View full sizeDivide lavender and other plants, and spread them around to increase the number of flowers around your house at no extra cost.Lynn Ischay, Plain Dealer  file
We all love to beautify our homes with annuals and perennials, or grow fresh vegetables for delicious meals, but gardening can get expensive. HGTV Gardens offered these low- and no-cost ways to save money gardening.

1. Stop buying expensive books and magazines (if you must have them, check them out from your local library). Seek out free advice. Attend free lectures held by your local garden club, garden center, horticulture society or cooperative extension service. Find free websites, blogs and instructional videos on YouTube.

2. Don’t buy mulch; make it by shredding leaves in the fall. Learn to turn household waste into compost.

3. Thin existing plants and spread them over your yard instead of buying new plants. Divide and replant day lilies, asters, hostas, sedum, butterfly weed, lavender and other plants. Swapping plants with neighbors is a no-cost way to increase diversity in your yard.

4. Learn how to harvest and store some vegetable and flower seeds to plant the following year. But make sure you are using heirloom or open pollinated plants; this won’t work with hybrid plants.

5. Organize a group of gardeners to buy in bulk and pay a lower price for plants and supplies.

6. Recycle items in your basement or garage that can have a second life in the garden. Turn wooden barrels, hat boxes, wicker baskets and more into containers. Create garden paths from logs cut into circular discs. Use a discarded wooden door as a garden gate, start seeds in empty egg cartons and use grapefruit rinds to catch slugs.

7. Take advantage of discount plants after peak planting season has passed. Take a chance on drooping flowers that you can coax them back to life.

Bog plants may be the saviour for gardeners battling with soggy ground, Hannah Stephenson discovers

The other week, maverick designer Diarmuid Gavin advised gardeners that they would have to roll with the weather to ensure their gardens survived and thrived the extremes.

That advice may prove useful to people who are looking out on yet another rainy day and wondering which plantings will withstand consistently soggy conditions and come to life in very wet soil.

Look at the positives of having a boggy site. Damp ground is a valuable wildlife habitat and there are plenty of plants which will thrive happily with wet feet, including bugle (Ajuga reptans), Siberian iris, lobelia, Arum lily and globeflower.

As for trees, native willows and alder are at their happiest in damp conditions if you have plenty of space to plant them a safe distance from your house.

Quite a few perennials and shrubs will thrive, such as hostas (although be vigilant against slugs and snails) and Jerusalem sage (Pulmonaria saccharata), an evergreen with white spotted foliage and red, pink or white flowers that bloom from late winter to late spring, while the foam flower (Tiarella cordifolia) is a spreading perennial with spikes of creamy white.

Popular shrubs which will tolerate a lot of water include many viburnums, dogwoods and spiraea. For those with big bog gardens which are wet throughout the winter and damp in summer, go for the enormous Gunnera manicata, which has dark green deciduous leaves spanning up to 2.5m (8ft) and provides a great backdrop for seasonal flowers.

If you haven’t much space, it may be better to plump for smaller specimens such as houttuynia and mimulus, which go well together.

Another plant that boasts impressive foliage is the skunk cabbage (Lysichiton americanus), which grows 1m (3ft) high by 1.25m (4ft) wide. But try not to plant it too close to nose level, as its big yellow flowers have a striking odour.

If you are creating a bog garden, bear in mind that bog plants look best in bold groups. Combine a good clump of foliage with some smaller, more colourful choices.

For those who want more colour, astilbes love wet soil and produce delicate plumes in white, pink, mauve, red and crimson in summer.

For a splash of green and yellow in spring, Euphorbia palustris is the one to go for, although beware of the milky sap which can irritate skin.

Cowslips should also be included in your bog garden border. Among the best is the giant cowslip (primula florindae), which grows to around 1m (3ft) and carries stunning tubular pendant yellow scented flowers in summer.

Another wonderful variety which is easily sown from seed is Primula denticulata, which bears beautiful flowerballs in lavender, cerise, mauve or white. And candelabra primulas are also bursting with colour in early summer, in a vast range of colours.

For a tall, elegant perennial, try Ligularia przewalskii, which has 2m (6ft) high stems and produces spires of yellow flowers in mid to late summer.

If you want your colour scheme to last longer, plant some Rodgersia podophylla, which has creamy white flowers in the summer and leaves which change colour beautifully in the autumn.

Remember that with plants which love soggy conditions, weed carefully as many of them will seed around the parents. If primulas do this, they have a tendency to produce a lot more colours.

If you want your wet garden to look natural, plant around existing features such as logs or mossy tree stumps. And make sure you dig in plenty of organic matter to help them along.

With a little imagination, you can soon reap the rewards of consistently wet soil and it should help stave off the misery of looking out at the rain.

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Hoai-Tran Bui, special to wtop.com

WASHINGTON – For adults, gardening can be one of the most rewarding activities
of
summer. However,
getting kids to enjoy the same activity may present challenges for some parents
and caregivers.

With rising levels of
childhood
obesity, and more youth engaging in increased screen time, sedentary
lifestyles in children and adolescents
is concerning. But gardening may offer the perfect middle ground
between a fun,
outdoor activity and a pastime
that offers exercise and promotes healthy habits.

“We see gardening as being a holistic activity for youth,” says Julie Parker-
Dickerson, the director of youth
education programs at the National Gardening
Association. “You
can garden in a very small space, you can
do it in an urban space, you can do it in containers.”

