One of the great mistakes many people make in Mediterranean-style landscape design is to incorporate plants that don't blend in with their natural surroundings. To make matters worse, the home owner (or the home owner's gardener) then prunes everything perfectly round or, worse yet, in geometric shapes--giving their home the look of a stage set from the movie Edward Scissorhands.

A house needs to connect with its natural surroundings to feel truly at home. With a little planning you can select the right plants to not only blend your home with the wilder landscape around it but also to create a garden that stands up to the sun and reflects the best that its rays have to offer. The key is to soften plants with formal growing habits by pairing them with free-form shrubs, perennials and grasses.

Most Mediterranean designs use Italian cypress, arborvitae, boxwood, laurel or yew (Taxus) to define the garden and give it some stature. Now consider house or garden walls that might be softened with the addition of a clinging vine such as Boston ivy or creeping fig. You could also incorporate grape vines on arbors, fences or pergolas.

The next thing to do is introduce motion to your garden with the addition of ornamental grasses. Start with a few closer in the foreground and then consider planting groups of three or more as you move farther out. Ornamental grasses change with the season just like the ones that cover the hills, making them great transitional plants. They are wonderful at reflecting sunlight and many have attractive showy plumes that add another shape to the garden. Consider varieties such as Kalamagrostis 'Carl Foerster,' Miscanthus, switch grass (Panicum), green or red fountain grass (Pennisetum), or feather grass (Stipa).

To give the garden some more visual punch, plant flowering perennials that you might expect to find in a field, such as agastache, aster, coreopsis, gaillardia, geranium (species), lavender, rudbeckia, salvia, and veronica. For some extra color and movement also consider tall stemmed daylilies and statice (Limonium).

Finally, for real standout color, consider adding roses to the landscape. You could create a formal hedge using a pure white rose, or just plant roses randomly throughout the landscape and let them blend in. Roses look great in Mediterranean gardens because it is natural to see roses at the end of grapevine rows throughout Tuscany.

To help conserve water, make sure to cover your planted areas with some type of decorative mulch. To complete the look of your sun garden, consider adding a small-scale fountain water feature and some empty decorative glazed containers. These will add style and form to the garden as well as reflect additional sunlight, sending rays of light throughout your new garden.

The increased popularity of wines and table grapes has led to a surge of interest in growing grapes in the home garden. Not only do they produce great tasting fruit, but they can also provide an excellent alternative to flowering vines on fences, arbors, and gazebos. If you have the room in your garden and lots of sunlight, you can even plant a mini-vineyard.

The most important factor in growing grapes is understanding the difference between table grapes and wine grapes. They are very distinct. Table grapes should be eaten fresh, while wine grapes are small berried and seedy, which don't make for good eating. You can't make wine from most table grapes because most don't get high enough in sugar content and the acids are too low to balance the wine.

It also helps to understand the growing habits and ripening dates of different varieties. This leads to a better understanding of when to harvest them and how to prune them properly for maximum health and fruit production. Many homeowners harvest too early, pulling grapes off the vine when they begin to color.

This is a mistake because coloring, known as "veraison," occurs weeks before the grapes are actually ripe. Grapes need to attain a good sugar content and acid balance before they can be harvested. Many people harvest their grapes before they have reached this point and are disappointed in the taste or the wine made from these grapes. It pays to sample your grapes before you harvest them. If they aren't ripe, wait for them to develop.

For wine grapes, consider purchasing a refractometer to determine the sugar content of the berries. Wine grapes usually need a sugar content of around 22-24% sugar (or more) to be harvested and subsequently produce the right alcohol content of the wine. Unlike other fruit, grapes don't improve after harvesting, so don't pick them too early.

