Do you love gardening? Whether you prefer to spend your time tending a lovely flower garden, or getting dirty while raising your own produce, you can teach your skills to an eager (or not so eager) child. Many lifelong gardeners have related to us that they began their gardening career as a young child in the shadow of a grandparent who had a green thumb. Some of our best memories are of the simple lunches that grandma made straight out of the garden, a green salad, radishes, fresh sweet corn, and if we were good, a peach crunch for dessert. Here are some ideas on how to encourage the gardener that lurks inside every child:

Start easy, marigold seeds have been used by every kindergarten teacher in the country, because they are so easy to germinate. Seeds are great for beginners and can be started indoors before you can work in the yard. Marigolds can also teach kids about using companion plants to prevent insect damage on vegetables. Other great seeds to start are radishes, carrots, and lettuce. Particularly fun are the radishes, they finish within 30-45 days (a short time for kids with short attention spans) and involve two of the most fun things to do in the garden, planting seeds and pulling plants right out of the ground! Lettuce is fun because you can seed it, cut it, and it will generally keep on producing.

Kids also enjoy perennial or shrub type fruits such as blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, grapes, and strawberries. There is nothing better than a sun warmed raspberry that can be picked and eaten in one movement!

Flower gardening can be fun as it will allow kids to plant seeds such as zinnias, larkspur, cosmos, and many more. They can then cut the flowers, arrange them, and give to a favorite friend or family member. Or how about snap dragons, Chinese lanterns, Four O'Clocks or other plants with fun shaped flowers? Will they be able to guess how the plants got their names? Plants with lots of texture are fun too. Lady’s Mantle and Lamb’s Ear have soft “hairs” on them or hostas with a lot of puckering will catch and hold rain water. Or we can combine lots of these plants to create a butterfly or hummingbird garden so we can help to care for animals too!

While watering and dragging a hose between the plants is a bit difficult for small people, it is a necessary lesson to learn. Plants don’t grow with out water or rain!

The real lesson is profound when teaching a young person to garden…be a steward of the land. Growing their own food will create a sense of pride and hopefully instill a lifelong love of fruits and vegetables. While teaching all these lessons is great for developing a well rounded, outdoor loving person; the parent, aunt, uncle, or grandparent can also cultivate a terrific relationship that will outlive the individuals and be passed on in the generations to come.

When planting trees, there are a few guidelines to keep in mind. First, it is always better to plant too high, than too low. Second, when properly planted, trees rarely require staking. Third, don’t try to remove the basket, burlap, or twine from the root ball. The only time you should remove the twine is if it is made of nylon or some other non-biodegradable material. Planting the tree with the support material intact helps hold the tree and root ball together, so if the tree is blown by the wind, it is not loosened in the root ball. Finally, the use of Fertilome Root Stimulator at the time of planting and every 10 days to two weeks through the first growing season is the best insurance for the tree’s successful transplantation. The basic procedure for planting a tree is as follows:

1. Measure size of root ball, this will determine the size of the hole you are about to dig. The hole will need to be 4-6” wider on each side of the tree ball. For example, a 24” dia. Root ball would require a 32-36” dia. hole. The depth of the hole should be no deeper than the depth of the root ball. Remember it’s better to plant an inch or two too high, rather than too deep!

2. Place tree in hole and check for straightness. Remember to remove any twine or other tree wrappings from the canopy prior to placing tree in hole as it is much easier to remove them while the tree is lying on the ground as opposed to upright in the hole.

3. Once the tree is straight in the hole, you can begin to back fill the hole, preferably with a planting mix containing some type of manure or compost. When the hole is half to three quarters filled you can wet the soil down with the root stimulator solution to settle the soil and remove any air pockets. You can then finish backfilling the hole, leaving a slight mound of soil around the perimeter of the hole. This slight mound will form a “dish” to funnel water to the root system. Be careful not to pile soil against the trunk of the tree as this can cause problems.

4. After the soil is back filled, mulch should be applied to help hold moisture and prevent the growth of weeds and grass near the trunk of the tree. Trees should be watered about once a week, taking care not to overwater. More trees are lost to excessive watering than drought, in heavy soils. Deep, infrequent watering is better than small daily watering. Also, if the lawn has an irrigation system you will still need to water the tree because the daily irrigation cycle will not provide enough water for the tree. Enjoy! If you should have any unanswered questions regarding tree planting questions feel free to contact us at (815) 939-9670.

We recommend trimming shrubs after they have completed their flowering. Yes, this does mean that you should not trim your entire landscape at the same time. While most people will not prefer this approach, there is an excellent reason! Spring flowering shrubs set their flower buds in the summer. Those buds sit there patiently waiting for spring and when the time is right they open up. So, if you were to trim your lilac bush in the spring, you would cut off all your flower buds for that year. This holds true for Hydrangeas, Viburnums, Magnolia, Serviceberry and many more. Amazingly, just three weeks (or so) after they have completed flowering, they begin to set their flower buds for the following year. We call that planning ahead!

So you have decided that you want to start seed for your vegetable garden. Some seeds are better suited to direct sowing into the garden, and others should really be started indoors before the last frost...if you want fruit before the first fall frost!

