Wednesday, September 25, 2019

Why Your Garden Isn’t Healthy and What To Do About It

The post Why Your Garden Isn’t Healthy and What To Do About It appeared first on Miss Smarty Plants.

Just like people, gardens can catch a cold. Bugs, fungi, and parasites can all infest your yard, damaging and even killing the plants that you’d like to nurture. It’s natural and organic, but it’s certainly not pleasant. 

Keeping your garden healthy is a challenge, but it’s also essential if you want yours to look anything like the ones that you see in the magazines. Take a look at these reasons why your garden isn’t healthy and what you can do about it. 

You’re Not Using Enough Mulch

Mulch is a type of ground covering that you can use to keep the areas around trees and bushes looking pleasant and fresh. But mulch actually does more than provide aesthetic benefits: it prevents the development of weeds. When you have a layer of mulch covering the ground, it’s much more difficult for weeds to take root or make their way up to the surface and sunlight. 

You’re Infested With Slugs

While slugs are a vital part of your garden ecosystem, they have a habit of multiplying in certain conditions, and their numbers can get out of control. When this happens, they munch their way through all the leaves in your garden, leaving carnage in their wake. 

How do you get around this issue? Your best bet is to fill a container with beer and then leave it in areas of your garden that attract slugs. Beer gives off a particular scent that the slugs love, drawing them in. In the morning, you’ll find them accumulated in the container and away from your plants. 

Your Trees Are Diseased

Trees can suffer from a variety of diseases. Worse still many of these are fatal. The good news, however, is that for some illnesses you don’t have to leave a tree to its fate. You can intervene. Oak wilt treatment, for instance, lets you deal with oak wilt disease, something you can manage with the right approach. You can also treat a variety of other conditions that trees in your garden might contract. 

Your Plants Are Crowded

Plants need a certain amount of space to thrive. If they detect that there are other shrubs nearby that might outcompete them for resources, they go dormant until a new opportunity arises. As a gardener, you don’t want this. You want a full, lush garden, replete with plants of your choosing. You don’t want a situation in which particular shrubs refuse to come up. 

The solution is to find a way to make plants less crowded. If you’re planting a new bed, leave plants further apart that seems natural. The plants themselves will grow and mature, growing closer together in the process to produce a full bed. 

You’re Not Using The Right Tools

Healthy gardens require gardeners to have the right tools at their disposal. If you don’t have the correct equipment, you’re not able to do the tasks that’ll keep your garden healthy for years to come, such as planting and pruning. 

Is your garden healthy, or could it be improved? 

The post Why Your Garden Isn’t Healthy and What To Do About It appeared first on Miss Smarty Plants.



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