Solutions to Gardening Dilemmas

By Elizabeth Wasserman

Planting a garden has traditionally been a getting-back-to-nature pursuit. Whether you're an urbanite with a roof garden, or a suburbanite with a great lawn, anyone who has a green thumb much prefers to till the soil, nurture seedlings, and artfully arrange perennials with our own hands. But these days, even gardening has given way to the wide-reach of the Internet with new resources for ways to design plots, select varietals, and order seeds and tools.

"I use the web to find interesting varieties of seeds," says Gayla Trail, author of You Grow Girl: The Groundbreaking Guide to Gardening (Fireside) and founder of You Grow Girl. Trail has purchased exotic and heirloom seeds online that she couldn't necessarily find at the local garden store, such as Black Plum Tomatoes, Red Velvet Lettuce and Mexican Sour Gherkin Cucumbers. She's even launched a seed exchange through her web site, where avid gardeners will list the names of seeds they are willing to part with and those they are interested in obtaining. The site also features sections where readers can share their gardening experiences and photos.

Growing a garden may never be the same with the abundance of information and resources abounding on the Internet. You can now use online tools to design your landscape or vegetable garden, find out when you should plant in your climate, and even order seeds, seedlings and hoes online. And the kids can often play a role, too. Here's how:

Step No. 1: Find tools to design a garden  Several web sites now offer free garden planning tools that allow you to plot your landscaping or design a flower garden via your computer. Better Homes and Gardens allows web surfers access to its Plan-a-Garden feature, which lets you select trees and shrubs and other plants, dragging and dropping them onto a plot. The home improvement store, Lowes, also has a free Landscape and Garden Planner tool that allows you to design a garden plan, print it, and even create a shopping list for supplies.

Step No. 2: Select plants and get help  When picking your plants, it's a good idea to know what will grow best in your region of the country. For the naturalist, National Geographic lets gardeners click on a map of the world to pinpoint an area's terrestrial ecosystem in order to grow native plants. For example, the map points out the different types of native plants in the Mojave Dessert versus the Middle Atlantic coastal forests.

Sunset magazine features a gardener's handbook that matches you with the right plants for your needs. The guide can also help the novice learn the difference between a cedar tree and an American gum tree, or tell you what type of sun and watering conditions it takes to grow carpet bugle or ice plant.

If some plants in your garden aren't fairing well, Cornell University's Plant Pathology Department offers photos and descriptions of vegetable plant diseases. The American Phytopathological Society has a database of common names of plant diseases. Planet Natural offers natural and organic ways to treat everything from blossom end rot to potato scab.

Step No. 3: Order seeds and tools  No longer must you rely on the seeds and tools available at the local garden store. With the Internet, the gardening marketplace has become more competitive as plant nurseries across the country vie for your business. There are certain restrictions involved in shipping live plants across state and national borders so check with local authorities before ordering online.

Seed companies such as Burpee have moved their catalog businesses online, where one can order everything from heirloom Black Krim tomatoes to ostrich fern. For heirloom varieties, which are important to keep diversity of crops alive, SEED SAVERS is a non-profit site where heirloom seeds can be exchanged. OrganicSeed provides a selection of soil-friendly, untreated vegetable and herb seeds. Smith & Hawken lets you buy such gardening essentials as trowels, forks and a leather gardening travel bag, while Johnny's Selected Seeds has rock-compost sifters and cell flats and heating mats.

"In the past, you were dependent upon regional resources," says Trail, who splits her gardening time between a rooftop deck, a community garden, and a patch of public land on a Toronto street corner. "The Internet has actually made so many things you need for gardening readily accessible."