Gardening with Kids, a subset of
the National Gardening
Association, emphasizes the role of gardening in
the formative years of children. The organization uses gardening to teach students
about science and nature, and it strengthens their connection with nature, in
general.

“Anyone around kids can see the difference it makes for them to have time outside
in fresh air,” says Sarah
Pounders, education specialist at the NGA. “It is relaxing, provides exercise
(and) stimulates their senses
and minds without being over-stimulating.”

Melinda Kelley, program manager at We Can!
® from the
National Heart, Lung and Blood
Institute at the National Institutes of Health, agrees that introducing gardening,
and the healthy foods that
result from gardening, gives youth a better chance of become healthy eaters later
in life. We Can! stands for
Ways to Enhance Children’s Activity and Nutrition. It’s a childhood obesity
prevention program that focuses
on improving healthy eating choices, increasing physical activity and decreasing
screen time, which includes
time spent on computers, games and television.

“It’s just a great way to bring people together,” Kelley says about gardening with
children. “When you take kids
to a farm, or take kids to a
garden or take them even to your backyard, you’re getting them away from the TV
and getting them up off
the couch and getting them to do something active.”

For parents who want to find a unique way to spend time with their kids, and for
those who just want to get
their kids outside this summer, try these tips for gardening with kids.

Don’t assume kids need “kid-friendly” gardening.

WTOP’s Garden Editor Mike McGrath says the smartest thing adults can do is
introduce children to
“real gardening.” He says trends and gimmicks — such as upside down tomato
planters or gardening in
straw bales — may seem fun and creative, but they are just trends that may not
even be safe to have around
small children.

“I think it’s degrading to pretend that children don’t have intelligence, that
they can’t be part of the real
world, that they can’t learn to do something correctly,” McGrath says. “If you
make them some sort of
bizarre playground of plants that has nothing to do with real gardening, you may
amuse them for about 20
minutes, then they’re going to get bored and they won’t have learned anything
about real gardening.”

Instead, Pounders recommends starting kids off
with raised beds or
container gardens, since they are much easier to plant and maintain.

Ask your kids what they want to do or plant.

Take your kids to the store and let them help pick out the seeds. Then, engage
them in planting the
seeds and watering the plants. Pounders says to choose seedlings for immediate
gratification and seeds for
delayed gratification.

Kelley says kids are more likely to be engaged in gardening if you frame it
around some of their
interests.

“Maybe some foods they’d like to try, (and) maybe just some plants they would like
to see what they’d look
like when they grow,” Kelley suggests.

Encourage them to eat the food they grow.

McGrath recommends growing small fruits and vegetables for children to munch
on, such as
raspberries, sugar snap peas or carrots.

“It’s really that first spring when the first peas come in, and the first little
fruits come in, that’s when you
say, ‘Hey do you want something really sweet, do you want to taste something
really delicious?’ And it’s not
in the fridge, it’s not in a box, it’s not in a store, it’s growing in our
backyard,” McGrath says. “And you take
them out, and once they have their first bite, they’re hooked. And there’s a kid
that suddenly, is always
going to have at least an acceptance of fresh food and an understanding of fresh
food.”

Pounders and Kelley agree that growing your own vegetables is the perfect way to
introduce children to
healthy, varied foods.

“The more you expose kids to healthy foods, I think you’re increasing the
likelihood that they’re going to be
receptive to those foods later,” Kelley says. “Just introducing foods to kids
numerous times can help them
overcome the picky eater issue that a lot of parents deal with.”

“Gardening is an activity that parents and kids can share while outdoors,”
Pounders says. “It teaches them a
lifelong skill — it can be a hobby or more fundamentally, it gives them the
knowledge to be able to obtain
their own food.”

Don’t expect to get a lot accomplished.

Children are naturally prone to distraction. Rather than tasking them with
pulling weeds or carting rocks, encourage them to do something creative.

“Let them enjoy what they are doing,” Pounders says. “They may get as much joy
just digging in the soil as
actually planting something.”

And while gardening is a slow process that many impatient children will find
frustrating, McGrath insists that
it is all worth it.

“There’s no plant you put in the ground that you get to eat the next day,” McGrath
says. “But there’s no kid
on the planet that doesn’t like fresh raspberries and blueberries and
strawberries. And to pick them from
your own yard, all of a sudden their parents are much more capable beings, they’re
much more important,
they’re much more interesting than any parent that takes them to the Whole Foods,
or takes them to the CSA
to pick up or takes them to the farmers market on Saturday or Sunday.”

Make it a family outing.

If you don’t have room in your home for a garden, try going to a community
garden. Churches, schools
and neighborhoods often have gardens on their grounds that are open to the public.

“A lot of communities have a little community gardens that you can sign up for and
have a little garden plot,
and that’s a really great way for some people to have access to a spot to garden,”
Kelley says.

Another option is to go out to a farm or an orchard to pick vegetables or fruits.
There are plenty of orchards in Virginia and Maryland that
let
visitors pick
strawberries in the summer, or apples and pumpkins in the fall.

“Ask the kids what they would like to pick, find out if this is a good time to
look and see what’s available in
your community in terms of gardens and farms to visit,” Kelley says.

Follow @WTOP and @WTOPliving on Twitter.

© 2013 WTOP. All Rights Reserved.

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