TIDBITS
TIDBITS
My experience is that kids take to gardens in different ways depending on their ages, temperaments and, yes, even gender. Of course, children develop at different rates; this is no abbreviated horticultural version of the popular child-raising series "What to Expect...
When You're Expecting... The First Year," etc. But a trowel full of guidance goes a long way to matching the child with the gardening activity.
Preschoolers, Ages 3-4: As long as I don't expect us to accomplish something in the adult sense of the phrase, gardening is great fun. We move mulch. We catch toads. We pull a few weeds. We blow the fuzz off dandelions. If a child wants to plant last night's dessert — watermelon seeds, we do just that.
This age of unbridled exploration must be accompanied exploration. Preschoolers are never safe unattended. And while you're together, you have a chance to explain the life cycle of a seed or the history of evolution in an ancient fern. Let kids take the lead while you supply the background information. It's in the storytelling that kids learn about gardening and the world. Don't know all the answers? No one does. Library trips are part of the journey.
Kindergartners, Age 5: "All the world's a stage" for youngsters who have an emerging sense of how to play with others. Gardens, great places to act out dramas, will serve children for a half dozen years or more. Create forts, tree houses, secret hide-a-ways, and kids' own gardens where children can interact and learn.
Continue to let kids take the lead. If your child sees a hollow stump as a potential troll house, drop your pruning shears and join him in inspecting it. Help him gather the supplies he needs to make the project happen. Assist only where needed — say in lashing sticks together to make a ladder, or by offering leftover nasturtium seeds or marigold seedlings to embellish his ideas.
At last, kids this age have the attention span and dexterity to be left within sight to create their own worlds. And don't fuss about how those little Edens turn out. The world was a messy place during its creation.
Elementary Schoolers, Ages 6-7: Your youngster's improving reading and math skills add new depth to gardening fun. Now kids can make plant markers, read seed packets, pore over catalogs, and pay for nursery plants. And yet they're still wide-eyed and open to nature's mysteries. Soil, holes, and water hold endless fascination, as do bugs.
But for children this age, the "doing" is still more important than the end result. For them, a garden is a willy nilly collection of plants of all shapes, sizes, and colors. A bouquet is whatever fits in the diameter of a palm and curled fingers and whose stems reach into a jar full of water.
Middle Schoolers, Ages 8-9: The emphasis shifts from doing to doing well. Your children can design a garden on graph paper, thinking about flower heights and colors or how much space a tomato plant will need. They can translate that drawing to a real garden.
Their ability to use tools increases; they can build arbors and fences. It's never too early, but now is an especially wonderful time to enter your vegetables and bouquets in contests at the local fair or town events or to join a group such as a community garden, CSA, or 4-H. These activities combine gardening with friendships — both so important now.
Middle Schoolers, Ages 10-11: Now gardening celebrates its ability to cross several disciplines with ease to speak to your children's many interests. Garden is science, math, art, and still fun. Your youngsters can organize a class project to create a small garden at the local nursing home — and gain the support of businesses and parent volunteers. They can build garden structures and community. They can start seeds and businesses. We know a couple of boys whose award-winning sunflowers at the fair launched their own sunflower seed business.
And the opportunities for fun in the garden are endless. With a little imagination, this year's scarecrows can look like the Spice Girls, or Arthur, or the scariest dementor Harry Potter ever met.
In-Betweeners: They may not be teenagers yet, but you'd never know it. At this age, if youngsters don't take a hiatus from gardening in favor of friends and anything currently "way cool," they can put their green thumbs to work in the family landscape and in community projects. While focusing on sports, fashion, or school plays fills their days to overflowing, how can gardening compete? In a word, it has to be "awesome." And it is.
Many students now do independent studies, such as "eighth-grade challenges," to demonstrate their mastery of a subject. These are the years when some gardening project guided by a biology teacher, group leader, neighbor, or parent just may set some youngsters on career paths. It's enough to hope your child will grow up to garden, but who knows, you may have a budding botanist or future horticulturist in the family.
There is nothing quite as welcome as those beautiful spring flowers that seem to emerge from nowhere to welcome the arrival of spring. Bulb type flowers are really unique plants, because they spend most of their days resting quietly beneath the surface of the soil. Then right on schedule, up they come, full of bloom and vigor, and then almost as fast as they came, they go. Except for the green leafy part of the plant that tends to linger longer than we would like them to.
Despite their short bloom time and unattractive foliage after the blooms are gone, they are still a wonderful addition to any landscape. But how should you care for them? First let’s talk about how to use them in your landscape. Flowers of all kinds are best when planted in groupings. Many people buy 25 or 50 bulbs and just go around the yard planting helter skelter. That’s fine if that’s what you want, but when planted that way they tend to blend in with the landscape and really don’t show up well at all. When you plant them in large groups they are a breathtaking showpiece.
