A Few Gardening Tips

Get the soil tested
Getting your soil tested will help you make the best gardening decisions. Test results can indicate what fertilizers are needed
Avoid creating a landscape that demands more time and maintenance than you can keep up and enjoy.
It's important to design a landscape that only requires as much maintenance time and effort as you have to give. Remember lawn areas, large vegetable gardens and flowerbeds are higher maintenance.
Effectively use mulches in flowerbeds, vegetable gardens, around shrubs and other appropriate areas.
Mulches -- such as pine straw, leaves, dry grass clippings, ground bark and wood products -- are our best, first line of defense in controlling weeds in beds. They also conserve soil moisture reducing watering, look attractive, prevent soil compaction and moderate soil temperatures. There are few things we do as gardeners that are more beneficial than mulching.
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Its too wet and cold in my area to start the garden although I suppose onions could be planted now. It just snowed a few days ago again and is not even near being warm enough to plant anything delicate. Tulips and Easter flowers are just starting to come out of the ground and it feels like winter yet.

 

I wait until after May 17th to plant the garden here in Illinois. Planting any sooner sometimes makes you lose everything to the cold. Our Rural King store already has garden plants out including tomatoes but its way too early for that.