The highest maintenance part of growing grapes is the amount of pruning required. Although there is no hard and fast rule about how much to prune, cutting away more of the grapevine leads to stronger and more robust growth during the next season. On the other hand, if you are trying to shade a large arbor, you may wish to allow more growth to remain, but you will have less fruit. Here are some general pruning tips:

• First, keep in mind that the current season's growth produces fruit from last season's wood. If you prune too heavily, the result will be an abundance of foliage--but very little fruit. Pruning too lightly results in large yields of poor quality fruit.
• Basic pruning is simple. The coarser bark of old wood is easily recognizable. Follow the growing tip back to the older wood from the year before. Then come forward, leaving four to five buds, and prune the rest of the branch off. Remove all the weak, thin shoots and leave only the strongest shoots to develop. Flowers from these shoots precede the development of fruit.
• Grapes will grow on the new wood that comes from these pruned shoots. Keep your vine tidy throughout the summer. Prune shoots back to the third or fourth leaf after fruiting. Remove any new growth. Also, remove all leaves around growing fruit clusters to give the fruit maximum sun.

Growing grapes in the backyard or garden can be a rewarding experience if done correctly.

These tiny creatures cause injury to foliage as they feed, bruising the cells with their small, whip-like mouthparts and ingesting the sap. Damage to the foliage gives a speckled appearance to the damaged tissue sites. They also leave a cottony web material between leaf stems.

Spider mite infestation tends to occur during periods of dry, hot weather and hit plants that have not been well watered. A good lesson to learn from this would be to keep your plants healthy and watered at all times, especially when hot, dry weather strikes your gardens.

If you still have spider mites even after your best precautions, there are a number of solutions for their control. For mild infestations consider spraying the undersides of the foliage with water. Make sure and do this at least seven days in a row since mites hate moisture.

For more severe infestations, spray the infected plants with a horticultural oil or a systemic miticide product. Make sure and repeat with two more applications seven days apart to knock out the complete (egg, larvae, adult) cycle. For plants that you know are susceptible to mites, consider applying a systemic root absorbing insecticide to prevent infestations for a complete year.

Remember to never spray edible plants with systemic insecticides. Use a horticultural oil or pyrethrin/garden soap spray instead.

Bonide Eight
Insect Control® Yard & Garden Spray

Eliminate insects from your yard and garden with Bonide Eight Insect Control® Yard & Garden Spray. This ready-to-use insecticide may be applied to vegetables, roses, flowers, and trees, shrubs, and lawns to control a wide range of flying and crawling insects. Apply to foundations, porches, eaves, and windows to control over 100 different indoor/outdoor nuisance pests such as ants, bagworms, beetles, borers, spider mites, moths, gnats, and tent caterpillars. Spray into hiding places, cracks, and crevices for residual control up to four weeks. Eliminate the insects that invade your yard and garden with Bonide Eight Insect Control Yard & Garden Spray. 

How often should I water my lawn?

Answer:

The key to a healthy lawn is to water deeply but infrequently. Deep and infrequent irrigation stimulates root growth, resulting in healthy, drought tolerant, and pest resistant turf.

Most lawns require between 1 inch and 1.5 inches of water per week. But the height of your grass can also contribute to water needs. A lawn maintained at 2-3 inches in height will hold more water than a lawn maintained at 1.5-2 inches of height, which will be more subjected to heat stress in summer. Soil type also comes into play, since sandy soil holds water less effectively than a heavier clay type soil.

To determine how long it takes to water your lawn at the required rate, place several shallow containers such as margarine containers in different areas of the lawn for thirty minutes while irrigating. Measure in inches the depth of water from the containers. The average depth of water in these containers multiplied by two is the inches of water per hour emitted by your sprinkler system. Then adjust your sprinkler timers accordingly. If you notice water runoff prior to achieving full irrigation, then you will have to water in a couple of cycles spaced half an hour apart to allow for complete penetration.

A lawn should be watered when the soil begins to dry out, but before the grass actually wilts. If you notice footprints in the lawn that don't bounce back after walking on it, or areas with a blue-green or smoky tinge, then your lawn is stressed. The lawn should be watered before these signs of wilting are obvious. You will find that most lawns, though, will need to be watered at least twice per week, usually less in spring and fall, and only during periods of extended dry weather in winter if in an area where your lawn doesn't go dormant.