thing. The only downside to the mulch is we’ve acquired a little garden gnome who loves to sneak the larger pieces out of the garden and runs around like crazy keeping them away from us.

Don’t let your white dog walk over your freshly-mown grass if it’s at all wet.

We usually wait for a sale at our local home and garden stores (Lowe’s and/or Home Depot) to buy mulch every year. Memorial Day is a good time to watch for those sales. If you need a ton, it may also be cheaper to get a trailer and go to a landfill or garden center that sells mulch by cubic yards, but you may have less choice in color and size of chips. Well there’s are biggest weeding secret! Go get lots of mulch this year! Once you have the mulch covering everything, you can follow other number one Weeding Rule: Never walk past a weed! We do garden walks pretty consistently once a day from April-October. While we’re walking, if we see a weed, we immediately pull it. It takes less than three seconds, thanks to the mulch, and that way we stay on top of everything! No weekly or monthly grueling weeding in the hot summer sun! So there you go, our two best weeding tips. Inches of mulch and daily weeding of thirty seconds or less! I’ll work on compiling more posts on gardening tips as the summer goes on. In other gardening news I cut some tulips for our kitchen this morning, and it kinda hurt my heart to clip their stems, but part of the reason why I planted flowers was so I could make my own bouquets, so I’ll just have to get over that. Now here’s way too many photos of our flowers over the past month and a half, so skip over them if all you wanted was to steal our gardening secrets. 🙂