Garden Variety: 100 skills to make you a better gardener - Mid-Atlantic gardening: Tips and pictures on flowers, vegetables, public gardens, composting and farmers’ markets

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June 1, 2009

100 skills to make you a better gardener

Fine Gardening magazine's August issue arrived in the mailbox with a wonderful, truly helpful, cover story: 100 skills to make you a better gardener.

I am not going to list them all here - and I probably won't do all of them either - but this is a great set of tasks for the self-taught gardener to do to help develop his or her skills.

Among them:

Determine the orientation of your house. Which way, exactly, is south?
Buy a good set of pruners and then prune a shrub rose. Learn how to sharpen your pruners.
Design and plant a container garden.
Learn to identify poison ivy, oak and sumac.
Buy a good shovel and learn how to sharpen it.
Force a bulb
Learn how to remove a tick
Determine your area's average rainfall and identify your microclimate.
Learn to keep good records.
Learn to tell the good bugs from the bad bugs.
Mix your own potting soil.
Lay a path.

(The article isn't available in the on-line version of the magazine. It looks like you'll have to buy it at the newstand.)

Posted by Susan Reimer at 7:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Magazine rack

Comments

Boy, this will discourage people from becoming gardeners! Remove a tick, roll around in poison ivy and force a bulb (no gentle coaxing?)

Posted by: Dahlink | June 2, 2009 3:08 PM

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About Susan Reimer

Susan Reimer has spent 16 years writing about raising kids - among other topics - in her column for The Baltimore Sun. And every time son Joseph or daughter Jessie passed another milestone - driver's license, college, wedding or a move to a new military duty station - she has planted another garden. Now she will be writing about those gardens - and yours - here on Garden Variety.

Susan isn't an expert gardener, but she wasn't an expert mother, either. Both - the kids and the gardens - seem to be doing well in spite of her.

She lives in Annapolis with her husband, Gary Mihoces, who loves to cut his grass but has noticed that there seems to be less of it every time the kids pass another milestone.

Follow @susanreimer on Twitter