Kitchen Garden Planner | Preplanned Vegetable Gardens by Gardeners Supply - StumbleUpon With our free online planner, you can design a super-productive vegetable garden, based on square-foot gardening techniques instead of traditional rows. Just drag and drop crops to the planting grid and the planner fills in the number of plants. Or choose from 16 pre-planned gardens. Print out your planting map and you're ready to go. Get Started or Expert Advice and Resources Small Footprint, Big Yield: Create an Easy Micro Organic Urban Garden Today! | Urban Gardens | Unlimited Thinking For Limited Spaces April 28, 2009 by Robin Plaskoff Horton There are two things urban gardeners are short on: space and time. The Urban Garden, brainchild of Bill Arquitt, resolves both of these issues, making it efficient and simple to plant a vegetable garden with up to 55 plants in a 3-foot deep by 4-foot wide footprint. The contained six level tiered system is nearly maintenance-free, eliminating heavy weeding, and its northwestern cedar construction renders it naturally bug repellent.
Square Foot Gardening Templates March 19th, 2009 A few of you asked about the template I was using in my photo yesterday, so I decided to explain what they are and how we made them. I use the Square Foot Gardening method in my raised beds. I don’t plant each square with something different as other people do, I usually plant large sections of different types of plants. Basically these are a square foot piece of some scrap plywood we had laying around. I contemplated having him make ones that had dowels or small squares of wood nailed for spaces so I could “punch” the holes into the soil with them, but we didn’t have any dowels and these were much faster (I think they’re 2 inch holes). You could drill smaller holes in these, but I decided I wanted larger ones to have room to work and so I wouldn’t risk getting any splinters or anything. I sanded and painted them yesterday to help protect them while using them in the garden. What method do you use for planting?
Omega Garden Carousel The Omega Garden™ Farmdominium/Vertical Farming is our answer to commercial and industrial-scale urban agriculture. Each horizontal carousel carries 36 Volksgarden™ modules. Each Volksgarden module has approximately 20 foot square surface growing area. Rotary motion effect on plants shows an increase in growth rates of up to a factor of five observed. Horizontal carousel frame conforms to intermodal shipping container specs for easy shipping, and stacking. The Farmdominium TM (like condominium but without the con ;) is designed to be a fully automated system. A Farmdominium TM can be either a permanent, or temporary installation.
Rosalind Creasys new Edible Landscaping | L.A. at Home | Los Angeles Times After Rosalind Creasy tore out her front lawn and planted a vegetable garden, real estate agents stopped by to offer their services. With such great curb appeal, they said, the home would be an easy sell. That was in 1984, two years after the publication of Creasy's groundbreaking book, "Edible Landscaping." Since then, designer Creasy has established herself as one of the pioneer foodie-gardeners, and Sierra Club Books has just released the much-anticipated second edition of "Edible Landscaping" ($39.95). (That's the author's Black Satin blackberry vines, above, fruiting among the blooms of her climbing rose bush. In the new edition, Creasy reports that one year the plant yielded nearly 30 pints of berries.) The book recounts how for decades Creasy accompanied her husband on business trips to places such as Cairo, Hong Kong and Venice (the Italian one). Creasy noticed that home gardeners in these far-flung locales made no distinction between edible and ornamental. -- Nan Sterman
How to Grow 100 Pounds of Potatoes in 4 Square Feet | Apartment Therapy Re-Nest On many occasions, we've been tempted to grow our own potatoes. They're fairly low maintenance, can be grown in a pot or in the ground, last a fairly long time if stored properly, and can be very nutritious (high in potassium and vitamin C). Here's more incentive: according to this article, you can grow 100 pounds of potatoes in 4 sq. feet. Learn how after the jump... According to this article from the Seattle Times, potatoes planted inside a box with this method can grow up to 100 pounds of potatoes in just 4 square feet. All that is required: Lumber Seed potatoes Soil Careful attention to watering The Times' guide for building a potato growing box yields up to a 100 lbs. of potatoes in a mere 4 square feet is shown below: Plant as early as April or as late as August 1, with an approximated 3 month till harvest turnaround time. Here are some pointers from the article: Cut apart larger seed potatoes, making sure there are at least two eyes in each piece you plant.
How to build a shed, free shed plans, build it yourself! This page contains information on how to build a shed and storage shed plans. Here are a couple of things to consider before you begin this project. Find out before building a storage shed if it will be allowed by zoning regulations. Zoning governs the size, height, and location of your shed. Find out if you need a permit. Also, you want to check for utility lines. I have included pages with garden/storage shed plans.
