Have you ever noticed that getting your garden to look perfect is next to impossible. For whatever reason, the neighbor’s garden looks incredible, but yours is still failing to thrive.
It’s not just bad luck. Usually, it means that you’re making some kind of mistake with your landscaping and lawn care. In this post, therefore, we run through some of the mistakes that people commonly make so you don’t fall into the same traps.
Mistake #1: Digging Through Wet Clay Soil
If you live in a clay soil area, you’ll know all about it. If you dig into the soil when wet, it has a putty-like consistency to it. It’s quite strange, actually.
But there’s a problem: if you start digging into the soil when it is in this state, you’ll break down the structures that hold it together, causing it to compactify and become less hospitable to plant life.
If you do have to turn over clay soil, wait for it to dry out a little and then mix it with well-rotted manure as you turn it over.
Mistake #2: Lackluster Weeding
The second mistake that gardeners make is lackluster weeding. Many gardeners believe that they’ve dealt with a weed if they lop off the leaves poking out through the soil. Unfortunately, that doesn’t work and, nine times out of ten, the weed will just grow back.
To really deal with weeds and prevent them from coming back again, you’ll need to dig up as much of the root as you can. You have herbicide, you can use that too to kill the weed all the way down to the roots.
Mistake #3: Allowing The Slugs To Invade
Slug armies can lay siege to your garden at any time. But most people wait until it is too late to deal with the problem.
The time to deal with slugs is in the early spring. If you can hold them off with grit, egg shells and copper tape between March and May, their numbers shouldn’t grow too high come the summer.
Mistake #4: Scalping The Lawn
Scalping the lawn is one of the commonest gardening mistakes that people make. It happens when you set the blade on your lawn mower too low and remove too much of the grass. Ideally, you want to reduce the height of grass by around a third each time you cut it. More than that risks damaging the grass to the point where you’re left with bald patches where the grass is too weak to grow back.
Mistake #5: Getting Your Watering Strategy Wrong
Many novice gardeners water at the wrong time of the day. Most will water at midday or in the afternoon because that’s when they happen to be out in the garden. But providing plants with water at this time of day is a bad idea. Moisture can act as a kind of magnifying glass, scorching the plant leaves below it. Therefore, if you need to water, do it first thing in the morning or later in the evening, when the sun is low in the sky.
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