Deterring Birds

Protecting your garden and home from messy birds
Birds and associated diseases are hot news -- people worry and wonder about bird flu jumping species -- but in fact there are already over 60 different human diseases associated with birds and their droppings, some of which can be fatal. You’ve heard of salmonella and bed bugs, but add to this list tongue-twisters such as histoplasmosis and cryptococcosis. In addition to diseases, birds can cause esthetic and financial heartache for property owners and gardeners.
Droppings cause unsightly stains, deterioration of structures and devalued property. Not to mention the cost of fixing/maintaining/cleaning up.
Pigeons (perhaps fed by a neighbor) are messy and ugly.
Woodpeckers can destroy wood homes, shingles and siding.
Great blue heron can eat valuable fish in your pond.
Starlings and blackbirds can eat the fruits (and vegetables) of your labor.
Canada geese will ravage grass and leave up to a pound a day (per goose) of droppings.
To end bird problems there are several options, depending on the budget, desires and restrictions of the homeowner.
Lethal options are not recommended, as they only treat the symptoms, not the problem itself. Meaning, poison, for example, does nothing to make the area undesirable to the birds; new birds will continue to come if there is a reason they like it there. Trapping birds is a lot of labor, and again doesn't do anything about new birds. Of course it's usually more desirable (and more economical) to treat the problem once and for all, not perpetually. Furthermore, lethal methods also cause extremely negative publicity among one’s neighbors.
But…birds are stubborn – they will want to stay if they’re happy and comfortable. The goal is to make the area undesirable and unappealing (via sound, odor, taste, visually or physically).

Sound deterrents

These are often employed against pigeons, woodpeckers, starlings and blackbirds. As birds will get used to the same sound repeated over and over, choose a device that has built-in change involved, for example one that varies in frequency, duration, and sequence, and features the sounds of both birds in distress and predators looking for food. This is a key factor in long-term discouragement.

Visual devices

Visual devices are usually used against pigeons, starlings, blackbirds, woodpeckers and more. As with sound deterrents, change is important. If you just put a plastic owl in the yard, they’ll quickly realize that it isn’t really a threat since it never moves. To work long-term, a repeller must involve movement. One option is a large orange sphere that has holograms on front and back. It appears to move when the bird looks at it from different angles. In addition to the eyes moving, it’s mounted on a spring that causes the entire predator to move and bounce in the wind.

Another visual option to scare birds away is iridescent bird deterrent foil. You simply cut off strips and attach them to fence posts, trees or rooftops to scare the birds away. As the strips blow in the wind, they catch sunlight, producing constantly changing colors and patterns. And the tape itself produces a metallic rattle, unnerving birds with the sound too.

Physical barriers

Bird spikes (think “barbed wire for birds”) prevent a bird from roosting on a nearby ledge, sill, roof peak, etc. Bird netting works well too. If birds don’t have easy, comfortable roosting access to your property, they are less likely to congregate there.

Taste aversions

A food-grade biodegradable spray (a bitter, smelly component of Concord grapes) will keep Canada geese from eating your grass, and will keep woodpeckers from finding your wood surfaces appetizing. This methyl anthranilate spray targets their taste and smell senses but won’t cause the environment any harm. In fact it has been used to flavor grape candy, soda and gum for years.

If you have an especially bad problem, or the birds have been returning for many years, you may want to use a combination of methods to scare the birds away. Whatever it takes to give the impression that your property is not a fun, relaxing, inviting place to stay.

