Getting to Know Your Garden

My name is Allen Watts from Anything Grows, a store for gardeners in Stratford, Ontario. On behalf of expertvillage.com, I would like to speak to you about tips for new gardeners and specifically getting to know your garden or your yard. What I mean by that is if you've moved into a new house and it is a different situation and you have a new landscape that you are unfamiliar with and how you best get to know it. I think one way is to not rush into a plan for a new garden until you do know it and that probably means waiting a year or possibly a year. You don't know what's going to come up in the Spring, what is going to come up in the Fall, you don't know sunny areas, shady areas that well, so it is sort of an education process to be able to become more familiar with your space. Once you are more familiar with your space, then you know what sort of opportunities might present themselves with that information. So if you have a particularly wet area or a shady area, then you may design to use that space for a particular reason because of those conditions. So it's a good way to look at everything a bit more practically and as I said not to jump into anything too quickly. If it's a house where you are currently living and you already have some of that information, then you are way ahead of situation where you've actually just moved into a new property. If you already know the property, you could probably jot down then a lot of that information just from your experience there and be prepared to move ahead on planting a garden designed or planning on how you want to use the space much more easily. In either case, it is good to know at first and then to write it down.