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We’re getting ready for the gardening season and that means the shovels are coming out. And just as sharp knives are essential in the kitchen, sharp garden tools make any landscape job easier. You may not have ever considered sharpening your shovel but believe it or not it actually makes digging easier. Dirt, rocks and tree roots quickly dull shovel blades. Sharpening your shovel is really easy. You'll need a 10 or 12-inch bastard cut mill file, which is readily available at home centers and hardware stores. This is a good all-purpose choice for sharpening any garden tool.

There are always tips home owners can use to make the garden a little easier to care for today on Southern Gardening. 

It’s Mississippi and we all have pest problems in the landscape, I’d like to share a few tips on being proactive today on Southern Gardening.

Remember when you were a kid, and you used to hate to make your bed every day? In the gardening world, you only have to make your bed once every couple of years, and now is a good time to do it. Of course I’m referring to your landscape bed, and here are some “how-to” tips. Some gardeners like to put a layer of landscape fabric down first, just like a bed sheet. This can be useful for weed control. After the bed sheet, comes the bedspread, so for our purposes, we’re talking about the mulch. Mulches keep the soil cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter.
There’s a lot of gardening interest in native plants. Let’s take a look at a few of my spring favorites. One of my favorite native plants is yaupon holly which has very distinctive berries. And boy are they red and I mean bright candy apple red. They’re translucent with a gem-like appearance. Yaupons are garden jewels that will sparkle in your landscape. The bark is a bright gray and accentuates the berry color. I really like this weeping selection. Our native Oakleaf hydrangea is a Mississippi Medallion winner that begins flowering in mid-spring into the summer.

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