Our Top 10 Favorite Gardening Tips

Inside: Know what you get when you combine 56 plus 30 years of gardening experience? Ann and Amy’s top 10 favorite gardening tips! Read on to find out our faves.

Daisies from the garden. — Something as simple as a daisy can be so lovely in the garden!

A Lifetime Digging in the Dirt

When you’ve been in the garden as long as we have, you learn a few things. My earliest memory of garden life goes back to around age four when Grandpa planted the acre below our house in tomatoes, melons, corn, cucumbers, and even peanuts. He lined us up in assembly-line fashion to help–my uncle Mark, brother Vince, and me–each with a job. We followed behind him, Grandpa making holes, Mark planting seeds, Vince covering up the seeds, and me stepping my two little feet on top to seal the deal.

Mom’s first appearance in the garden was around six when she helped her grandma pull onions and radishes out of the ground.

In both cases, gardening is in a our blood, and we’ve been at it for a while, that’s for sure. What follows here is a list of our top 10 favorite gardening tips, in no particular order.

Those Top 10 Favorite Gardening Tips

Pinch off flowers when transplanting. So you bring home all those gorgeous plants that already have flowers and you can’t possibly imagine removing those early buds. But if you prune the top of your plant a few inches (Mom suggests taking the top third off, unless it’s really small) you will have a fuller, healthier plant with more flowers. The proof is in the pictures.
A pot full of profusion zinnias, thanks to early pruning.

Zinnias I didn’t prune, looking a little Charlie Brown-ish.

Both of these pots have profusion zinnias, one reddish orange, the other salmon colored, but the container with reddish orange flowers was pinched off, the pot of salmon colored wasn’t. . . If Mom had a dollar for every time she’s given this piece of advice, she’d probably, well, buy a whole lot more plants!
Take cuttings and start new plants. If you follow tip number one, you will have a lot of cuttings. Mom takes hers and sticks them directly into soil. You can use rooting compound if you’d like, but usually I don’t. Below is a picture of coleus cuttings turned healthy plants. Begonias work great, too.
One of my favorite pots full of plants grown from coleus cuttings.
Keep a filled water can next to your container plants. If you’re like me, you tend to discover a particularly parched plant on your way to the car. No time to bring that hose around and do a decent watering job, but you can give a little drink to keep your plants happy until you get home later.
Use purple cabbage as an ornamental. I love doing this! The cabbage has such lovely purple leaves and adds texture to your flower beds or containers
Purple cabbage–it’s not just for eating any more!
Keep planting into summer. Seems like once Mother’s Day is past, most wannabee gardeners decide they can no longer plant. Not true! Check out your frost date and do a little planting math to make sure you’ll get a crop or flowers. June and July are wonderful months for planting. And don’t forget those sales at your garden center!
Create one area of beauty. This tip comes from advice Mom gave for saving money in the garden back when I interviewed her a couple of years ago. While I have a few different beds, I think this is perfect advice for those who lack the funds for an elaborate garden or don’t have a lot of spare time for taking care of a big set-up.
My favorite area of beauty–the Stump Garden.
Fill the bottom of your pots with natural material. I’m talking twigs, grass clippings, leaves, etc. Mom had so many helicopters (maple tree seeds) that she used those in a lot of her pots. You might be wondering, why bother? To save money on potting soil, for starters. Also those twigs and grass clippings and leaves are quite a bit lighter than pots filled totally with potting soil. Plus, depending on what you use, you’re more than likely adding a bit of natural fertilizer to the mix. Which leads me to the next favorite tip. . .
Use natural fertilizers. Mom sprinkles her coffee grounds around her plants and chops up old bananas and peels, burying them a couple of inches into the ground around other plants.
Trench composting. Dig a hole and dump in your kitchen scraps.

I make weed teas and collect my food scraps for compost. And, one of my favorite tricks is, after dumping out the compost bucket, running water into it and using that rinse water for plants that need a little boost. I accidentally stumbled upon this a couple of years ago when I absentmindedly rinsed the compost bucket and poured that water around my pepper plants–a habit I continued for several months. Toward the end of the season I was scratching my head as to why the peppers were doing so well when I remembered my compost bucket habit. By the way, you can also use water you’ve boiled vegetables in after it’s cooled.
Upend pots to use as a pedestal to raise other containers higher. I’ve got a hodgepodge of various flowers and containers around my steps, and sometimes a plant gets lost in the jungle. I take a cheap terra cotta pot and turn it over to use as a pedestal to give height to a plant that would otherwise disappear among its neighbors. Mom taught me that one.
Grouping pots together that have the same plants to create a larger, fuller display. I learned this tip from Mom when I was watering her plants while she was on vacation. At first glance it looked like she had a huge peace plant. Upon closer examination, I noticed she had positioned several smaller pots around a large one in the center, which created the appearance of one huge, lush plant. Beautiful!
So there you have it–Ann and Amy’s top 10 favorite gardening tips! Why not try one or more of these tips, and, while you’re at it, leave a comment and share with us your favorite tip. That way we can learn from each other.

The great thing about gardening is that there’s always room to grow.

Putting coleus pots together for one of our top 10 favorite gardening tips.