Archive for May, 2010

VACAVILLE, CA - APRIL 20:  a worker holds fini...
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There are lots of items in your kitchen which could be used to produce natural organic fertilizer. Remaining vegetables and other edible supplies from the kitchen area contain lots of nutrition which are vital for raising plants within your garden. With your kitchen leftovers and garden waste, you are able to produce fertile and rich garden soil.

Despite the fact that it is possible to produce natural organic fertilizer with only your leftovers on the ground, this process can be very messy and stinky. Make no mistakes about it, left over foods can certainly give off a horrible smell after being kept for a few days so in case you don’t want your home to stink, use a closed composting bin. Furthermore, leaving your left over food on the open could appeal to rodents and also of bugs therefore unless you want rats running around your backyard, you better maintain your compost supplies covered. No, you do not need an costly bin to start out composting your kitchen leftovers and other waste items. but when you desire to get it done proper and in an asthetic manner there are design compost bins on the market, like the RolyPig composter, that happen to be fully closed and are fun to look at.

To make natural organic fertilizer you just, after buying a composting bin, put your bin in a strategic place and begin filling it with kitchen leftovers and garden waste materials. Try to fill your bin with a variety of green and brown waste from your kitchen and yard. Keep in mind that the type of stuffs that you put into your bin will determine the fertility of the natural organic fertilizer that you will generate, consequently ensure that you put in green kitchen waste which has a lot of nitrogen into your natural organic fertilizer bin.

Brown waste resources for example cardboard and cardboard tubes, saw dust, leftover cereal products, lifeless crops and the likes will also be excellent resources for your natural organic fertilizer so put a lot of those sort of things into your composting bin. You may also add used paper towels, paper bags and eggs shells into your compost. However, don’t put too much of these products into your composting bin.  Eggshells, paper towels as well as brown bags usually do not decay as quick as kitchen leftovers. Once your bin is filled, seal it to keep insects and rodents out.

To quicken the composting process, turn the contents in your natural organic fertilizer bin every two weeks. If you have a non tumbling bin you should, for hygiene reasons, wear a mask and gloves when you turn the heap especially throughout the initial couple of weeks. Note that some kinds of kitchen leftovers decay little by little and they tend to give off bad smell while decaying so ensure that you cover your nose and mouth when you turn the heap. Keep in mind that you are dealing with smelly waste here therefore protect yourself from the stink. That is why we suggest a rotating compost system like the RolyPig, this looks funny it’s simple and clean and no awfull stinks.

The author of this article, Hank Gordon, writes at his website Gardeners Info Point. com about design compost bin in general and the RolyPig in particular.

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snail and beetle larva
Image by myriorama via Flickr

Snails and slugs are a menace. Wherever a climate is damp there will be a problem with these critters. In desert type climates such as New Mexico and parts of Arizona, snails will come out early, when there is moisture on the plants.

If the leaves on your otherwise healthy plants look like swiss cheese, you’ll know snails have come to call. Those slimy, fat creatures appear when you don’t expect them. Snails will follow the slimy trails they find that have been left by other snails.

Tracking down the snails is a thankless task. They are in hiding, making thousands of equally homely babies. They will keep doing this for their entire lives. The little buggers hatch in less than three weeks! In six weeks the babies will be full grown and making their own off-spring – many thousands more.

Find their slimy egg clusters hidden away. Quick! Shake salt on them as fast as you can. They will be destroyed before they hatch.

With each passing year, snails grow larger. They live for several years so they can grow quite large. The more they eat, the more they grow, so destroy them as quickly as you can.

Gardening in a home greenhouse can be a deterrent to snails and slugs. If you’re thinking of buying a polycarbonate greenhouse snails and slugs won’t be as big a problem.

Fat and bold, if they can creep in when your back is turned, they will make babies inside.Use the shiny trail to find where they are hiding! Sherlock Holmes has nothing on you when you go on the hunt.

After you find them, there are several things you can do.

Oat bran does not do well in their digestive tract and will kill them when they eat it.

Cracked eggshells will cut the snails as they slime their way across the sharp edges.

They love the smell of beer. Simply place bowls of beer around your greenhouse. They will fall in and drown.

If you plant certain herbs they will repel snails and slugs. Grow them in abundance in your greenhouse to keep the snails and slugs at bay. Thyme, lemon balm, rosemary, lavender and mint should be part of your arsenal.

Keep on top of the problem and you will never have to resort to poisons. In the confines of a greenhouse, herbs will usually do the trick. If you get a serious infestation however and need to take drastic measures, use all the above solutions at the same time. If you do that, you can avoid ever using poison.

If all else fails, buy a small green house and get a hedgehog or a duck. Hedgehogs and ducks love tasty snail meat.

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The Psychology Behind Gardening

Arbres en couronne...!!!
Image by Denis Collette…!!! via Flickr

I don’t know what it is about a garden that has always drawn humans to them. But they’ve always been very popular, and an intrinsic part of peoples’ lifestyles. Most religions feature gardens as the settings for quite a few of the largest occasions As reported by Christianity, humanity was started in a garden and the son of God was resurrected in a garden. The Buddhist build gardens to allow nature to permeate their environment. Virtually every major palace and government building has a garden. But what’s so great about them? They’re just a bunch of plants, on balance.