In the early spring start thinking about where you would like to create a bed for flower bulbs. Prepare the bed by raising it with good rich topsoil, and if at all possible add some well composted cow manure. Do this in the spring while you are in the gardening mood, you may not be in the fall. Over the summer fill the bed with annual flowers to keep the weeds down, and to pretty up your yard for the summer. Come fall all you have to do is pull out the annuals and plant your bulbs to the depth recommended on the package.
If you think you could have a problem with squirrels digging up the bulbs and eating them, you can also wrap the bulbs in steel wool, leaving just the tip of the bulb exposed so it can grow out of the little wire cage you’ve created. Or you can just plant the bulbs and then cover the bed with chicken wire or plastic fencing until the bulbs start to grow in the spring.
When the bulbs come up in the spring and start blooming, you should clip off the blooms as they start to wither. This keeps the bulb from producing seeds, which requires a lot of energy, and you want the bulb to use all of its available energy to store food in preparation of the bulb’s resting period. Once the bulbs are completely done blooming you don’t want to cut off the tops until they are withered and die back. The million dollar question is how to treat the tops until that happens.
Many people bend them over and slip a rubber band over them, or in the case of bulbs like Daffodils tie them with one of the long leaves. This seems to work because it is a very common practice among many experienced gardeners.
I strongly disagree with this theory because back about 6th grade we learned about photosynthesis in science class. To recap what we learned, and without going into the boring details, photosynthesis is the process of the plant using the sun’s rays to make food for itself. The rays from the sun are absorbed by the foliage and the food making process begins. In the case of a flower bulb this food is transported to the bulb beneath the ground and stored for later use.
So basically the leaves of the plant are like little solar panels. Their job is to absorb the rays from the sun to begin the process known as photosynthesis. If we fold them over and handcuff them with their hands behind their back, they are not going to be able to do their job. It’s like throwing a tarpaulin over 80% of a solar panel.
In order for the leaves to absorb the rays from the sun, the surface of the foliage has to be exposed to the sun. On top of that, when you bend the foliage over, you are restricting the flow of nutrients to the bulb. The veins in the leaves and the stem are a lot like our blood vessels. If you restrict them the flow stops.
You decide. I’ve presented my case. Bending them over seems to work, but those who've spent a lot of money on bulbs want them running at full speed. So clip the blooms off once they are spent, and just leave the tops alone until they are yellow and wilted. If they are still not wilted when it’s time to plant annual flowers, just plant the annuals in between the bulbs. As the bulbs die back the annuals tend to grow and conceal them. If one shows through, clip it off. This seems to work well.
Keeping your landscape plantings, flower beds, and nursery crops free of weeds is a battle, but if you approach it with a strategic plan, you will prevail. In order to develop a plan, you first must understand how weeds work, and what kind of weeds you are dealing with.
Basically weeds grow either from seed, or they reproduce from their roots. As the roots grow outward from the parent plant, new plants sprout up from the lateral roots, creating more parent plants and the process continues and the weeds thrive. Weeds that tend to reproduce from the root are usually more difficult to control.
Weed controls facts? Weeds are plants, and they function just like the desirable plants in your yard. They need water, sunlight, and nutrition to survive. Of these three key survival needs, the easiest one for a gardener to eliminate is sunlight. Through proper mulching you can eliminate the sunlight.
But first, let’s look at the steps you should go through before you mulch, then we’ll discuss the best mulching techniques to use. In order for your weed control efforts to be truly effective, you should do everything in your power to make your gardens as weed free as possible before you plant or mulch. There are a couple of ways you can go about this, either organically or with chemicals. I don’t like using chemicals, but I do use them for weed control, and I use them for pest control when necessary.
I’ll discuss organic control first. The first thing you should do is remove all unwanted vegetation from your planting area. Using a hoe, spade or other digging device, undercut the roots and remove the undesirable plants, roots and all. Then you should work the soil by rototilling or turning the soil by hand.
Once worked, let the soil sit for four days or so, and work it again. Keep doing this over and over as long as time permits. This process serves two purposes. It brings the roots that were left in the soil close to the surface so they can be dried by the sun, which will make them non viable, and it disturbs the weed seeds that have started to germinate, which makes them non viable as well. The longer you continue this process the more weeds you are eliminating from your garden.
Weed control facts? Depending on the time of the year, there are a few billion weed seeds drifting through the air at any given time, so to think that you can eventually rid a garden of weed seed is false thinking, but at least this process is effective for the remaining roots, which are the most difficult to control.
With that process complete, go ahead and plant your garden. When you’re done planting you can either mulch the bed, or keep turning the soil on a weekly basis to keep it free of weeds. Most people opt to mulch. Not only does mulch help to control the weeds, but if you select a natural mulch it also adds organic matter to the soil which makes for better gardening results down the road.
