By Sheryl Smolkin

Turning over the calendar from April to May brings out the latent gardener in all of us. Beautiful shrubs, flowers and home grown vegetables are highpoints of summer even in parts of Canada when the season is short.

How to Start a Home Vegetable Garden – Benefits & Saving Money by Heather Levin on Money Crashers discusses the benefits of a home garden including relieving stress and saving money. Gardening can also be a family activity.

The Irish Food Board extols The Economic Benefits of a Well-Kept Garden. They include enhanced curbside appeal of your property and increased productivity of workers in offices and industrial buildings with landscaped areas.

Twenty expert tips to make you a better gardener by Canadian Gardening has all kinds of useful hints. For example, never plant trees that will become large with age too close to your house and set your lawn mower blades at 7.5 centimeters or higher to allow your lawn to go dormant during periods of drought.

Sheridan Nurseries offers great suggestions for growing roses. Roses should be watered regularly through the summer, every few days if there is no rain at ground level and not by overhead sprinklers. Avoid wetting the leaves as this promotes disease. Early morning is the best time to water as late evening watering also promotes disease.

And finally, if you have a small planting space, check out Rodale’s Organic Life’s 7 Secrets for a High-Yield Vegetable Garden. Did you know that you can get maximum yields from each bed if you avoid planting in square patterns or rows? Instead, stagger the plants by planting in triangles. By doing so you can fit 10 to 14& more plants in each bed.

Do you follow blogs with terrific ideas for saving money that haven’t been mentioned in our weekly “Best from the blogosphere?” Share the information with us on http://wp.me/P1YR2T-JR and your name will be entered in a quarterly draw for a gift card.

Also read: How to plant an inexpensive, maintenance free garden