I've had several emails and comments this week with a similar theme, "I kill everything I try to grow, but I want to have a garden, help!!!"  I've never met anyone with a truly black thumb, usually just a life that's a little too busy to maintain a complicated garden.  Most often it's a matter of neglect through busyness or abscence. 

My first recommendation for the "green-thumb-challenged" among us, is to start small.  Don't do your entire yard at one time, do one flower bed and maintain it until it becomes second nature to you, then tackle a vegetable garden.  Read a book about what interests you and then do it for a while.  Over doing it has kept more nurseries in business than anything else!  Remember, they make money on those plants you kill and then replace!

The number one need any garden has is to be watered consistently.  If you are the kind of gardener that loves to hand water your plants each day and finds it restful and restorative great, but if you're like the rest of us who forget or get too busy to water consistently I have a recommendation for you.  Before you invest any money in plants, soil amendments, fertilizers or beautiful garden arches, I suggest you invest in a watering system of some kind.  Drip irrigation systems are really easy to install and as totally unhandy as I am, I've managed to do it even without help.  They are also very affordable.  You can run them directly off of a water spigot or have someone come and install a complete irrigation system. It's best to connect them up to a timer that can be set to water in the early morning without your ever having to give it much thought.  Most of my life I watered by hand until I inherited a home with a complete landscaping watering system on timers and it is a life saver (for my plants anyway!) 

Nothing will stunt your flower or vegetable growth more than sporadic watering.  A lack of water will weaken your plants and make them much more susceptible to disease and infestation.  You can spend months making your garden bloom and grow only to lose all of it in a single day in the heat of the summer.

The second recommendation I have is to go with the flow.  If you live in Phoenix, don't try to plant what would be native to London, England!  You'll have a lot of grief and frustration and little good results.  Plant what is native or similar in nature to what grows naturally in your area.  My favorite thing to do is find a local, smaller nursery that can give me guidance and counsel on my specifc area.  The super stores may have better prices, but they don't generally have anyone who LOVES gardening working in their garden departments.

If you live in an arid climate, go with low water requirement plants.  They don't have to be boring —  there are specialty catalogs for every kind of growing environment.  One of my favorites is High Country Gardens (www.highcountrygardens.com) they specialize in low water, deer resistant plants that are spectacularly beautiful.  They even think through the seasons for you and will sell you complete gardens with plans and instructions to lay them out. 

My final recommendation for today (I'll come back to this topic again later in the week) is to choose your plants with maintenance needs in mind.  If you have 2 bushes to choose from and one will require monthly pruning to look good and the other might require a once a year cleanup, which one will you enjoy more in the long run?  If you want to enjoy a flower garden with minimal fussy tasks, perhaps a formal English garden isn't the direction you should head, but an English Cottage Garden with it's wild and free look would be perfect.

My favorite way to perk up my deck and yard is with window boxes and a patio filled with large pots of flowers.  The benefit of planting in pots are these: I don't have to weed them much, when something dies, I plant something new in its place.  With very little work I can plant them so that I have non-stop color all year around (I can even grow flowers in the winter where I live).  Similar to pots are raised flower beds.  I'll share about them the next time.  Enjoy Spring!