If your container plants have lost their lust for life and you want to do something about that, watch this video. Sloat Gardens is a 10-store California gardening chain operating in San Francisco, Marin, Contra Costa and San Mateo counties. Here an expert from Sloat Gardens reveals two products that are key to successful container gardening. A business-like presenter takes 2 mins, 54 seconds to impart this knowledge.

Whether you are planting veggies, herbs or color plants, use good potting soil and transfer the seedlings in their plugs to the container. Then you take something called Zeba (a cornstarch polymer tagged as “super absorbant granules”) on the box and put a little of it around the root zone of the plants - not too much. This retains moisture in the soil and breaks down in about a year. (You can also use Zeba when sowing seeds.)

After that you take a product called Sure Start (a kind of ancient fungal material with a scientific name I couldn’t quite catch) and put about a cup of it in the container. The Sloat Gardens representative swears by this product. She says that if you put two containers next to each other and treat one with Sure Start and the other one not, the difference is “like night and day”, with the Sure Start container doing much better, of course. “There is a symbiotic relationship between the Sure Start and the plant,” she says. “Sure Start encourages the plant to take up nutrients and water while the Sure Start draws some starch from the plant’s roots.”

Although this 59 second Wonder-How-To video is entitled “How To Grow And Care For Black-Eyed Susans”, it really only tells you how to water the newly-planted established plants thoroughly. According to the Wonder-How-To spokesperson, “It’s really important to reduce transplant shock by soaking perennials very well.”

You use a hose, preferably with a long nozzle attachment, that is producing a gentle stream of steadily trickling water. You water them from the top first then move the hose down to the base and let the water really soakd the root area. Leave it there for an half an hour if you can. That’s really all there is to it…

Here is a short (1 min, 30 sec) philosophical presentation by the handsome Gardener Allen Smith on Why We Should Plant Trees In The Fall. The practical reason is probably the least reason to plant them, according to Allen. (Trees are dormant in the fall, so planting them then gives them ample time to recover in time for their growth period during the spring.)

You plant trees because they can live long after you, says Allen. A great example he gives is George Washington planting trees at Mount Vernon, tulip poplars which are now 200 years old and still thriving. And if chosen and positioned and allowed to grow to their full extent trees can contribute to the health of the environment.

That’s not all. If you plant the correct trees in the correct location on the west side of your house (but not so close they interfere with the structure or the utilities) then they can block solar radiation hitting your house, leading to energy savings up to 40 percent. Before buying a tree to plant, know what its height and limb spread will be at maturity so that you make the right decision.

Yardsmarts of www.yardsmarts.com give a compact little video (1 min 43 secs) that should leave you in no doubt as to how to fill in that bare patch in your lawn or establish a lawn in a bare yard. The principles are the same no matter the size area you want to seed.

The Yardsmarts commentator recommends spring or fall for planting in the Northern US states which are cooler and summer for the Southern states. You go out and buy a sack (or sacks) of good quality grass seed. Before leaving the store, read the label. Weed seed (there is always some mixed into the grass seed) should amount to no more than 0.2%.

Right, so you go home and prepare the soil by raking it. Then you spread the seed either by hand or using a small spreader (for small areas) or a broadcast spreader (for large areas). The idea is to get about 15 seeds per square inch. Then you tamp or rake the seeds into the soil (small area) or heavy roller (larger area).

Then you need to spread straw or peat moss over the area to keep the seeds in place while they germinate and keep the soil moist. Finally you water the area gently and keep it watered whil the lawn is getting established. Water it twice a day if necessary. You don’t want it to dry out.

Here’s the real deal on pruning a rose bush. It’s easy! At least one Nick Federoff on Revver makes it looks easy, and he takes only 1 min and 43 seconds doing so. Maybe it’s the Rasputin beard that imparts a sense of confidence in the viewer.

Anyway, Nick calls roses “one of America’s most beloved plants.” Yeah, and the rest of the globe, too. But he cautions that if you want beautiful flowers in spring, summer and fall you are going to have to prune those bushes right.