Aluminum Can Plant Markers Thank you for visiting Little House in the Suburbs. Please subscribe and you'll get great simple living tips and how-to articles delivered to your inbox, for free! This is not the easiest way to mark your seedlings. It’s not the most gorgeous. But it’s free, lasts indefinitely and it’s kinda fun. Besides, I gotta keep up my aluminum can skilz. Supplies & Equipment: Aluminum Drink Cans Cheap scissors Dried up ball point pen Straight edge (for the straight plant markers) Impressionable work surface, like the cork back of a place mat or coaster, mouse pad, etc. 1. 2. 3. This is how it will look on the right side now. 4. 6. You can make them any shape you can think of besides the typical “stake”: Soda can aluminum is relatively soft. If you are not feeling up to aluminum can cutting–and I understand completely, a lovely reader sent in her way of using old mini-blind slats, cut into stake form, and labeled with a Sharpie marker.
Self-Seeding Crops You’ll Never Need to Replant One of the characteristics of a truly sustainable garden is that it produces at least some of its own seed. This is most often done when gardeners select, harvest and store seeds until the proper time for planting the following year. But some self-seeding crops produce seeds so readily that as long as you give them time to flower and mature, and set seed, you will always have free plants growing in your garden. In addition to getting all the free garden plants you need (and some to share with family and friends), nurturing self-seeders is also a great way to provide a diversity of flowers that supply pollen and nectar for beneficial insects. Starting a new colony of any of these annuals is usually a simple matter of lopping off armloads of brittle, seedbearing stems in the fall, and dumping them where you want the plants to appear the next season. Spring Seeds for Fall Crops Managing Annual Self-Seeding Crops Volunteer Veggies Controlling Rampant Self-Seeders 34 Easy Self-Seeders
Root 4 Kids - Inspire Kids to Dig Real Food Email Does your kid spend enough time outside? Research shows most kids don’t, but new Root 4 Kids program created by Annie’s organic foods aims to encourage and inspire kids and families to get outside, dig into nature and eat healthier by offering recipes, gardening tips and activities — and we’re happy they’re leading the charge. Be Out There notes that kids spend just half as much time outdoors as they did 20 years ago which makes little sense for green families, since studies show that the best direct route to teaching little ones to care for the environment is to allow them to participate in nature activities before the age of 11. Plus, by the time most U.S. children enter kindergarten, they’ll have spent more than 5,000 hours in front of a television — that’s enough time to earn a college degree! Top this off with staggering childhood obesity rates due to lack of activity and poor eating habits, and well, childhood is starting to look pretty abysmal. + Root 4 Kids
4 Simple Steps to Grow a Hundred Pounds of Potatoes in a Barrel 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. Not only does growing potatoes in a barrel reduce the amount of weeding and exposure to pests and fungi, you don't even have to risk shovel-damage to the tender potatoes by digging them out of the ground when they're done, just tip the container over! After extensive research to plan my own potatoes-in-a-barrel, I've boiled all of the recommendations down to 4 simple steps to a winning potato harvest. 1. Select and prepare a container You'll need to pick out a container such as a 50-gallon trash barrel or one of those half whiskey barrel planters. Good drainage is critical for the cultivation of healthy potatoes so you'll want to cut or drill a series of large drainage holes in the bottom and bottom sides of your container. 2. 3. 4. Other tips to grow bushels of barrel potatoes More gardening tips
Do it Yourself & Page 2 It’s approaching the end of summer and rather than saying good-bye to your herbs why not go inside and try an indoor vertical herb garden? But, if you live in an apartment and have space restrictions a permanent vertical herb garden might just be the solution for you – where you can have herbs inside all year round. You may also like to get creative and add colour by adding succulents. When growing any vertical garden indoors or outdoors the biggest consideration is choosing the wall and analysing how much light you will get. What should you grow your herbs in? The best solution when growing herbs inside is to use woolly pockets as they provide the right environment for growing herbs and vegetables. Top Herbs To Grow Inside on Your Vertical Garden Walls Which Don’t Get Much Light If your wall doesn’t get much light there are herbs which will have a better chance of survival indoors. Sun Loving Herbs Greek oregano is a very sun loving herb insisting on at least six to eight hours of sun.
Organic Lawn Care For the Cheap and Lazy Lawn care in a nutshell: Must do: Set your mower as high as it will go (3 to 4 inches). Water only when your grass shows signs of drought stress and then water deeply (put a cup in your sprinkler zone and make sure it gets at least an inch of water). Optional: Fertilize with an organic fertilizer in the fall and spring. I recommend the Ringer brand. Now for the verbose details on lawn care: A little knowledge makes it so damn near anything can qualify for the "cheap and lazy" label. The key to the lawn care game is competition. lawn care must do: mow high There is a fight for sun. MYTH: "If I mow short, it will be longer until I have to mow again." If you have a serious weed infestation, consider mowing twice as frequently as you normally do. Finally, when mowing, be sure to leave the clippings on the lawn. Mowing higher gives the following perks: Check out this pic. lawn mower My lawn care mower of choice? Update! There has been a lot of discussion about this in our forum.