Creative Vegetable Gardening with Kids

Give Them the Unusual and Surprise Them with Color!
Children and vegetables may not be a match made in heaven, but kids will love to vegetable garden if they grow these vegetables. We keep hearing that kids spend too much time indoors watching entertainment on a screen and eating junk food. The rate of overweight children and teens has nearly tripled in 20 years, increasing from 6% in from 1976 to 1980 to 16% from 1999 to 2000.*
Ease your kids into loving both vegetables and gardening by surprising them with the unexpected. Purple carrots and a tomato that masquarades as a pepper. Why not? And there's lots more where that came from.
*According to the Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics, as reported by the Gallup Organization

How To Spring Bulbs: How To Plant Spring Flowering Bulbs

Spring flowering bulbs offer a reliable colorful display just when you need it most and they require very little effort. Choose bulbs suited to your area and many will improve year after year. The trick to growing large, healthy flowering bulbs is to prepare the soil well at planting. A rich, well draining soil with a balanced pH will feed the underground bulb and fuel the spring growth and flowers.

Difficulty: Easy
Time Required: 30 - 60 Minutes per Dozen Bulbs
Here's How:

Choose healthy bulbs. Avoid bulbs that are dry and withered, spongy or moldy. In general, the larger the bulb for its type, the more flowers.

Choose an appropriate location. Most flowering bulbs prefer full sun, but that can be almost anywhere in the spring, before the trees leaf out. So don’t overlook a spot that seems perfect, just because it’s a bit shady in the fall. Woodland bulbs (Anemone nemorosa (Woodland Anemone), Arisaema (Jack-in-the-Pulpit), Erythronium (Dog's Tooth Violets), Galanthus (Snowdrops) and Trillium) prefer a bit of cool shade.

A well-drained soil will prevent the bulbs from rotting in cool weather.

In areas with cold winters, you can plant bulbs as long as the soil is soft enough to dig a hole. However they will have more time to begin growing roots if planted before mid-November.

In areas without a freezing winter, you may need to purchase pre-chilled bulbs, but you won’t have to plant your bulbs until early spring.

Plant with the pointed side up. The pointed end is the stem. You may even be able to see some shriveled roots on the flatter side. If you really can't tell, don't worry about it. The stem will find it's own way, sooner or later.

Plant bulbs to a depth of about 3 times their diameter. For Daffodils, that’s about 6 - 8 inches. Smaller bulbs can be planted to a depth of 3-4 inches and so on.

Mix some bone meal or superphosphate into the soil at the bottom of the hole at planting time, to encourage strong root growth. You could mix in some water soluble fertilizer as well, but it’s not necessary if you’ve already amended your soil.

If rodents tend to eat your bulbs, you can try sprinkling some red pepper in the planting hole. A more secure method is to plant your bulbs in a cage made of hardware cloth. The roots and stems grow through, but the rodents can’t get to the bulbs. Make it easy on yourself and make a cage large enough to plant at least a dozen bulbs. Or you can make it really easy on yourself and stick to daffodils, which rodents and most other animals avoid.

Replace the soil on top of the bulbs. Water the bulbs after planting, to help them settle in and close any air pockets. Through the fall and winter, you only need to worry about watering your bulbs if you’re having a particularly dry season. Come spring, you should be well rewarded for all your efforts.


Tips:
For A Natural Effect: Bulbs look best in clumps or drifts. To get a natural looking effect, either dig a large area and plant several bulbs at once or simply toss the bulbs into the air and dig holes and plant where ever they fall. You’ll be surprised how well this works.
Mark Your Plantings: To make sure you don't disturb your bulbs by trying to plant something in the same spot, mark where and what you have planted.
Spring Care: When your bulbs have finished flowering, cut back the flower stalks to ground level. It can get ugly, but let the foliage of your flowering bulbs dieback naturally. Resist the temptation to cut it back while still green, but floppy. The bulb needs this time to photosynthesize and make food reserves to produce next year’s flowers.
To Divide Bulbs: Many bulbs spread and increase, making the original planting over crowded. If your bulbs are flowering as well as they used to, this is probably the case. If you wish to move or divide your flowering bulbs, the safest time is when they enter their dormant period. This is usually just after the foliage completely dies back. Dormancy is brief, even though nothing is happening above ground, so don’t put this task off.
What You Need:
Bulbs

