To Landscape Or Not To Landscape?
If you have more than a small town garden, then landscaping your garden will probably be one of your considerations. If you have just acquired the property, or you think that it is time for a garden make-over, there are methods of going about it. The easiest technique of going about planning a garden, is to first take a good look at the landscape of your garden. This can be difficult if the garden is established and in full bloom.
Therefore, it can be better to delay until autumn or winter, so that you can see the true lie of the land. You could make a plan of the garden on graph paper and take a lot of photos too. Identify the photos on the back of them and relate them to the grid on your graph paper. There may be bumps and hollows, potholes, rocky areas and even a marsh or a pond to deal with.
These are almost certainly natural features and if you want to change them, you will have to tackle the fundamental cause. The feature is only the symptom. Like freckles or spots! If you look at the state of affairs in this way, it makes planning simpler.
For example, a rocky patch probably means that the Earth is throwing stones up gradually and if you want to clean it up, you will be picking up stones for the remainder of your life. Likewise, if your wet patch is the result of natural drainage from higher ground, you will have to drain it and put in permanent drainage, because it is not going to stop raining for you.
So, you can either work with nature or you will be working against it for the rest of your life. Either that or paying someone else to do it for you. Another point is that the wildlife that uses your area does so because of how it is. If you change the landscape, your current range of wildlife might move on or just die. A lot depends on how much land we are talking about, but in general, I would say that the larger the plot, the more you should leave it alone.
On the other hand, you can add features more easily than remove them. For instance, if you have an area with poor soil, you could improve it with compost or put a pond there. Shade and existing fences or sheds should also be noted on your graph paper, although being man-made, these are simpler to remove or alter.
Next you should decide what type of garden you want, within the constraints of the existing landscape, how much work you are prepared to put into it and how much money you want to spend on it. Enhancing the natural features of the land is the easiest way of landscaping your garden.
If you have a swampy area, why not put a low wall around it and turn it into a pond? If you have a rocky patch, why not collect up the stones and build a rockery? If you have a couple of trees, try growing wisteria, honeysuckle or vines through them.
If you are in the shade, buy flowers that prefer the shade and vice-versa. It is a effort to go against nature and unless you have a good cause to do it, it is not really worthwhile. Then build a patio or deck and sit outside and enjoy all the landscaping that you have saved yourself in your garden.
Owen Jones, the writer of this article, writes on many topics, but is currently involved with outdoor heat lamp. If you are interested in patio heaters too, please click through to Residential Patio Heaters.
Techniques For Keeping Cats Out Of Your Garden
It is very difficult to keep cats out of your garden, but do not give up, it can be managed. Cat owners may not understand why gardeners want to prevent cats gaining access to their gardens, but there are justifiable reasons, it is not always that gardeners hate cats. Cats are ferocious hunters and can also be very destructive.
For example, my next door neighbour had a cat, but felt lonely when her daughter moved away, so she permitted the cat to to have young. Now she has six cats. But cats are not like dogs. My dog stays in my garden not upsetting anyone apart from by barking if a stranger walks past the gate However, that is his job and he is not only telling me but the neighbours as well. These six cats do not stay in their own garden though, so we have all acquired six cats whether we want them or not.
The first problem I became aware of was that birds stopped coming to pick my dog’s bowl clean in the afternoon. Then I saw a cat eating a lizard, a beautiful nine inch specimen and then I remembered not seeing a lot of lizards lately. There is one lizard, the Tokay, that they have completely wiped out – I used to listen to them calling at night, but no more.
Cats also dig up flowers when they defecate and use furniture as scratching boards, so I do not want these destructive animals in my garden. But how do you keep cats out of your garden?
Walls are rarely protection against cats, but cats will often prowl along the base of walls and if they come across a gap, they will probably go in out of inquisitiveness, so plug all low-level opennings in your fences. There is not much you can do about the top of your wall short of putting broken glass or electrified wiring up there, but that is not a nice idea.
