Defining Your Home, Garden and Travel.
Building a Rain Barrel. If you have a garden or alot of plants then you know that you can use quite a bit of water keeping everything green, especially when there are days or weeks between rain showers. I have noticed rain barrels being sold at Whole Foods for $99 and thought the construction looked simple enough to do on my own and possibly at far less a price. So I undertook the task of doing just that. I picked up an empty barrel at a local farm store that once contained olives. It even had one olive left inside when I got it, I didn’t eat it as tempting as it was. Make sure you find a food grade barrel for this project, you don’t want unknown chemicals spread onto your garden or plants. All of the parts needed I either had lying around or picked up at the local Home Depot. 3/4″ Male No-Kink Hose Bibb 3/4″ Tapped Male Hose to Male Adapter #18 O-Ring (1″) Teflon Tape 3/4″ PVC Female Adapter 1″ Hole Drill Bit First, clean the barrel inside and out.
Bottom bibb assembly attached Screen attached to lid – bottom view. Edible Gardening Containers. My presentation on the “Beautiful Edible Garden” at Epcot’s International Flower and Garden Festival was a hit last week in Florida! After a detailed 45-minute presentation, my audiences stuck around for another 30 minutes or so to take photos of the demonstration gardens. What a compliment. Shirley giving away Baker Heirloom Seeds Some of the biggest hits were edible garden containers that we found at the local dollar store and repurposed as planters! Take a look. <p>Hanging onion basket repurposed as edible garden container! This is an onion rack repurposed as a hanging herb planter!
Another hanging delight, fresh herbs are planted in a $1 wreath frame. Packed in moss and lightweight soil, the wreath maintains a neat appearance through occasional herb harvesting. Make sure you hang this one where the sun DOES shine! Kitchen colander $1 already has drain holes! I’m sure you can find an unused colander in your kitchen cabinet or at the dollar store to transform into a countertop salad garden! Growing Ginger. Learn How To Grow Ginger At Home When I started growing ginger root I expected it to be difficult. It's not. I've been growing ginger at home for years, and ginger would have to be a serious contender for the title "most neglected plant" in my garden. (Which is a shame.
Ginger is a beautiful and beautifully scented plant. I really should move it. One day...) I look at my ginger plants exactly once a year, at harvest time. I easily grow a year's supply of ginger root from them. You can get started using store bought ginger root. On this page I tell you everything you need to know about growing ginger, so you can grow your own fresh ginger, too. Growing Ginger Root Is Not That Hard... ...provided you get a few basics right. The picture on the left shows the foliage of ginger plants. To talk about ginger root when talking about the edible part of the ginger plant is actually incorrect. But I'll keep talking about ginger root anyway, that's what everybody does and you know what I mean. Garden Article: Growing Ginger. Do you love Asian foods, ginger ale and pumpkin pie? It’s the taste of ginger that’s won you over. Zingiber officinale is easy to grow and makes for a great project with kids.
And with its attractive foliage, this plant will add beauty to your home and garden, as well. Just pick up a root from your grocery store’s produce section and get growing! Because ginger root tubers grow right near the soil surface, don’t bury them when you transplant them to your garden. Photo Credit: John Buettner Simply lay the ginger root on the top of the potting soil to “plant” it. Pull the roots from the ground and allow them to dry in the open air before removing the stalks and harvesting. Ginger root is sold in a clump that’s often called a “hand.” Planting is easy as pie: Simply pick a pot that’s at least twice the diameter as the length of your root section.
Studies say ginger’s peak flavor arrives at 265 days. With proper care, your ginger can reach 2-4 feet tall. Candied Ginger. Growing Sweet Potatoes. Overview: Although the terms sweet potatoes and yams (Dioscorea sp.) are used interchangeably in the U.S., they are two entirely different vegetables. They are also unrelated to regular potatoes. Sweet potatoes are in the same family as Morning Glories (Ipomoea tricolor) and you’ll easily see the similarity in leaves to the sweet potato vines we now grow as ornamentals. Although sweet potatoes require 4 months of warm temperatures to develop full size tubers, they are surprising easy to grow.