Before mulching you can spread newspaper (7-9 layers thick) over the soil and place the mulch over top of that. The newspaper will block the sunlight from reaching the surface of the soil and help to keep weed growth to a minimum. The newspaper will eventually decompose, and not permanently alter the make up of your garden. Paper grocery bags also work well, so the next time you hear, “Paper or Plastic?”, you’ll know how to answer.
What about black plastic, or the weed barrier fabric sold at garden centers? I don’t like either and I’ll tell you why. For one, neither one of them ever go away, and the make up of your garden is forever altered until you physically remove them, which is a real pain in the butt.
Weed Control facts? Plastic is no good for the soil because soil needs to breath. Plastic blocks the transfer of water and oxygen, and eventually your soil will suffer as will your garden. It’s all right to use plastic in a vegetable garden as long as you remove it at the end of the season and give the soil a chance to breathe.
Weed barrier fabrics allow the soil to breathe, but what happens is that when you mulch over top of the fabric, which you should because the fabric is ugly, the mulch decomposes and becomes topsoil. Weeds love topsoil, and they will grow like crazy in it. Only problem is, they are growing on top of the fabric, and you are stuck with a ton of problems, like a weedy garden, and a major job of trying to remove the fabric that is now firmly anchored in place because the weeds have rooted through it.
Weed fabric is also porous enough that if an area becomes exposed to the sunlight, enough light will peek through and weeds below the fabric will grow, pushing their way through the fabric. I don’t like the stuff.
Weed control facts? Controlling weeds with chemicals is fairly easy, and very effective if done properly. I know that many people don’t approve of chemical weed controls, but millions of people use them, so I might as well tell you how to get the most effect using them.
There are two types of chemical weed controls, post-emergent, and pre-emergent. In a nutshell, a post-emergent herbicide kills weeds that are actively growing. A pre-emergent prevents weed seeds from germinating. Of the post- emergent herbicides there are both selective and non-selective herbicides. A selective herbicide is like the herbicides that are in weed and feed type lawn fertilizers. The herbicide will kill broad leaf weeds in your lawn, but it doesn’t harm the grass.
One of the most popular non-selective herbicides is Round-up®, it pretty much kills any plant it touches. Rule number one. Read the labels and follow the safety precautions!!! Round-up® is very effective if used properly, but first you must understand how it works.
Round-up® must be sprayed on the foliage of the plant, where it is absorbed, then translocated to the root system where it then kills the plant. It takes about 72 hours for the translocation process to completely take place, so you don’t want to disturb the plant at all for at least 72 hours after it has been sprayed.
After 72 hours you can dig, chop, rototill, and pretty much do as you please because the herbicide has been translocated through out the plant. The manufacturer claims that Round-up® does not have any residual effect, which means that you can safely plant in an area where Round-up® has been used. However, I would not use it in vegetable garden without researching further.
No residual effect also means that Round-up® has no effect whatsoever on weed seeds, so there is absolutely no benefit to spraying the soil. Only spray the foliage of the weeds you want to kill. Be careful of over spray drifting to your desirable plants. To prevent spray drift I adjust the nozzle of my sprayer so that the spray droplets are larger and heavier, and less likely to be carried by the wind. I also keep the pressure in the tank lower, by only pumping the tank a minimum number of strokes. Just enough to deliver the spray.
Buy a sprayer that you can use as a dedicated sprayer for Round-up® only. Never use a sprayer that you have used for herbicides for any other purpose. Once you have sprayed the weeds, waited 72 hours and then removed them, you can go ahead and plant. Mulching is recommended as described above. To keep weed seeds from germinating you can apply a pre-emergent herbicide.
Depending on the brand, some of them are applied over top of the mulch, and some are applied to the soil before the mulch is applied. A pre-emergent herbicide creates a vapor barrier at the soil level that stops weed seed germination, and can be very effective at keeping your gardens weed free. They usually only last about 5 or 6 months and need to be re-applied.
Visit a full service garden center and seek the advice of a qualified professional to select the pre-emergent herbicide that will best meet your needs. Never use a pre-emergent herbicide in your vegetable garden, and be careful around areas where you intend to sow grass seed. If you spill a little in an area where you intend to plant grass, the grass will not grow, they really do work.
That’s what I know about weed control. Read this article several times, your success depends on getting the sequence of events correct.
Have a question about gardening or just need a more experienced opinion? We'd love to hear from you - email us direct at dher@bellsouth.net or by clicking the link below! 
Ask Diana
Page by Melissa Tabor
Copyright 2005 Mystic Waters & Gardens All Rights Reserved
Have questions, comments, or problems with this site? Please Tell Us