Beginner's Garden #4

The Beginner's Garden, Phase 4

"How fair is a garden amid the trials and passions of existence," said Queen Victoria's Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. Well, yes, but as you've learned recently, gardening provides its own trials and passions. Disraeli probably strolled through gardens in which others had toiled.

I'm grateful for the feedback about your trials and, happily, pleasures. (You can reach me at gardening@slate.com.) The guy who wrote and said I didn't provide for enough mulch after planting was correct. I was skimping to save money.

Anything you've observed that made you curious? Would you consider planting a small tree in the fall?

In June and July, your tasks are few. Continue snipping off faded flowers and brown leaves. You don't need to fertilize. The plants in the sun gardens are meadow flowers that don't need rich soil. In fact, nitrogen, the first ingredient in most fertilizers, would cause them to grow more green leaves and produce fewer flowers.

For the shade gardens, the compost and manure you added before planting will provide enough nutrition for the plants we chose.

You may have friends who are growing vegetables and are fertilizing like crazy. That's because they're asking a lot of those tomato or lettuce or melon plants in a short time.

Though a large swath of the country has had too much rain, wherever you are it's still necessary to check once or twice a week to see if your garden plot needs water. Summer is hot. Soak at the roots.

If you're interested in learning a little more, here are three books that are trustworthy and entertaining, plus a profound and engaging author whose advice might lead you interestingly astray:

The Garden Primer, by Barbara Damrosch
What I admire about this book is its eminently sane and rational voice. The chapter "What Plants Need" is worth the price alone. The only advice Damrosch provides that is out-of-date is the recommendation to double dig before you plant. Many gardeners now forego double digging (replacing the soil in a bed with … forget it, I can't even describe what she says without getting tired) in favor of putting soil-improvers like compost and manure on the surface and letting the worms do the work.

Rodale's All-New Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening: The Indispensable Resource for Every Gardener; edited by Fern Marshall Bradley and Barbara W. Ellis
This is an update of the original encyclopedia. A hefty 689 pages, the book contains advice that is clear, practical, and, happily, never dogmatically organic.

Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden, by Eleanor Perenyi
Seventy-two essays, arranged alphabetically, azaleas to compost to hedges to strawberries to wildflowers. And at the end, the devastating entry "Woman's Place," on the persistent belief that men should tend the serious and useful plants while women might snip a flower or two—and, naturally, do all the weeding. Nonetheless, these pieces are supremely intelligent, elegantly composed observations from 30 years of amateur experience.

And, finally, I recommend pretty much anything from the pen of Henry Mitchell, the late garden columnist for the Washington Post. "The life so short, the craft so long to learn," Mitchell wrote, "this was said about literature, but it really fits gardening better."