Needless to say, the reasoning is fairly obvious behind why people grow food in gardens. It’s to eat! If you live off the fat of the land and actually survive on stuff from your garden, it’s simple to figure out the reasoning. But I’m considering those people who plant flower gardens just in the interest of looking nice. There is no immediate benefit that I can observe; you just have a group of flowers in your yard! However, after thinking extensively about the motivation behind planting decorative gardens, I’ve conceived several potential theories.

Gardening Advice

I think one reason people like gardens so much is that while we have a natural desire to progress and industrialize, deep within all of us is a primal love for nature. While this desire may not be as strong as the hope for modernism, it is still strong enough to compel us to create gardens, small outlets of nature, accompanied by all our hustle and bustle. Since being in nature is like regressing to an earlier stage of humanity, we too can regress to a time of comfort and utter happiness. This is the reason why gardens are so relaxing and calming to be in. This is why gardens are a respectable place to meditate and do tai chi workouts. A garden is a way to rapidly escape from the busy world.

I’ve thought sometimes that perhaps we as humans feel a kind of guilt driving us to regenerate nature and care for it. This guilt could stem from the knowledge that we, not personally but as a race, have destroyed so much of nature to get where we’re today. It’s the least we can get done to create a small garden in remembrance of all the trees we kill each day. It’s my theory that this is the cause for the majority of people to take up gardening as a hobby.

Gardening is unquestionably a healthy addiction though, don’t get me wrong. Any hobby that provides physical exercise, helps the environment, and improves your food consumption can’t be a negative thing. So despite what the underlying psychological cause for gardening is, I think that everyone ought to continue to do so. In the United States especially, which is addressing excessive weight and pollution as its two major problems, I think gardening can simply serve to improve the state of the world.

Obviously I’m no psychologist; I’m just a curious gardener. I often stay up for hours questioning what makes me garden. What is it that makes me go outside for a few hours each day with my gardening tools, and facilitate the small-time growth of plants that would grow naturally by themselves? I may never know, but in this instance ignorance truly is bliss.

To know more about gardening, please check out Easy Gardening

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Mount Grace Priory: Herb Garden
Image by Ambersky235 via Flickr

One of the best ways for gardeners to spend an autumn day is strolling through an herb garden that’s setting seed. The plants send up a fragrant aroma as your legs brush against their branches, and flower petals cling to their last bit of summer color. You will be able to replant your herb garden next year using materials you already have in hand by collecting seeds from your garden herbs.

How Seeds Form

Before you start saving seed from your herb garden, it’s a good idea to make sure you understand the basics of plant reproduction. Plants grow from seed. There will be two leaves on a seed that has just sprouted. Those leaves sprout new leaves, and they and their progeny keep sprouting more leaves until a plant is formed. In order to nourish the leaves above the ground, the seed also sprouts downward into the soil.

Like everything else in nature, the plant’s strongest desire is to reproduce itself. Plants reproduce from seed; a plant’s mission in life is to produce seed to guarantee the survival of its species. Plants are able to produce seeds by growing flowers, these are then pollinated by the wind or bees. As the flower petals shrivel and dry up, the seed matures, and the wind shakes the seed off the plant and onto the ground where it germinates and sprouts two new leaves, and the process repeats itself.

How to Collect Herb Garden Seed

Presumably, you will be harvesting your herb garden plants throughout the growing season and using their leaves and flowers for medicinal or culinary purposes. Halfway through the season, choose a few healthy sturdy stems from where you will collect your herb garden seed. Tie a colored ribbon around the branches to mark them, and stop harvesting leaves from those stems.

When the flowers are almost fully ripened, cut the stems at the base of the plant. Bind several stem ends together with a rubber band and hang the bundle upside down from a clothesline hung in a warm, dry room. Place the hanging end of the bundle inside a paper lunch sack, and secure the bag around the bundle with string or a twist tie. After a few days, shake the stems and you will find that full ripe seeds will drop.

How to Save Herb Garden Seed

Once you have collected seeds for an herb garden, the seeds will remain viable for several years if they are stored in paper envelopes in a cool, dry place. Make sure that you write the name of the herb outside the envelope so you will know what you are planting next spring.

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Unique Ways To Grow Strawberries

Strawberries have been one of the most popular plants to grow of all time. If you are concerned about not having enough space or time, there is no need to fret – there are countless options for you to try!

The most important thing is to consider what type of seeds to use. One popular type is the everbearing strawberry plant, as these tend to yield a crop in both the spring and fall. If you are growing them indoors, which is very much possible thanks to all the unique growing methods available, you can sometimes even fool your plant into producing more. Strawberries only require two things to grow well, 6-8 hours of sunlight, and regular watering. When you remember a few strawberry growing tips the rest is pretty easy from there!

Many beginners will often start with an easy and popular method known as container gardening. The choices for different types of containers are many, and your only real limit is your imagination. Many people choose container gardening because it is much easier than learning how to build something from strawberry planter plans.

Another way to plant strawberries is in an upside down hanger. Youi can make your own by reusing plastic bottles from around the house, or you can also buy them in kits at any garden supply store. This unique method hangs and grows your plants literally upside down. You could also try planting your strawberry garden using the lasagna gardening method. This kind of gardening eliminates the need for tilling up the dirt or using chemical fertilizers, since it creates its own rich topsoil. This environmentally friendly method of gardening requires stacking boxes and compost on the ground. While it may be a newer method of gardening, it is a great way to get rich soil without worrying about pesticides or chemicals.

With so many great ideas, growing strawberries with your family is sure to be a fun time for everyone. When you give your plants the proper type of care, you just might be surprised what they can use for growing in.

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