How do I begin to learn gardening?

K

kittyrat234b

New member
We are renting a house with a garden that clearly used to be a well-tended, beautiful, formal garden. I want to take up gardening and learn how to care for our new garden. Now, it is over-grown and in disarray with huge clumps of the strong (bleeding hearts, lillies of the vally, etc.) choking out all the small plants. I would like to restore its beauty as much as I can.

Should I read a book to the basics of gardening and the care of individual plants? If so, can you recommend some?

Or what is the best way to go about it?

Can you also recommend a publication to use to identify the plants by the leaves and flowers?
 
Ask your landlord to identify the different plants for you. Then look the plants up online. Your probably going to have to thin out a lot of the plants and put bark mulch down around the remaining ones. Cleaning up an established garden isn't that difficult. I'm willing to bet there are only 5 or 6 different types of plants in the garden, the rest are weeds.
 
Read EVERYTHING you can. More important than that is to just put something in the ground. Start small, experiment and keep reading. I started with a few buckets of veggies, my garden is now 75 ft X 75 ft. Just put stuff in the ground, you will learn from mistakes and even mistakes can be pretty.
 
yes one of the best way to learn gardening is reading as much as you can about it you can always ask your neighbors they maybe able to give you an idea about what does grow good around your house and ask them for advise on how they would thin out the garden your local department of ag Extension service is a good place to get reading material for plants and technique in your area and an excellent source of advice on how to thin out the current garden
 
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