Whether you are starting a garden for the first time or are a seasoned gardener, your main goal is to grow large healthy fruits, vegetables or flowers. Both flower gardens and vegetable gardens require their own unique combination of soil, water, sun and fertilizer to properly thrive. It takes diligence and commitment to create and maintain a beautiful and productive garden, but all the hard work is well worth it. With the right care, there will come a day when you can finally pick bouquets of flowers to brighten your home, and use homegrown vegetables as fresh healthy ingredients in your meals.

With proper fertilization, any garden plants can grow large and healthy and produce amazing flower blooms and crisp delicious vegetables. One of the more recent innovations in garden fertilizing is organic compost tea, which is bagged, aged compost steeped in water for an extended period of time, usually a minimum of two weeks. Organic compost tea can be made from your own compost pile or it can be purchased from a store or online retailer. Once the “tea” has been properly steeped it can be used as food for the roots to encourage growth. Organic compost tea can also be diluted and used in a sprayer bottle on the leaves and foliage of the plants to provide helpful bacteria and deter pests.

The most important thing to remember when making organic compost tea is the age of the compost being used. Compost that is too fresh can potentially burn the leaves and roots of the plants, and compost that is too old will not have any of the nutrient benefits required for a good tea. If trying to use the right age compost for your own steeped tea sounds too complicate and involved, there’s nothing wrong with buying an organic compost tea from a merchant. There are a vast variety of compost teas on the market, all with their own unique benefits for different types of plants and gardens. With a little shopping around you can find exactly what you need to provide the best plant food to your growing flower or vegetable garden.

Along with a beautiful garden, we want a breathtaking lawn to accent our thriving vegetables and flowers, but this is often a tricky task. Many of us know the feeling of encountering low spots in our yard when we are mowing. It is often an unexpected surprise and downright unpleasant if it jars our body on the mower. Rolling a lawn can help level a yard, but you have to catch it at just the right time when the ground is still wet but not too wet. If you miss that window of ideal moisture levels, rolling efforts are in vain. An easier solution is the practice of organic topsoil dressing. This process involves placing topsoil over the existing grass and into the grooves, holes or divots created by decaying roots, sunken pipes or any other shift in the landscape. Placing organic topsoil over the grass is far easier than tilling an entire area down just to make one particular spot on the same level of the surrounding lawn. Organic topsoil dressing will also provide beneficial nutrients to the existing grass encouraging it to grow up through and take root in the new soil.

About the Author

Brian Skyler writes for www.antiquebrick.org and has been blogging about gardening and landscaping for over 7 years. Since his early days, he has always had a green thumb and looks forward to the time he spends in his garden.