Nick applies his “3 Point Rule” when pruning roses and they make a bunch of sense. ONE Cut it knee-high, which is about 12 to 16 or 18 inches.
TWO Put your hand palm upward and form a cup shape. That’s how you want the pruned rosebush to look, with three to five main branches cupped around a hollow. The knuckles represent buds, which should face outward like your knuckles. Cut away the excess internal growth to create the hollow, airy space where the new rosebush will thrive. THREE Prune the roses diagonally about a 1/4 inch above the outward facing bud.

Oh, Nick adds you should use a good bypass pruner, availabe at your local nursery or garden centre. ADDITIONAL POINT FROM ME: Wear gardening gloves when pruning roses.

Well here’s a little piece of fertilizer wisdom from Yolanda Vanveen. In a video on the Flower Garden Basics, she argues that many alternatives to fertilizer on the market are simply fashionable and not very effective. In a video just two minutes long, Yolanda of Expert Village tosses out fishmeal, bone meal, body fluids and all those delights we spread over the garden, calling them mere passing fads. After being caught out by coco peat some years ago (it was no good for her plants so she used it as mulch) Yolanda believes in compost. Period.

This video is not about figuring out when the compost pile has gone (when it’s gone it’s gone) but when your compost heap is ready to be used to fertilize the garden. In 1 min, 40 secs learn how to tell when the compost is good enough to spread. The bad news is that good compost takes 6 weeks to 6 months to “mature”, depending on the weather, the materials added and many other factors.

“It’s ready when there is no recognizable material left in the compost,” says the anonymous gardening enthusiast. “It should look like dirt but it’s not dirt; it’s 100% organic compost made from decomposed plant material. Not a lot of minerals in there but it’s great for your garden. Spread 5 gallons of the compost on each 4×8 foot bed once or twice a year and it will be really good for your soil.” Okay.

Quick-talking Doug (good name for a weed puller) at ExpertVillage teaches you in a matter of seconds (one minute and twenty-three seconds to be exact) how to pull weeds so they don’t re-emerge in a matter of days. His talk forms part of a series of videos on How to Set Up A Low Maintenance Garden.

Doug says he gets away with weed-pulling for just half an hour a week in his small garden. The main thing is not to hoe the weeds as this simply stimulates growth. “Use your cultivator and work the weed so you can get the root out with the rest of the plant, otherwise the root if it’s left behind will simply sprout another weed,” says Doug. A cultivator, for those who haven’t yet got their hands dirty, is a hand fork for the garden that has bent-in prongs so you can get right under the plant (I mean weed, but hey, a weed is just a plant in the wrong place ).

Another important point Doug makes is that you should not just toss the weeds onto your lawn “or it will just produce another weed right there.” Throw them in trash.

A 208 year old Invisible Gardener from Malibu, California (that’s how it’s billed, folks) takes us into an organic vegetable garden to look at a raised vegetable beds. It’s quite a skill making one. You need timber sides, two layers of 1/4 inch chicken wire placed on the bottom for the gophers and drip irrigation throughout. What’s more, ideally you need two of these giant beds so you can rotate crops, rest the soil, etc. The Invisible Gardener explains how the soil gets to rest and then earthworms (red ones from Africa) are introduced.

Then comes a layer of compost (not too rich) and finally mulch. Did you know that spreading coffee grounds around repels snails? That’s just one of the intriguing things you’ll learn in this quirky ten minute video.

And this is the first in a series so you’ll be able to follow the series as the season progresses, watching the raised beds develop and produce and the Invisible Gardener grow older. Nice concept.

This is a couple of minutes well-spent with an anonymous person from Expert Village who says: “Whether you garden or you don’t garden, you should make compost. It is a great thing to do and removes your compost from the waste stream.” Okay. She recommends a certain type of composter. It’s like a huge plastic bag and is in fact made of recycled plastic with holes punched in the sides. Get one cheap from your local dump or town office.

Then start making compost. Don’t worry about smells: if you build a compost pile the right way there won’t be a problem. It will have a very nice fragrance actually, kind of nutty. The way to do it is to have a wide variety of stuff (peelings, vegetable leaves, eggshells etc.) in layers and the pile must not be too wet, so mix it with dried leaves, weeds or whatever. I like this bit: you should churn in a shovelful of compost to get the whole thing going. It reminds me of making yogurt!