Hello and welcome back to my gardening blog for beginners! As those of you who have been reading know, I have been growing a vegetable garden last summer and that’s a fair bit of work. There’s lots of digging, watering and weeding involved and obviously this is not possible for everyone. Those of you with less time or energy for gardening still deserve something beautiful to look at and so this post is all about how to have a no-stress garden with minimal work. So how do you get a garden if you don’t want to dig? It stands to reason that this should be easy because plants flourish in the wild without any interruption from intrepid gardeners. If you have time and the forethought to plan ahead, it is possible to get the same results as you do with tilling soil and mixing in compost and the secret is newspaper. Simply put a layer of wet newspaper on top of the soil in your garden and put a layer of compost on top – no tilling required. Make a hole in the newspaper for the roots of your plant to reach through. You should do this a few weeks in advance of planting so that the compost and newspaper have a chance to break down. For the plants themselves – choose transplanted young plants rather than seeds for an easier growing process. Next, choose plants that are local to your area that don’t require any input from you because […]

Hello again my fellow green-thumbed gardeners! In my last post I took a look at how to choose your plants and today it’s time to discuss the next stage – what to do now that you’ve purchased your seeds and plotted out what you’ll plant. Assuming that you have chosen a spot in your garden with nice soil and nourished it with compost (I keep a compost heap in my back garden, using it for my plants is a wonderful way to avoid wasting food), it’s time to get stuck in! Most seeds are not that resilient so generally you should plant them when there is no fear of frost. This means that depending on the plant or flower, the middle or spring or autumn are the best times to begin. Easy to grow plants Taking my garden for example, one of the things I have planted is lettuce. Lettuce is particularly easy to grow right from the seed and so I thought it would be a great choice for a beginner gardener like me. Back in May last year I planted the seeds half-an-inch deep and made sure they were covered with soil and thoroughly watered. More fragile plants like tomatoes are easier to care for if you purchase a young plant, rather than trying to grow them from a seed. These are called transplants or set plants. In this case, I simply picked up a young tomato plant and set it directly into the hole I dug for […]