Shovel, Trowel or Bulb Planter
Bone Meal or Superphosphate
Water

Transcript

Hi, I am Charlie Siegchrist for About.com Home and Garden. This segment is about how to edge a garden.
Tools Needed to Edge a GardenFor the task of edging your landscape bed, you will need the following tools:
A pair of wooden stakes
A hammer with which to drive them in
String to connect the stakes
For cutting that edge, either a square-bottomed, sharpened nursery spade or a half-moon edger.A half-moon edger has a step like this and then a half moon blade of steel. Alternately you can rent at home and garden centers a motorized edger that is probably twenty times faster if you have enough garden to justify the expense.
Benefits of Edging a GardenWe undertake edging for a couple of reasons. Obviously a crisp, neat line enhances the appearance. Second, we stop the encroachment of lawn grass into the garden where it can become a weed problem.
Creating a Straight Garden EdgeWe want to establish a clean edge, so we need to work where the grass is thick enough to not look raggedy, and we have to be far enough into the lawn to take up any bald strips. So, we start the stake here. You can tie a loop in your twine and that fits loosely over the stake. We can then execute a simple knot.
Start EdgingWe put this spade to where it is just touching the string, and punch in far enough, a couple of inches are all we need, and move down the string. And then once we are done we can come in from the other side and undercut the sods, and that sod should just peel out as one piece. At then end we are left with a nice clean edge. This is good soil here, so we can cut the roots off and they will not regenerate. We will get most of that soil saved and brushed back into our line, and you can see what a difference in appearance for the time it takes to edge your garden. Thanks for watching. To learn more, visit us on the Web at homegarden.about.com. See you there.

Garden buildings

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(This section would benefit from more material on garden buildings in China and Japan)
Arguably, the oldest fragment of a garden building is at Pasargadae in Iran. It was an encampment garden and the building was a pavilion dwelling for Cyrus the Great. The Romans erected numerous small pavilions in gardens and examples survive at Pompeii. The making of luxury gardens resumed with the renaissance and so did the construction of garden buildings. The taste for garden buildings then spread north of the Alps and small buildings became characteristic of the English Landscape Garden.
The small and highly decorative garden buildings in Chinese and Japanese gardens originated as Buddhist temples. They were well-cared for and frequently rebuilt after fires (often caused by lightening).
Garden buildings remain popular in modern gardens but their use tends to be more functional than aesthetic. They are used to store equipment, for games, for swimming, as garden offices, as summer houses, as sun rooms and for plant propagation.
The most contemporary use for garden buildings is indeed as garden offices. These can range from much loved garden sheds that have been upgraded by their owners garden offices.
Many people installing garden buildings in Britain are unaware of the controls and restrictions. Even a shed can be subject to planning permission or building regulations, if it is used to house human activity.

History of gardening

This entry concerns the history of ornamental gardening considered as an amenity of civilized life, as a vehicle for style, for conspicuous show and even an expression of philosophy.
See also subsistence gardening, the art and craft of growing plants, considered as a circumscribed form of individual agriculture.
Though cultivation of plants for food long predates history, the earliest evidence for ornamental gardens is seen in Egyptian tomb paintings of the 1500s BC; they depict lotus ponds surrounded by rows of acacias and palms. The other ancient gardening tradition is of Persia: Darius the Great was said to have had a "paradise garden" and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon were renowned as a Wonder of the World. Persian influences extended to post-Alexander's Greece: around 350 BC there were gardens at the Academy of Athens, and Theophrastus, who wrote on botany, was supposed to have inherited a garden from Aristotle. Epicurus also had a garden where he walked and taught, and bequeathed it to Hermarchus of Mytilene. Alciphron also mentions private gardens.
The most influential ancient gardens in the western world were the Ptolemy's gardens at Alexandria and the gardening tradition brought to Rome by Lucullus. Wall paintings in Pompeii attest to elaborate development later, and the wealthiest of Romans built enormous gardens, many of whose ruins are still to be seen, such as at Hadrian's Villa.
Byzantium and Moorish Spain kept garden traditions alive after the 4th century. By this time a separate gardening tradition had arisen in China, which was transmitted to Japan, where it developed into aristocratic miniature landscapes centered on ponds and separately into the severe Zen gardens of temples.
In Europe, gardening revived in Languedoc and the Ile-de-France in the 13th century, and in the Italian villa gardens of the early Renaissance. French parterres developed at the end of the 16th century and reached high development under Andre le Notre. English landscape gardens opened a new perspective in the 18th century.
The 19th century saw a welter of historical revivals and Romantic cottage-inspired gardening, as well as the rise of flower gardens, which became dominant in home gardening in the 20th century.
20th century gardening expanded into city planning

