Charlie Nardozzi

To get all the best flavor and highest nutritional value from your vegetables, you need to pick them at just the right time. Some vegetables taste terrible if you pick them too early; others are tough and stringy if you pick them too late. ©Jacob Lund / Adobe StockAnd after you pick your vegetables, what if you can’t eat them right away?

After you choose a good sunny spot for your vegetable garden and draw a plan on paper, you need to clean up the area so the soil will be easier to work. ©New Africa / Adobe StockYou can clear your garden area any time during the year, but the season before planting works best — clear in the fall for spring planting, or clear in the spring for summer or fall planting.

Before you reach for the insecticide sprayer to attack pests in your vegetable garden, try some of these lower-impact methods to reduce problems from harmful insects and diseases. Often, a pest problem in a garden can be averted before it actually becomes a problem. Plant your vegetables in the proper locations.

After clearing your garden area in preparation for planting, you need to take a close look at your soil — give it a good squeeze, have it tested, amend it, and then work it out to make sure it’s in shipshape.Good soil gives vegetable roots a balance of all the things they need: moisture, nutrients, and air. And knowing your soil type enables you to counteract problems that you may face when gardening on that piece of land.

Just like people, roses need water to be healthy and bloom beautifully. No water? No rose bush. You just end up with a dried-up dead stick poking through parched soil. Roses need more water more often in hot weather than in cool weather, and even steady rain may not provide enough water to keep your roses healthy.

Rosaceae is the third-largest plant family. This family includes many ornamental landscape plants, fruits, and berries, including apples, cherries, raspberries, and pyracantha, characterized by the shape of the hypanthium (the part of the flower where the seeds develop) and by petals in groups of five. Roses are members of the plant genus Rosa.

Growing your garden requires the aid and cooperation of many forces including the climate in your hardiness zone; insects, good and bad; fertilizers; and soil amendments.Decorative material (such as mulch, stone, sand, and gravel) adds a nice finish, so know how much you need to buy. Adapting each element to your garden's needs — as best you can — leads to a successful gardening experience.

How to mow a lawn or grass the right way is one of the most important practices in keeping your lawn healthy. Grasses are like most plants — if you clip off the growing points (for grass, it's in the crown, where the new leaves develop), the plants branch out and become denser, which in this case, turns thousands of individual grass plants into a tightly woven turf or a lawn.

Before you put in your beds and borders, reflect on how the location of your garden can give you viewing pleasure throughout the season. Plant annuals where you can most enjoy their color and fragrance during their relatively brief life. Almost everyone’s yard has some features that are ready-made for planting beds and borders Find the situation that most closely matches your yard and discover how to re-create a design or adapt it for your own garden: Sunny patio bed: Many homeowners have a backyard patio that they use for various summer activities.