Hummingbird and Butterfly Gardening: Butterfly Host Plant Seed Exchange? Anyone interested?!, 1 by beckygardener

beckygardener wrote:
Grampapa - Welcome to this wonderful and helpful group of gardeners who just happen to love butterflies and caterpillars!

Everyone - I want to share 2 things I have discovered that have helped me with my gardening.

First - I have started trying to garden without digging up the ground. Here's how it works - In the early fall but no later than early winter - take newspaper and lay all over the area on the ground that you want to use for a garden. Spray it with the hose and soak all the newspaper to hold it down. Be sure to use at least 10 layers of newspaper everywhere and then cover with a heap of mulch about 6 inches deep. Leave it there until you are ready to do your Spring planting. The longer it sits, the better to completely kill all the grass/weeds/etc. underneath. When you are ready to plant, just push the mulch away from a small area in the garden where you are going to place a plant. I do an X cut, fold back the newspaper, dig out the dirt for the size of your plant, mix in some compost and good soil, put the plant in the hole, add more compost and good soil around plant, fold newspaper back over the area around the new plant, re-cover with mulch, and there you go! Move on to the next spot you want to add another plant.

I have actually done this with my herb garden, both of the side gardens along my backyard fence, and that is also how I did much of the front garden. I physcially can NOT dig up the ground. Of course, if you are removing plants, then you will have to do some digging and plant removal. It was a real chore to remove the shrubs we had in the front yard along the house. Luckily our yard was pretty bare except for grass/weeds before I put in several of the new gardens. So the newspaper/mulch did the trick for me! You can actually do this any time of the year, but it works best when everything is dying from the onset of winter.

Try it! It actually works. Remember - the trick is to smother and kill the growth underneath the newspapers & mulch. So the longer it is down, the better!

A fence trellis:
The second little trick I have used and this may or may not work for many of you. It really depends on how your fence is built. When we had our new fence put in, we just happened to get the kind of fence that has two horizontal supports that are about 2 inches deep across both the top and the bottom of the fence. I was trying to figure out how to get a trellis on the fence because the fence is vinyl and there was nothing for the plants to hold onto. I was looking in Home Depot and saw just plain vinyl lattice and an idea came to me. Why not buy some sheets of that and cut it in strips and mount it to the fence. The only thing was that I did NOT want to be drilling holes all over my new fence. So I bought packages of 14" and 24" long plastic multi-purpose ties. I cut the lattice into 2' wide and some were cut into 1' wide strips and fastened them to the fence using the ties. (See photo.) (The lattice came in 8' X 4' sections.) Instead of using the entire piece of lattice on one fence panel, I was able to get enough to do several panels, so it saved me quite a bit of money. And it looks really nice! Because the particular fence I have does have the 2" clearance behind the lattice, I was able to weave my vines in and out of the lattice from the front to the back. I waited to tie down the bottom of the lattice until after my plants were woven through the lattice which made it so much easier to do.

If you are needing a trellis in the middle of your yard .... buy the correct panel of fencing, set the panel into the ground (using concrete) where you need it, and then attach the lattice to it, and weave your vine. The vine will gradually cover both sides of the fence!

I hope I was clear in describing my 2 suggestions. Try it on your next garden project!


This message was edited Oct 15, 2006 9:14 PM