Several Things You Should Be Doing in Michigan Gardens

Gardening is one of my favorite hobbies in summer and I spend a lot of time making sure things look really good.

It doesn't matter if you have a flower, vegetable, or lawn garden. It takes time and patience to keep everything looking good.

My goal someday is to be on the cover of Better Homes and Gardens magazine. With the work my wife and I put into our yearly gardens, we should have been on the cover years ago.

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The most important thing you should be doing right now in all of your beautiful gardens, is make sure everything gets fertilized, especially flower gardens.

Take some good advice from mlive.com:

There are at least two months of bright beauty left from annual flowers. This means we need to fertilize for blossoms, and fertilize sufficiently. I want to tell you to fertilize heavily, but you can fertilize too much. If you don’t know how to decide which fertilizer analysis to use, just get a liquid fertilizer for flowering plants. That type of fertilizer will have a second number that is higher than the first and third numbers. For example, a classic flower fertilizer will have an analysis of 10-20-10 or even 10-30-10. It’s the second number, phosphorus percentage, that encourages blooming.

What should you do now in your vegetable garden? The most important thing to do right now is start watering for a few days or so.

We have really hot weather coming our way next week and our vegetables need more water and tender loving care.

Another important tip is to keep tomatoes and peppers evenly watered. Soak the soil really well instead of getting the plants all wet. This helps by keeping the plants disease free.

And of course let's not forget about our Michigan lawns. Here's a great tip, courtesy of mlive.com:

First, let’s do a tip on the brown lawn. Should you water your grass? Will it die if you don’t water it? Michigan’s drought periods during the grass growing season are usually not enough to kill a lawn. But beware of next week’s heat. If we get several days of 100 degree heat on an already dried up lawn, you could have some death to areas of grass. If you have the ability to water your lawn once before the coming hot spell, it might be wise.

Take my advice if you will, water your lawn if we ever go through any dry spells. It doesn't take long for parts of your beautiful lawn to dry up and brown up, when there's no rain in the forecast for prolonged periods of time.