Here is a list of vegetables that can be successfully sown directly into the garden: Green or Wax Beans, Peas, Beets, Lettuce, Radishes, Cucumbers, Pumpkins, Watermelon, Cantaloupe, Sunflowers, Potatoes, Onions, Okra, Rutabaga, Carrots, and more!

These are some vegetables that you will want to start from seed indoors (6-8 weeks before the last frost, in our area the frost free date is usually around Mother’s Day) or purchase as transplants from Tholens’: Tomatoes, Green & Red Peppers, Eggplant, Hot Peppers, Broccoli, Cauliflower, Cabbage, Celery, Squash & Zucchini, and most Herbs.

The easiest way to start seed and successfully transplant is to begin with Jiffy seed products. Jiffy pellets or pots are made of compressed peat moss. The pellets should be rehydrated and seed sown directly into the expanded pellet. The pots are made to be filled with Jiffy seed starter soil. You can then sow your seed into this pot. Each seed will take a different amount of time to germinate. So be patient and look at the packet for guidelines on what to expect. Once your seed has germinated, follow your seed packet instructions to “thin” the plants if necessary. This means removing a percentage of the seedlings to allow the other plants room to grow. The biggest problem our customers report is that the plants just melt away, growers call this “dampening off”. The best way to avoid this is to provide ventilation. As soon as the plants are up, you can take the dome off (if you have a little tray kit in the house) and let some air in. The plants will continue to stay moist, but won’t be water logged. After the plants have been growing for a couple of weeks, you will want to remove the dome completely. Slowly introducing your plants to the outdoor weather is very important. Taking them in and out for several days and protecting them from the wind will give you a nice, tough plant that should survive in your yard.

Our Bourbonnais store features a large selection of organic products. Here are just a few of the natural solutions that we sell. Some natural insecticides that we carry include: Dipel Dust, Spinosad, Bacillus thuringensis, insecticidal soaps, Milky Spore, and more. We carry a nice selection of organic fertilizers such as Monty's Joy Juice®, fish emulsion, mushroom compost, Dr. Earth® natural fertilizers. We are excited because we now carry Green Cure® fungicide which is effective in combatting powdery mildew, black spot, and other fungal problems. Come on in and check out our display of natural solutions for your organic garden

This topic is so important to us, we included it on our website twice! Lately, we have been getting a lot of phone calls from customers complaining about the health of their newly planted trees. Upon further discussion we are finding that many customers have not been watering this spring. Certainly, we have had some cooler weather and in April we got more rain than we thought we needed. However, we have to remember that trees which were planted last year or this spring, do not have an established root system, they only have access to the water which falls directly onto their root balls. Particularly, when a tree is planted in the lawn, it needs even more water (no, your irrigation system is not sufficient), because it is competing with your turf for moisture. So, you wonder, how do we diagnose that your tree is not getting enough water? We ask lots of questions! The first indicator that your tree needs more water is often yellow leaves or some fall color. Early fall color, in particular, tells you that your tree is in desperate need of help. We can also diagnose lack of water by brown crunchy leaves which are falling off the tree, bending of the new growth, etc. If you think your tree might be dry, give it water, then call us. If the soil is saturated and squishy, it is not too dry. We recommend deep, infrequent watering. Please lay a hose at the base of the tree with a trickle the size of your small finger for 30 – 45 minutes; twice a week, less if we have had more than 1” of rain, that week. Remember that your tree has its own method of communicating with you; it is telling you if it is healthy or sick. So make an effort every day to look at the tree and make sure it isn’t waving a yellow leaf at you!

With all this recession talk, you have surely heard the term "recession garden". Many of you green thumbs are probably chuckling, thinking, "My family has had a garden since I was a child!" There are millions of American families who plant a vegetable garden every year, no matter the economic climate. These are the people that we should turn to for sage advice about best practices in the garden. So here are some hints, in no particular order, from some of our most successful customers in regards to vegetable gardening, home orcharding, and how to use all that valuable produce!

You should always rotate your crops. For every crop you grow there is probably a pest to avoid, distract, or kill. For example, some people have problems with tomato wilt every year. It is caused by a soil borne fungus, so if you plant your tomatoes in the same spot every year, they will continue to get the fungus every year, and leave more pathogens in the soil for next year. By simply moving the tomatoes down a spot every year, you can break the cycle!

Planting your potatoes later in the season can help you avoid the potato beetle. We first read this in Organic Gardening magazine, a story about an author who was in Russia and a gardener told the author that he planted his potatoes at the end of June when the potato beetle had already laid its eggs on all his neighbor’s potatoes. We thought this sounded creatively devious and tried it. Lo and behold, it worked! We planted our potatoes in the first week of July, when they came up we mounded them, two times (this keeps the skins from turning green from too much sunlight through the soil. FYI, that green skin is toxic in volume.) And by October we had a terrific crop of tasty little spuds. Granted, these were not huge baking potatoes, they were those tender little spuds, that cause you to always dig the potatoes “too early”. It works best with potatoes that have short growing seasons, we especially liked Yukon Gold and Yellow Russian Fingerling. We thought this was a terrific method, and by the way, this was this gardener’s first attempt at growing potatoes.