Gardening Life

The best way to maximize our effort is to plan now for what we want to eat later.  It’s really no different than the age-old concept of planning out your week’s meals before heading to the grocery. It eliminates ending up with produce that you have no idea what to do with in late fall – and not enough of the ones you need to can and freeze to feed your family.  

Follow the photo-link to find helpful tips to help "Plan to Can".

There have been 117,000 of these snails picked up in Miami-Dade County since they first noticed the infestation in September 2011. 

Denise Feiber, a spokeswoman for the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services told Reuters that it is important to get these massive guys under control as soon as possible. The snails are not just a problem for the area's vegetation, but they are for the areas human population as well. "These little buggers carry a parasitic lungworm that can cause meningitis in people."

Follow the photo-link to read more about this.

A vegetable garden can be a bountiful and beautiful thing. These garden layout ideas will help you design your own vegetable garden. . .

Benefits of harvesting rain water for your garden.

With ‘no-till’ gardening, once the bed is established the surface is never disturbed. Amendments such as compost, manure, peat, lime and fertilizer are ‘top dressed’, i.e added to the top of the bed where they will be pulled into the subsoil by watering and the activity of subsoil organisms.

Recycled newspaper pots are relatively easy to make and make transplanting seedlings to the garden simple, as the pot can be placed directly into the soil, where it will degrade. Instead of purchasing peat pots at the garden center, consider recycling your old newspapers into beneficial seedling pots.

Grow-chart for a wide variety of common garden vegetables. Most of these vegetables can be grown outdoors during the warm growing season in USDA hardiness zones 4-9. If growing in cooler climates or locations with shorter growing seasons, or cultivating plants native to tropical or subtropical regions (such as tomatoes and peppers), you may consider starting your plants indoors to ensure a mature crop before the first freeze of the fall or winter.

This article will strike different ‘chords' with different people. For some this is art, but others may see this as decimation of a beautiful instrument. But before you begin to grieve for them, to my knowledge all the instruments shown here were beyond repair.

Use the photo-link to find other examples of artful instruments.

"My allotment neighbour has a row of roses, which he took as cuttings. I asked how he took them. He simply plunges the cuttings into the ground. But his secret of success is the humble potato! Before planting cuttings, he pushes the bottom end into a small potato, which he believes keeps the cuttings moist as they develop  roots. It sounds crazy, but his row of allotment roses is proof it works."

Follow the photo-link to learn more!

"Spring Lilacs" - A cover image created and placed in the public domain for your use. Click-through to the source page to find the free download.

Add tropical plants to your garden this year - in ANY zone.

Follow the photo-link to discover how.

I am wondering if any of you create spaces in your garden which are both attractive and child-friendly. Would you incorporate something like this?

More garden ideas can be found here: http://ow.ly/jy2rp

If you have warm temperatures during the day but cold nights and want to add plants to your Fall or Winter garden you can start your seedlings in small containers stored inside clear plastic totes. Take the totes outside before you leave in the morning so they can get a day's worth of sunlight and build up cold tolerance then bring them inside at night.

This idea comes from homesteading weblog The Prairie Cottage. They recommend grouping seedlings into plastic totes according to their cold tolerance. That way you can bring in your most vulnerable plants well before sunset while other plants may be fine for another hour or two. Eventually most of your plants will grow and build up their cold tolerance so they can be planted in the soil and you can flip the clear tote over as an improvised cold frame while the plant's root systems are getting established. The plastic totes may not seem like much but they will keep wind chill from hurting your plants as well as trap a little solar heat.

Since the beginning of recorded time, mankind has been using collections systems to gather and store rain water for future use, and while the appearance of the systems has changed, the basic elements that make them up have not. All you need is a wide surface and a piping system to direct the water to the storage device.

Roofs and down spouts fulfill the first two requirements and are at the disposal of every homeowner, it’s getting a proper water storage device that trips up most would be water collectors.

Follow the photo-link to read detailed, step-by-step instructions for building your own "perfect rain barrel system".

Plant trivia! Indulge your inner gardener with the "World of Plants Quiz". Play now and get to the 'root' of your knowledge!

In order to bloom, wisteria needs full sun and moist soil. It prefers slightly acidic soil, but they will adapt to most soil conditions. Wisteria is a vigorous vine, so you will need to build support for your plant. Most ready-made trellis will be pulled apart by your wisteria. Also, avoid using your house or other building structures as support, since the vines are capable of ripping off shingles and siding.

Follow the photo-link to learn about how to grow this beautiful and fragrant plant.

Strategies used which enabled us to greatly increase our garden yield, while requiring less time and less work.

"It took over 20 years of gardening to realize that I didn't have to work so hard to achieve a fruitful harvest"

Container gardening isn't only for savvy urban gardeners and folks with limited space to grow, it can also be for folks who want to maximize their yields in a controlled environment.

The Alnwick Garden - an English duchess created this garden, dedicating it entirely to flora which are deadly and/or narcotic.  Behind big black gates, the carefully curated garden contains about 100 legendary killers like Atropa belladonna (deadly nightshade), Strychnos nux-vomica (strychnine), and Conium maculatum (hemlock).

Fragrant flowers lure us into the garden, and keep us there.  The spicy scent of lily-of-the-valley may remind us of a favorite neighbor, while a whiff of honeysuckle transports us back to childhood summers in the country.  We accept the beautiful aromas of the garden as gifts meant for us personally, even though they are intended strictly for the birds and the bees.  Nearsighted pollinators rely on fragrance to guide them to nectar-filled blossoms;  like us, they may become intoxicated and find themselves unable to leave a favorite flower.  Just as some insects are attracted to specific plants, we humans have our individual preferences. What are yours?

Follow the photo-link to find the lists of heavy, subtle, and spicy scented flowers.

Easy to expand and add on, a 3-4' wide is a good distance, otherwise it gets hard to reach your plants in the middle, and easy reach is a big benefit of raised bed gardening.

Follow the photo link to read more about creating your own raised concrete beds in various designs.

The Cycling Flowers at Brockwall Park, London