Garden Design as a Vocation

Garden design is the art and process of designing the layout and planting of domestic gardens and landscapes. Garden owners showed an increasing interest in garden design during the late twentieth century and there was also a significant expansion in the use of professional garden designers. Some garden owners have enough skill and experience to design their own gardens, but this is comparatively rare. Sissinghurst, one of the most admired gardens made in the twentieth century, was designed by its owners: Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West.
Garden designers usually are trained in both design and in horticulture, and have an expert knowledge and experience of using plants. Garden designers are also concerned with the layout of hard landscape, such as paths, walls, water features, sitting areas and decking.

History

The theory of garden design and landscape architecture can be traced to Vitruvius. Though he had little to say specifically about the design of outdoor space, Vitruvius put forward the influential theory that the objectives for all design projects are: Commodity (utilitas), Firmness (firmitas) and Delight (venustas).

Before the Renaissance, garden design was usually carried out by garden owners or by the professionals they employed (horticulturalists, architects, surveyors, sculptors etc). In China and Japan, gardens were often designed by scholars, artists, poets, painters and priests. In Europe, it seems likely that professional training for garden designers began in seventeenth century France. After the time of Le Notre it was accepted that both an artistic and a horticultural training were necessary. Various garden design courses were established in Europe during the nineteenth century and in the twentieth century many of them changed over to the teaching of landscape architecture. Towards the end of the twentieth century there was a re-emergence of university level education programmes in garden design.

Traditionally, garden designs were set out on the ground. With Renaissance advances in plan drawing it became common for gardens to be designed on paper and transferred to the ground using surveying instruments, including tape measures and theodolites. With the invention of Computer Aided Design (CAD) towards the end of the twentieth century it is becoming increasingly common for garden designers to work on computer screens and then print paper plans which are issued to garden builders. A range of CAD programmes is used including vector drawing software, bitmap editing software, 3D modelling software and animation software. Some of these programmes are able to 'print' 3D models as well paper plans.

Garden design courses

Education in garden design has emerged from the older traditions of training in horticulture and architecture. Horticulturalists receive a technical education with a scientific underpinning. Garden designers require a knowledge of horticulture and building construction but also require the skills in art and design traditionally associated with architectural education. This is often provided with a Bauhaus type art foundation course in drawing, painting and 3D modelling. Since garden designers draw upon the historic legacy of garden design they also require knowledge of the history of gardens. A garden design education can be obtained via a 3 or 4 year university course or by shorter, intensive courses, often run by private colleges, with a duration of around 1 year.

The Inchbald School of Design, in association with the University of Wales, offers an MA course in Garden Design. The University of Greenwich offers a Master of Arts in Garden Design and also an MA in Garden History. University College Falmouth also offers both BA(Hons) and MA courses in Garden Design. A number of part-time certificate and diploma courses are available at various private colleges in the UK, including Garden Design School and Merrist Wood College - both in Surrey.

Developing a Garden Design

Before the garden is actually built and planned, drawings would be helpful to formulate, express, and develop the sense of garden’s design. The schematic plan, which is the first drawing of the garden’s design, can be used to show the main proposed features and planting areas. It is a quick visualization that sets out the general and broad proposals for the garden. All subsequent drawings are usually based on this plan, so it should be considered important.

