Start A Green Living Now!
Green Gardening
Save Water in Your Garden
Having a garden can be a wonderful way to enjoy the greenery, the vegetables it produces, and it can help the environment as well. The only problem is that many gardens consume quite a bit of water, which is not a good thing. It's great to have your own garden, but it is a good idea to work on reducing your watering footprint when you water your garden. Here is a look at a few tips that can help you to save water while still watering and keeping up a nice garden. Choose the Right Plants First of all, you need to make sure that you choose the right plants. Consider the rainfall in your area at the present and the predictions for the future as well. You want plants that can do well with the amount of rainfall that you are to expect in your geographical location. Consider Drip Irrigation One option to help you save water while still watering your garden is drip irrigation. It can help you to save a whole lot of water. It has various pipes that have drippers on them that will put the water right where it needs to go. Since the delivery is targeted, you don't ...- Bookmark :
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Organic Pesticides That You Can Make At Home
Why spend a lot of money on commercial organic pesticides when you can easily and cheaply make your own at home? You will be surprised to know how many items that you have around the house can be used for organic pest control in your own garden. Here are just a few ideas. Garlic Garlic is technically not a pesticide because it does not usually kill but it repels many pests. They just don't like the taste or the smell. You can use garlic for pest control in two ways. First, planting garlic around other plants will keep many pests off. Garlic planted around tomatoes can prevent red spider mite. (Salt water spray is also good against spider mite.) Around fruit trees, garlic plants can repel borer beetles whose larvae would bore into your tree trunk, damaging or even killing the tree. Second, you can make an organic pest control spray from garlic blended with water or oil. Use the water mixture directly on growing vegetables or flowers to prevent rabbits and other invaders from snacking on your plants. Use the oil mixture to spray onto ponds. It will form a film on the surface of the pond that can kill mosquitoes. Boric acid (known ...- Bookmark :
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Worm Farms and Vermicomposting
Worms are man’s best friends especially if you are a home gardener and avid environmentalist. With just a few home-scale worm farms and knowledge about vermicomposting, you can make a difference in your garden and for the environment. Setting Up Your Worm Farms Worm farms can be bought in many shops, both online and offline, even in hardware stores. You will spend $50-65 for a ready-made worm farm with its initial batch of worms. Take note that the earthworm species used are not your garden variety types. Instead, red wigglers and European nightcrawlers are preferred. If you want to make a worm farm, you can use a variety of materials like old plastic containers and old wood. Just drill holes into the container’s bottom for aeration and drainage. Or better yet, build your worm farms into the ground. Place a pan to catch leachate runoff and spacers to separate the catchment pan and the tub. Start by layering small pebbles at the bottom, adding an inch of damp newspapers (use the black and white portions only) and placing handfuls of garden soil (don’t use potting soil) and some eggshells. Don’t pack it down. You can then add your worms into the bedding. Just make ...- Bookmark :
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Indoor Vegetable Gardening for Beginners
Indoor vegetable gardening can be very rewarding, but there are several things to think about before you start. First, do you have enough light? Plants do require a good amount of light to grow strongly and produce a crop. This does not matter so much for general house plants where you just want the plant to survive, but if you intend to grow a plant for its vegetable crop then it will need more light. A large sunny window ledge is fine for smaller plants. If you have a conservatory or a room where the windows reach the floor that is even better because you can use the floor space. Clearly, choosing what to grow will be important. In fact, the most important thing you will do for your indoor vegetable gardening project is choosing the plants. Tomatoes can work well indoors because they grow upward and do not need much space. They do like a lot of sun so you will need to put them right in the window. You can buy a trellis to stand in your container to support them. Herbs also make good indoor plants. They usually like well drained soil. Too much water can cause fungal growth. They also ...- Bookmark :
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Maximize Garden Space with Trellises
With the high cost of food these days, you may have wished that you could start growing your own fruits and vegetables, only to be stymied because you don’t have enough land to do so. The solution is to build a garden trellis, for either vegetables or fruits. This method is called “vertical gardening” or “growing up,” or using a “square in the air.” You can purchase a trellis from a garden store, or build your own. The trellises sold in stores are two dimensional, and are usually in the shape of a fan or a lattice. If you build your own, you can really go to town, building a three-dimensional trellis in the shape of a large open rectangle, as high as you like, and running nylon string, or wire, vertically from top to bottom, or in a V-shape. Each string will support a single plant, of whatever type of plant you wish to grow. You merely have to train it to grow along the strings. Plans to build such trellises may be found on the internet, or in handyman-type books on gardening. These trellises are like the filing cabinets of your garden. Instead of having the plant sprawling gracelessly along on the ...- Bookmark :
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