What is a site?

Your site is the place where plants go: a garden, flower pot, window box, yard. While most people think of a site as just a plot of dirt, it really is more than that: the site includes all of the ingredients that make it unique, such as its soil and climate. Understanding the conditions that make up your site and knowing how to deal with them is crucial to successful gardening. Helping you understand these things is one goal of the Garden Tutor course.

Throughout this course we will refer to a site as that part of your property that is relevant to the project at hand. Sometimes the site will be your whole property, sometimes it will be a particular portion of your property, and sometimes it will be the area around one plant.

Hopefully you’ll discover that you use the term in a similar fashion: at times it will be convenient for you to call the whole yard your site, and sometimes you’ll refer to a flower bed as your site.

How do I determine the conditions on my site?

Site analysis. You will be the detective, gathering data about your site to find out which garden options should work on your site. Site analysis doesn’t take much work, yet it is the most important thing you can do to prepare for a garden.

Module 1: Site will take you step-by-step through your site analysis. In it, we discuss the major site-related constraints, and we try to give you helpful information without any fluff. Keep in mind as you learn that site analysis isn’t perfect: the basic idea we present here is the more you know about your site, the better informed you as a gardener will be. And an informed gardener makes better decisions.