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Thursday September 02, 2010
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About Jeff Bredenberg
Jeff Bredenberg is the most lovable guy in gardening gloves you’ll ever meet. He spent the first two decades of his publishing career working for newspapers, primarily writing and editing in features departments in Chicago, Denver, St. Louis and four other cities. He is now an independent writer and editor specializing in how-to and health topics. He has written, edited, or contributed to more than 20 books, including three on the subject of housecleaning. He is a frequent contributor to home-oriented magazines as well.
His How to Cheat at Gardening research laboratory appears to be—to the untrained eye—a conventional house in the suburbs of Philadelphia. He shares this laboratory with his wife, two sons, three cats, and a woeful number of cat boxes.
Learn more about Jeff
How To Cheat Books
Ask Jeff a Question
Jeff Bredenberg also shares advice about cleaning in America Online’s "Coaching" section, where experts provide advice on a broad range of lifestyle matters. See Jeff’s photo gallery of tricks for hard-to-clean appliances.
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About How to Cheat at Gardening and Yard Work
Shameless Tricks for Growing Radically Simple Flowers,
Veggies, Lawns, Landscaping and More.
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Do you love the look of a stunning flowerbed or a nice expanse of lawn bordered by attractive shrubs, but don't have time to spend the whole weekend in your backyard? It’s time to cheat—in a smart way.
In How to Cheat at Gardening and Yard Work, you'll find hundreds of work-reducing, time-saving, cost-cutting gardening tips that will reward you with the best-looking yard and garden you've ever had with less work than ever before.
Cheating on garden and yard tasks is part attitude adjustment, part shortcuts, and part simplicity—with a healthy dose of making clever choices. You'll discover effective and efficient methods to complete just about every garden project, chore, cleanup, or predicament you'll face.
Set aside the things you've done for years and discover:
• How the right tool can save you time—and save your back
• That doing less for your lawn actually means better results
• Why planting a diversion crop cuts down on your pest-patrol efforts
• That groundcovers and foliage plants are no-hassle solutions for weedy flowerbeds.
Buy It Now: Amazon
Other Books by Jeff Bredenberg
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Our Favorite "How to Cheat" Yard Work Tips
• Save time with shady gardens. If you don't have much time for gardening, plant in shady areas rather than sunny ones. Shady gardens generally have fewer weeds, fewer pests, and don't need watering as often as sunny ones.
• Groundcover: the no-hassle solution. One of the lowest-maintenance plantings you can add to your landscape is groundcover. Groundcovers - such as pachysandra, vinca and various forms of ivy - typically grow 6 to 8 inches high. Because they're densely planted, weeds have little hope of survival in the midst of groundcover once it has grown and filled in any little gaps (one more yard work chore eliminated!)
• Water early in the morning. That way, you will lose the least amount of water to evaporation. Avoid watering in the evening. If your plants sit wet overnight, you run the risk of inviting diseases and pests.
• The "weekend warrior" approach to gardening is a path to misery. That is, saving up all of your maintenance tasks and trying to get it all done at once, well, without blisters or exhaustion. Attack your outdoor maintenance daily as 5-minute mini-projects - 5 minutes of picking up trash, 5 minutes of pruning, 5 minutes of weeding, 5 minutes of picking up leaves in corners, etc. The mini-project approach translates into less total time spent actually working.
• Myth-Buster: You need to buy hefty, expensive tools that will last for decades. No. Square Foot Gardening only required three simple tools: a trowel for minor digging, scissors for trimming plants, and a pencil for creating planting holes. A $1 trowel from your discount store will serve you nicely.
• Don't go overboard with the mulch. When you add mulch to a bed year after year, it will mount up more and more, creating strangling volcano-shaped mounds around the base of your plants. Instead, put no more than 1 inch of mulch around the base of the plants and use 3 inches of mulch in the outlying areas between plants.
• Before you drop a young tree into it's planting hole, get your garden hose and fill the hole two-thirds of the way with water. A combination of bouyancy of the rootball and lubrication from the mud will make the tree easy to spin around in it's planting hole, so you can quickly "face" the tree any way you wish.
Submit your own tips to Jeff.
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