Latin Name: Ipomoea batatas Common Name(s): Sweet Potato, Yellow Yam Hardiness Zones: Mature Size: Depends on variety. Exposure: Days to Harvest: Harvest roots in 4 months. Description: Sweet potatoes are the tuberous roots of vining plants. The orange fleshed sweet potatoes are the most familiar, but sweet potatoes can be white, yellow and even purple. Suggested Varieties: Beauregard - Pale reddish skin with dark orange flesh. Harvesting: You can dig your tubers once the foliage starts to yellow. Maintenance: Garden Designer. Four-Season Garden. Don’t Believe Everything You’re Told When I moved to Geyserville, California in May of last year, I was excited to grow my own food for the first time. But immediately my neighbors dashed my hopes. They told me that it was too late to grow much this year – that I’d have to wait until next year. Sure enough, I found a pamphlet put out by the local Master Gardeners, confirming that it was too late to plant most crops.
Fortunately, I didn’t listen. Matt and I first amended the soil. Then we made garden beds. What didn’t work? In September, our neighbors told us we would lose our garden to the rains any moment. We harvested 240 lbs. of tomatoes from 4 plants. We didn’t listen. All because we really wanted to do it and nothing was going to stop us. Ten Reasons To Grow A Four-Season Organic Garden Growing your own food reduces the distance your food travels from the farm to you (10 feet, say, versus 250-2,500 miles). When To Plant Fall and Winter Gardens Then find out your average frost date. 35 Ways to Organic Garden. Beneficial Insects. As a gardener, there's nothing more frustrating than finding a prized vegetable crop being devoured by insect pests. A couple of hornworms can level a row of tomatoes overnight.
Fortunately, every pest has a predator, and we can use that natural food chain to our advantage. A sufficient number of beneficial insects will keep garden pests to manageable numbers. You just have to know how to attract those beneficial insects to your garden. Beneficial Insects, Nature's Pest Control: Put simply, a beneficial insect is an insect (or other arthropod) that helps you grow healthy plants. Don't Use Pesticides in Your Garden: Pesticides can't distinguish the good guys from the bad guys. When you're first trying to attract beneficial insects to your garden, you may find the pest population skyrockets for a bit. Plant an Insectary to Invite Insects to Your Garden: An insectary is a garden plot just for the insects.
So what do you plant in an insectary? Provide Water for Insects: Perennials Butterflies Love. Want to bring butterflies to your backyard? Butterflies need good sources of nectar, and these twelve perennials are butterfly favorites. If you plant it, they will come. Butterfly gardens should be planted in a sunny area of your yard, since butterflies require the sun's warmth to fly. All of these perennials do well in the sun. For more information on how to grow the perennials butterflies love, click your way over to About.com's gardening site, where you will find plenty of information by Marie Ionnatti, the About.com Guide to Gardening. 1.
Photo: © Marie Iannotti, About.com Guide to Gardening Garden phlox may be old school gardening, but the butterflies don't seem to care. 2. In my yard, blanket flower is a "plant and ignore" flower. 3. Photo: © Debbie Hadley, WILD Jersey A few plants go by the name butterfly weed, but Asclepias tuberosa deserves the name like no others. 4. 5. Asters are the flowers you drew as a child, many-petaled blossoms with a button-like disk in the center. 6. 7. Insectary Plants (video) Dandelions. By Anita Sanchez Whether you love them or hate them, dandelions are among the most familiar plants in the world. They're one species that just about anyone can identify at a glance, as familiar to humans as the dog. Dandelions are, quite possibly, the most successful plants that exist, masters of survival worldwide. Nowadays, they're also the most unpopular plant in the neighborhood – but it wasn't always that way.
Only in the twentieth century did humans decide that the dandelion was a weed. To get us back on the right dandelion track, here are 10 dandelion-related facts. 1. 2. 3. 4. 6. 7. 10. Dandelions probably will never be eradicated, but we can learn to be more at ease with dandelions and other wild things – and maybe even to love them a little.