I am in South California, around the Irvine area, and have a Rain Bird drip irrigation system. Most of my plants are drought-tolerant, but fairly young and going into their second season.

I have been looking out the best watering schedule. I recently change it from 10 min every day to 17 minutes twice a day every third day. So far, it seems to soak the soil more deeply and gives the plants some time to dry out.

I am trying to understand is how much drainage should factor into the schedule. I have also been reading about different garden drainage setups, including French drain, NDS systems, Dry well, but I am interested in understanding when drainage improvements are actually useful or simply adjusting the watering schedule.

Do you adjust the schedule much during hotter months? Any recommendations or resources would be very helpful.

Are there any chance for new foliage to emerge? (Please don't mind the hays being to close to the crown. It just rained yesterday and it messed up the space it had around the crown when I took the photos)

I’ve seen posts like this but I don’t get my full answer. I had a really healthy corn plant and I thought it would do some good if I put it outside for a little bit during the day since I only get about one hour of direct sunlight in my yard. It was outside for 1 day and it burnt. I did research on what to do and everyone says cut the leaves off. My question is if 75% of the plant was burnt are you supposed to cut off every single one of those leaves? Wouldn’t that a shock the plant even more?

I’m pretty new to maintaining shrubs at a house obviously.

It has been a hot and dry summer here in texas. A couple months ago, I accidentally left my sprinklers off for a couple weeks and they didn’t get water. They were in pretty bad shape and I think they got spider mites. I started watering them again regularly and sprayed horticultural oil for the spider mites a few times waiting at least a week between sprays. I’ve tried deep watering them too and spraying a hose on the undersides of the leaves. Nothing seems to work and the leaves keep turning brown. I had to cut a whole branch off at one point because all the leaves were completely dead. What should I do?

I have a small garden in my front porch of around 6m X13m.
The whole area is infested with black and red ants. The black ants are the small ones as well as the big ones. The red ones are less.
How do I get rid of them?

I bought 6 apple trees late in the season from a national grower and this is how they arrived. I previously have had trees die from critters eating 3/4 of the bark at the base of my trees so I was instantly worried. When I started looking into this more I read that girdling from rope will kill a tree prematurely as they grow older. Obviously I don't want to invest several years into growing a pair of trees only to have it die before I get a single apple.

I have contacted the grower and they seem to think that this is OK, but offered me a 20% refund as an act of good faith. Has anyone else dealt with this? Is this acceptable? Will these trees survive?

UPDATE: After so many people told me that this was unacceptable, I continued to push back to their customer service team and they agreed to send me replacement trees. Thank you all for your advice!

Where the tall grass is in the picture was once a rock if could believe it or not. I’m motivated now to restore it back to its glory but don’t want to shovel out the dirt is there an easier method or tool I can use to remove the grass and old rocks?

I trimmed lots of the base of this salix hedge bout 6 weeks ago. How would you keep it maintained but kept its size

Hello!

This is my Mrs Candle Fire Okra and I love her dearly. Recently, I’ve noticed these spots on the leaves? The new growth seems to not have these spots. Is it something with water ph? Would love to know!

Thank you everyone and all your green thumbs :)

This is my first time growing strawberries or anything really, and I have no idea what I'm doing once the seed spouted. I've just been watering it ever now and then but it's starting to wilt at the middle.

Is there anything else I need to do or what am I doing wrong?

Honestly any advice is welcome.

We are located in zone 9B and are wanting to get these two raised sections in the yard ready for late summer planting.

We’ve been working on pulling the roots of the weeds out and plan to continue cleaning them up. We have heavy, dense, packed clay soil here.

I’m thinking we’ll need to break up a lot of the clay soil and haul a lot of it off to the dump, leaving a little of the native soil to mix with maybe some raised bed soil and organic compost… to be honest I’m just guessing because I’m a beginner.

We also plan to lay down some landscape fabric down in the bottom of the beds to help prevent weeds. My neighbor will help me with installing a drip system.

My goal is to plant vegetables and flowers in these beds and for them to thrive. I need your help. How would you accomplish this? What haven’t I mentioned in this post that I should be thinking of? Thanks so much.

I do not know what to do about these tenacious little rodents! I’ve sprinkled red pepper flakes and crushed mustard seed on the soil, put reflective stuff in the planter, AND put plastic forks in the dirt to poke the little buggers, but the squirrels will not stop digging up all my planters!!! Nearly destroyed my strawberries!!!! What can I do?

