Help Your Gardening Habit Sprout with These Helpful Tips
- Rena Justine
- 16 minutes ago
- 3 min read
By Rena Justine:
For generations, gardening has been a cherished pastime for many people. Today, up to 55% of American households admit that they regularly tend to their gardens. After all, as our previous article by Jane E. Dritchta explained, gardening involves so much more than just creating something beautiful or edible; it’s also an engaging way to pass down and preserve culture and history. From one household to the next, your garden tells the story of your family’s own tastes, hard work, and creativity.
That said, gardening is usually easier said than done. A real labor of love, it takes skill, patience, and consistency to create and maintain a gardening habit. For most beginners, this can seem like a daunting task. The good news is that there are many modern-day solutions that you can apply to make gardening more pleasant and successful, no matter your level of experience. Here are a few:
Invest in Protective Gear
While gardening has lots of health benefits, it can still strain the body and expose you to the elements. Over time, this can cause aches, pains, and even complications that can impair or downright halt your gardening. Therefore, it's important to use the right gardening accessories that can keep you comfy and safe, thereby ensuring you're physically able to maintain your gardening habit.
QVC's gardening tools feature products designed to ensure a gardener's well-being. Sun damage is a very real threat, with radiation being the cause of issues as serious as melanoma, so Farmer's Defense protective sleeves can be valuable accessories. Designed to slip on like gloves, these can also safeguard sensitive skin from other external irritants. Another option is the Girl Next Door Garden Seat/Kneeler, which can work as padding for knees or as a makeshift stool. This ensures that joints are shielded from the harsh ground. With this type of gear on hand, you can prevent any unwanted injuries that can deter you from keeping up with your garden.
Treat Your Foundation First
Gardening is a soothing and relaxing exercise, but it does require some prep beforehand. Namely, it’s crucial that the soil itself is addressed before any other actions are taken. Otherwise, you may find that all your efforts are for naught because the soil won’t take. Thankfully, the best course of action is a rather straightforward soil test, which you can do yourself at home. While there are ways to DIY these tests, you can save yourself the trouble and buy some ready-made kits. For instance, Luster Lee offers simple-to-understand kits that provide accurate and quick results. Since these are able to test for things like pH levels, they can reveal how you can "balance" your soil to complement the plants you want to work with.
Take Advantage of Technology
A common misconception that many new gardeners have is that they need to do everything old school; otherwise, it’s “cheating.” In reality, while it’s important to understand the manual and traditional elements of gardening, embracing contemporary innovations can make gardening more forgiving, especially since there are many tech initiatives available that can directly address concerns that plague most gardens.
For instance, one survey on MSN found that improper watering was one of the most common mistakes that home gardeners experience. Though rather than stressing over this, you can make your life easier with tech products like a smart watering system. These aren’t hard to come by, with brands such as Moes selling Bluetooth irrigation programs on Ali Express. Since these can be programmed ahead of time, they can be preset with your own schedule, plants, and location in mind. From here, they’re able to work almost independently. This leaves you with the time and mental capacity to focus on more sensitive gardening tasks so you don’t get overwhelmed.
Rena Justine is a teaching consultant who provides guidance to schools across the country. Through her online articles, she hopes to impart her 10 years of experience to help others. She spends most of her free time in the park with her husband and three children.
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