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Choosing the Best Shed for Your Garden

Finding the right spot for your garden tools wherein they can get the best protection and room may not be that easy. But you can go through it if you know the purpose of the shed and why it is important that the garden tools and other gardening equipment and accessories are kept in a proper storage room, far from the kids or other beings that can possibly ruin the tools.

You also need to consider the size of the garden shed. If you disregard the size and just buy any shed that you think will fit your needs, you will end up disgusted if the shed is too big or too small for the area where you are planning to put the shed.

When Choosing the Garden Shed, You Need to Look for Some Things

Before you buy a shed that you think is the right size for your garden and for your gardening needs, make sure you know how to put or install it. Although not all sellers of sheds for the garden offer an installation service, it is still your responsibility to ask the seller if they do before you buy it. This way you will have time to decide if you will put it up yourself or go check for other sellers who offer installation services for the garden shed you want to purchase.

If you want to do it by yourself, you may look for a garden shed that is easy to assemble. You may want to check the Arrow Ezee shed range for your own garden shed. Arrow eZee has a lot of designs to choose from and all of the sheds are easy to put up even if you are not familiar with the DIY process. The pieces are designed with easy slot together and the doors are all pre-hinged making the process hassle-free.

All Arrow eZee sheds come with a 15 year guarantee and they have a 40% stronger roof than most standard sheds. With plenty of headspace and a modern, stylish appearance, the eZee shed will suit most gardens.

Of course you need to consider what you will be storing in the gardening shed before you purchase one. Sheds come in all different sizes and while they may look big on the outside, inside there may be limited space. If you plan to store a lot of tools and gardening equipment then you will need to ensure that they will fit in without any problems.

What to Avoid When Looking for a Garden Shed

The main thing that you have to avoid when choosing a shed is making a rushed decision. It really is important to take your time and find the right shed that will suit your storage needs. Try to stay within your budget and shop around. Don’t just buy a shed from the first store that you visit. Take your time to look around and see what the average prices are at different stores.

Be open to advice and opinions of others. You can find the garden shed that will fit your needs if you will give consideration to your garden settings. If you are still undecided on what garden shed to choose or if you don’t know how to put the shed in your garden, the Arrow eZee shed may have the right solution for that.

August 24 2009 | Landscaping | No Comments »

The Charming Wild Flowers

The felicitous grouping of plants is one of the signs of a gardener’s coming of age. It takes knowledge, thought, imagination and taste to assemble together plants which like the same soil, exposure and cultural conditions, which bloom at the right time to make the picture, and which look as though they belong together.

This is the time of year to be thinking about next year’s garden pictures, and it is a pleasant game to be playing. What our gardens need is originality and imagination. Too many of us take the easy way and follow the lead of others, and the result is an uninteresting and boring sameness of pattern.

If fresh ideas don’t flow readily, take a look at wild flower groupings, analyze them and find out what makes them charming. Is it foliage shape or texture, or flower color or quality? Is it harmony or contrast? Wild flower drifts are especially effective in helping us to widen our vision of color association and in giving us tips on new and exciting combinations. Reflect on the banks of blue gilias and collinsias in many shades of purple, on cerise penstemons growing with blue and purple penstemons, on lavender Iris macrosiphon growing in among wine-red Calochortus rubellus.

Self-sown plants bring the happiest accidents to my garden, creating effects I would never have dreamed of. One year, green-blue nigellas sprang up in a patch of crimson-scarlet Delphinium nudicaule. Another time some very bright pink ixias, apparently dropped by absent-minded gophers en route to their store houses, bloomed among the flower-laden branches of a lavender-blue ceanothus. And once Campanula rotundifolia came up in the arms of a Beatrix dianthus, some of whose blooms had reverted to the old sweet-william deep pink.

Annuals, bulbs, as well as some clean air plants which do their own perpetuating are invaluable in bringing unexpected color contrasts or harmonies to the garden. Brilliant-colored plants like the brilliant blue Agathea aethiopica is lovely with cherry-red helianthemums, and the lesser of the two dingle grasses, Briza minor, at one season brought fairiness to a group of volunteer lobelias in light, bright blue and white. And anyone who lets his babianas and sparaxis seed themselves knows what startling results ensue when exceptional shades show up in the scilla colony or come out of a blazing plant of blue lithospermum Heavenly Blue. Anagalis, in blue and in tomato-red, Linaria maroccana in yellow, purple, mauve and lilac, all are splendid companion pieces, and the linaria is particularly valuable because of its spike-shaped flower heads.

Nature doesn’t have to do it all. We can take things into our own hands and create our own pictures, and there are annuals suitable for this purpose in every garden on the West Coast. Use the grace and sweetness of Papaver heterophylla and see how much appeal its bendy bud stems and its tangerine, maroon-blotched flowers will add. Put the deep, rich magnolia purple of old honesty behind blue and blue-purple April flowering cinerarias, and be sure not to side-step the dusty mauves, gray-purples and ashes-of-roses of tall annual nicotines. The advantage of using annuals for purposeful plantings is that the seed sowing or the transplanting can be con-trolled to make the blossoming come to pass at the appointed time.

August 20 2009 | Gardening | No Comments »