Keeping your home cool is more than just a nice convenience, it can protect your belongings from damaging humidity. Proper care and maintenance will not only lower your monthly utility bill, but can also prevent high repair costs. An occasional check on the temperature and performing a routine maintenance on the system once a month can keep the unit running smoothly. The tools are typical household items such as a thermometer, vacuum cleaner and a garden hose or hedge clippers. more »
A garden coach is somewhere between a landscape architect, a landscaper and a therapist. The garden coach is hired by a homeowner who wants a garden or has one she is unhappy with. Usually, there are two homeowners involved. One half of the couple is probably the gardener and the other is the non-gardener who must dragged into the garden kicking and screaming. The couple usually wants a garden that looks as if it came from a photo in a magazine, but that same couple also wants to do little or no garden maintenance. The garden coach has to be a couples therapist, learn what the expectations of the homeowners are and decide what is realistic for them. The garden coach must check soils, know the plant palette available for the region, for that garden and for the couples' wishes. That must be tempered by the couple's abilities and desire to work in their garden. The garden coach must work with every kind of gardener, from the ones who don't know a pruning saw from hedge clippers to the exp more »
Pruning; here in South Florida we do a lot of it. We shear, we prune, and we clip back. We prune to maintain vistas, we prune to encourage privacy, we cut out the dead, we prune to promote health and encourage growth, we prune away from buildings and other plants to discourage growth. We prune to protect our trees from hurricanes. We prune to preserve plants and trees after hurricanes. You get the picture; landscape maintenance around these parts requires us to know quite a little bit about pruning. Yet driving around our neighborhoods shows in many cases there is still a lot we can learn. I think, if landscapers were forbidden to buy chain saws and powered hedge clippers until they proved that they understood the way plants grew, we could have healthier and prettier looking foliage and a lot fewer landscapers! In the short space I am allotted here I will run through some basic pruning principles and guidelines. Find pruning suggestions broken down by the type of plants we most common more »
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