Selecting a Location

The main issue when constructing a garden is where to make it. Many of the great gardens in the history and today often include: a location that is topographically significant, a suitable microclimate for plants, a well-designed connection to water, and rich soil. However, a good garden design, which is well-planed and constructed, can boost up the value of the garden more than just its location.

Elements (Ingredients) of Garden Design

1. Conditioning the Ground (soil)

First, excavated subsoil and topsoil carefully need to be replaced; then, the soil should be aerated thoroughly so it can be crumbly by digging it. Also, "conditioning the soil thoroughly before planting enables the plants to establish themselves quickly and so play their part in the design."[1] Since “many native plants prefer an impoverished soil, and the closer to their natural habitat they are in the garden, the better,” a poor soil is better than a rich soil that has been artificially enriched.[2]

2. Boundaries

The look of the garden can be influenced strongly by the boundary impinges. Planting can be used to modify the boundary line or a line between an area of rough grass and smooth, depending on the size of the plot. Introducing internal boundaries, perhaps in the form of hedges or group of shrubs, can help break up a garden.
 Hedges
The hedges vary their colors throughout the seasons dramatically. The hedges, being strong features in a garden, are often used to divide sections of the garden. However, since they use the moisture and nutrient from the garden soil to grow as well as other plants, they may not be a good choice and may bring a negative effect to the other plants.
 Walls
Besides the boundaries that are made up of plants like the hedges, walls made up of various materials can be built between regions. There are broadly three types of walling material: stone, either random or coursed, brick, and concrete in its various forms. It is good to determine what color, size, and texture will be most appropriate for the garden before actually building the wall.
 Fencing
According to Brookes, fencing can offer an alternative solution, is the walls are too solid for the region of the garden. There are several numbers of fence types that can be used for a garden: animal-proof fence for country situations, peep-proof fences for the suburbs, and urban fences that provide shelter from the winds in exposed roof-top gardens and create internal barriers

3. Alternative Surfacing

Usually, a smooth expanse of lawn is often considered essential to a garden. However, a textured surface “made up of loose gravel, small pebbles, or wood chips is much more satisfactory visually” than a smooth surface.[3] According to Brookes, creating a relaxed feel to a garden is often done by loose surfacing made up of bark chips, pebbles, gravels; also, the various textures, shapes, sizes, colors, and materials of many different paving elements can contribute to making a garden plan pattern and texture, if they are mixed successfully.

4. Water

Water plays a very important role in the garden since wet conditions foster rampant growth of the plants. Water spigots and pipes throughout the garden are helpful in providing a wide range of wild life and plant habitats. The water pipes must be placed below the frost line in order to avoid them from freezing in cold weathers.

5. Garden Furniture

The garden furniture is available in a range of materials, and it may be more creative than without furniture and by making use of it. It offers to explore how things can be creative not just being visual in the gardens. The wood is the most common material to make the garden furniture. Besides the wooden furniture, metal can be sometimes a better choice than the wooden ones since it is more durable than wood. Also, more creative sources like plastic can be used.http://soils.usda.gov/survey/WSS-Brochure.pdf

6. Electrical Outlets

If there is a lead to the water pump or a fridge in the pool house, electrical outlets should be established so they can function in the garden. The cables for all these power outlets must be laid before the construction of the garden begins. At the depth mandated by local building codes, three romex direct-burial cables can be laid in a marked or known situation such as just beside a path.

7. Lighting

Since most plants require direct light for their growth, lighting is an important factor to consider when designing a garden. Light regulates three major plant processes: photosynthesis, phototropism, and photoperiodism. Photosynthesis provides the energy required to produce the energy source of plants. Phototropism is the effect of light on plant growth that causes the plant to grow toward or away from the light.[4] Photoperiodism is a plant’s response or capacity to respond to photoperiod, a recurring cycle of light and dark periods of constant length.[5]
In most cases, various types of lighting techniques may be classified and defined by heights: safety lighting, uplighting, and downlighting. Safety lighting is the most practical application. However, it is more important to determine the type of lamps and fitting s needed to create the desired effects.