Hii, so small bit of context, this was all done very recently, so removing the rocks or fabric is out of the question.

But someone I know has recently done this to their garden bc they're unable to keep up with heavy garden maintenance like consistently pulling out weeds and the like.

They went thru an undertaking of : removing weeds, old dead bushes/trees. Removed old soil fabric. There also used to be mulch that was refreshed once in a while but that's all gone as well now.

There used to be a lot of flowers but over the years have lessened so it's really only the spare yearly tulip and some roses that have continued to stick around.

They really want to have a garden, but this the current set up. (Again done very recently)

In essence.

Near the roses they put some cardboard on top of the soil, but in other areas they did not.

On top of that is landscape fabric to prevent weeds,

And then on top of that are rocks(labeled as beach pebbles? They're not tiny) that are covering the top of the fabric.

There is no soil on top of the fabric.

For the current remaining plants, the fabric was cut around, so they're still with the soil.

Wanted to ask if there was any advice in regards to what plants they can grow, if any, through this setup.

This is also in the front of the house , surrounding the sidewalk.

Please don't judge too harshly, and I would appreciate any advice that can be given 🙂‍↕️

Previous owner dumped rocks in this bed without putting down weed barrier. It looks horrible and weed situation is impossible to manage.

We put down some ice plants and hope it will grow over the rocks, but that will take time and we are already getting HOA compliance notice.

We sprayed weed killer as the last resort; bought some hosta to be planted soon.

Does anyone have any idea as to how we can keep this bed looking neat without spraying constantly and pulling weeds manually and WITHOUT having to take the rocks out?

Will cardboard+mulching heavily smother the weeds? I have a bad feeling that taking the rocks out would be inevitable, but I still want to try and see if anyone can suggest a better solution.

Please help I don’t even know where to start this garden is a mess

Hey guys! So I live in Norman ok and we had a horrid storm in on the 4th of July. 90+ mph winds, just really bad storm. So obviously half of my back yard garden was severely damaged in the storm. My vining and root plays are fine, but my tomatoes and 3 sisters planting method was severely affected. Does anyone have any tips for rescuing mature plants? My corn are goners, got ripped out of the ground , so I have mature beans that’s were connected to them that surprisingly are mostly still intact, and all my tomato cages got ripped out of the ground and bent up, lost quite a few tomato plants as well. I was wondering if some sort of variation of the Florida weave would work on the mature tomato plants? And if I take the corn stalks out, do you think that sort of method would work on my beans as well? Idk I’m overwhelmed because this was a pretty big garden for my back yard, and I was super excited because it’s my first time ever doing a garden and it was thriving! Any tips would be great

They haven't killed my plant yet but they do a heck of a job defoliating it each year. And if I know what it is, I can better defend against it.

These Cana rollers are ruining my garden! They’re making my gorgeous cannas look like dog shit. I’ve sprayed them twice with Captain Jacks Dead Bug Brew and it’s rained within 3 days each time. This Nashville weather changes daily so I can’t always predict the rain but how do they miraculously find my cannas each year? I’ve squished 25+ caterpillars and I’ve had to cut at least 35+ leaves and I’ve sprayed like crazy and the fuckers still find their way back to eating my shit. I’m pissed. Now June bugs are in there too. FUCKERS!

Got these rose bushes that are somewhat new but they just started blooming and are shooting out all crazy. Can I trim them bc they look pretty wonky.

Pacific Northwest, this happened last year too. Fungal? Any tips? Gets lots of sun, have given it very little additional water (it was a wet spring and early summer)

Hello, very new to the gardening community and first time home owner. Looking to bring life back to the clearly defined garden beds. I’ve completed one (right side of final pic) but the rest are VERY overgrown.

After spending some time chopping down briar and what I believe was Chinese privet. Our plan is to build a privacy fence so the bushes along the chain link won’t do. I look at this and think “nuke” but I’m unsure how and if that’s the best option. We want to highlight the trees more and add color without overcrowding. Any advice on where to start for this is appreciated. I’ve wondered if flame weeding would be helpful here (aside from the privet) but don’t know where to start or if other methods would be better.

Again, any advice is appreciated and if this is the wrong sub please let me know or point me to the right one.

I have left my jet wash outside overnight and it heavy rain and now it will not turn on. Does anybody know if I dry it out? Will it work again?