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The lilacs are finishing up and the Lily of the Valley are kicking into gear. My garden smells wonderful. There are a lot of fragrant flowers, but most of them are old fashioned varieties that have become hard to find. Fragrance has yet to make a comeback. Breeders are still focused on lots of blooms and disease resistance.

I appreciate those efforts, but I'm still swept away by scented flowers. You tend to need a lot of them to really get the scent wafting, but it can really be worth it.

• Top Choices and Tips for Getting the Most from Your Scented Plants
• Readers' Favorite Fragrant Flowers (Add Yours!)

Photo: © Marie Iannotti

Garden Scents originally appeared on About.com Gardening on Tuesday, May 21st, 2013 at 09:30:00.

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There are a lot of dairy and horse farms near me and manure used to be free for the taking. If you had a truck and a shovel, you could have a nice pile of manure, slowly rotting and getting ready to enrich your soil. We also have a lot of gardeners in my area, and these days several stables charge a fee for their manure. Not everyone was pleased about being charged to clean out the barn, but it was the periodic E. coli scares that had gardeners wondering if it was worth it.

No matter how many precautions are taken, contamination can happen. Does that mean you should avoid using manure in your garden? I don't think so. It should be composted first, but once it is, it becomes an excellent soil conditioner. What's your experience been? Any favorite type of manure?

• Using Manure Safely
• Fascinating Horse Manure Facts (Really!)

Photo: Goat Girl / stock.xchng

Magical Manure originally appeared on About.com Gardening on Monday, May 20th, 2013 at 09:30:18.

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You've probably heard of adding a dash of Epsom salts to the planting hole for peppers. Epsom salts provide some supplemental magnesium which is thought to help peppers set flowers and fruits, especially during hot weather.

Another old trick for growing peppers is to plant a book of matches in the hole, too. Peppers like a relatively acidic soil of about 5.5 to 6.0. Matches contain sulfur and it's just enough to lower the soil pH near the pepper plant's roots and make it easier for the plant to access nutrients in the soil.

To test this out in your garden, fan out a book of matches and place them in the bottom of the planting hole. Cover the matches with a couple of inches of soil, then plant the pepper on top of them. (You don't want the matches in direct contact with the plant roots.) Let us know the results.

• Growing Peppers
• Using Epsom Salts in the Garden

Matches and Peppers originally appeared on About.com Gardening on Sunday, May 19th, 2013 at 10:30:37.

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Can roses be grown organically. Of course. Growing roses organically is really no different than growing any type of plant with organic techniques - except that roses are notoriously prone to problems. It certainly helps to start with disease resistant rose varieties and there are a lot to choose from, including some new introductions and many of the older species roses. But even if you're devoted to hybrid teas, all hope is not lost. Organic rose gardening means more than just not using chemicals. It means giving the plant what it wants and needs to grow well. Do that and you'll have a healthy plant, better able to withstand pest attacks. Here are some tips.

• Organic Rose Growing Tips
• Controlling Black Spot

Photo: © Marie Iannotti

Is Organic Rose Gardening an Oxymoron? originally appeared on About.com Gardening on Saturday, May 18th, 2013 at 10:30:29.

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Sooner or later we all venture into the dark side of gardening - pest search and destroy. I think I'm more tolerant of problems on my flowers than my vegetables but looking through Debbie Hadley's 12 Worst Vegetable Garden Pests gallery, I see that I've had them all. Luckily she also gives some chemical-free ways to annihilate them.

Which got me wondering how garden pests decide which plants they are going to ravage? Do they choose to go on cabbage binges or are they just too lazy to crawl all the way over to the other side of the garden to woof down some peppers? Debbie also tackles the question of How Plant-Eating Insects Find the Right Food - a first step in how to prevent them from finding it in your garden.

Photo: © Marie Iannotti

Gardening on the Dark Side originally appeared on About.com Gardening on Friday, May 17th, 2013 at 09:30:21.

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