Some dogs are good at keeping cats away, but not all. My dog got a nasty and completely unexpected swipe of claws across his nose one day. He used to chase them when they were kittens, but now they have grown up, he only growls to tell me a cat is on the premises. I cannot blame him.
In Australia, many gardeners believe that transparent bottles full of water confuse cats, so they stay away, but in my experience, only Australian cats react in that manner.
A row of prickly bushes or flowers along the base of a wall where cats frequently come in works. At the bottom of high walls too, where the cat cannot see them until he is on top of the wall. I often see cats mewing (in frustration, I hope) on the top of one of my walls. The only route down is to go back.
If you still cannot keep cats out, then you will need to train them not to come in. This is easiest accomplished by using a few methods. If cats are using your flower pots are conveniences, try smearing the pots with pepper, lavender, lemon, mustard, or tobacco. Or you could leave a mothball in each pot. Some of these will have the desired result for you, others will not.
Then there are industrial repellents, but I do not want to resort to them. However, if you have a big garden and a big problem, it might be the only way. There are also high frequency sound emitters. Humans cannot hear them, but almost all animals can, so I think that that is deplorable as well.
At night, motion-activated external lighting is a great upset to cats. Cats have very sensitive night vision so a quick flash from a floodlamp really puts them off a garden.
The best deterrent is water. You can get motion-activated sprinklers, which are excellent at keeping cats out of your garden, but I like to sit in my office or in the garden with a powerful water pistol and squirt them by hand. The lizards have not come back yet, but neither do the cats quite so often either.
Owen Jones, the writer of this article writes on quite a few topics, but is at present concerned with visual comfort lighting. If you would like to know more or check out some great offers, please go to our website at Outdoor Wall Lamps.
Why You Have To Keep Your Koi Fish Pond Clean
The first priority of any koi pond keeper, indeed of any fish pond keeper, it to maintain the pond water at a high level of hygiene. This basically means that you have to keep the nitrate and ammonia levels down. However, the fish will not help in this endeavour, and nor can they, since they live and defecate in their environment, the water. You could rightly say that the live in their own toilet bowl.
Therefore, it is up to you, as their patron, to keep their water as clean as possible. This is really not so hard and much or the cleansing process can be automated, leaving you, the owner, to only have to carry out routine, weekly tests.
The first check that you should carry out can be made on a daily basis if not more frequently, when you feed your fish, does the water look clear? Is it green? Are there lots of leaves floating around in it? If it is translucent enough to see the bottom of the pond, you are probably doing OK, but do not rely on that, wait for the weekly chemical check up.
Never forget that you have manufactured an unnatural environment for your fish to live in. It is nearer to nature that a fish tank, but it is a long way from being a river or a duck pond. This is why the bigger your pond is, the simpler it will be to maintain, because the closer it will be to the real thing.
The smaller your pond, the more that you will have to depend on water filtration and aeration systems to keep the water crystal clear. One way of helping to maintain clear water is not to over feed. Most fish pond owners give far more fish food that the fish require.
This results in more excrement and more rotting food on the bottom of the pond. All this excess energy in the water is happily soaked up by algae, which will also draw the oxygen out of the water as it blooms. If you find yourself in this position, the first thing to do is reduce the amount of fish food and scrape the sides of the pond of algae. If you do not, the lack of oxygen will stress out your fish and stressed fish are more susceptible to disease.
Keep the water in your pond circulating as much as possible, as this will reintroduce oxygen into the water that the fish, algae and plants have used up. The standard ways of doing this are to have a fountain, a waterfall and an oxygenator (or bubbler, like you see in fish tanks).
Another way of dealing with oxygen and algae issues is to not overstock your fish pond. Koi will breed freely, so if you just start your population off with a few fish, you will soon have many more. They know when there are too many of them and they will eat the fry or control the breeding in other ways. If you do all you can to give your fish a good environment, they will do the rest.
Owen Jones, the author of this article, writes on many subjects, but is at present concerned with fish pond accessories. If you are interested in a Solar Powered Pond Pump, please go to our web site now for some great deals.
Sponsors
 |
 |