Composting: a guide to making compost at home, using compost tumblers, bins & other composters ~ Activate your compost. 'Activators' can be added to your compost to help kick-start the process and speed up composting. Common compost activator materials are: comfrey leaves, grass clippings, young weeds, well-rotted chicken manure. ~ Flying insects attracted to your compost? ~ Unpleasant odors from your compost pile? ~ Is your compost pile steaming? ~ Is your compost pile soggy? ~ Matted leaves, grass clippings clumping together? ~ Problems with raccoons? ~ A moveable feast. ~ Additive only. ~ Take advantage of autumn's bounty.
Backyard Vegetable Garden While it may seem like a lot of work to get the beds established for planting, this can be done in stages. You can start with a small plot and enlarge the garden as time and inspiration allow. Remember, the bulk of the work, establishing the beds, only has to be done once. Once in place, nutrients can be added by 'top dressing', and will not require heavy digging or strenuous work. The best advice we can give is to put your attention to building rich, organic soil. Learning the basics of soil development is not difficult, it just requires some attention early in the season, before planting any crops, and during the season in between successive crop plantings. A well-planned and prepared garden will provide many years of productivity with relatively minimal routine maintenance.
5 Secrets to a ‘No-work’ Garden It took over 20 years of gardening to realize that I didn’t have to work so hard to achieve a fruitful harvest. As the limitless energy of my youth gradually gave way to the physical realities of mid-life, the slow accretion of experience eventually led to an awareness that less work can result in greater crop yields. Inspired in part by Masanobu Fukuoka’s book, One Straw Revolution, my family experimented with gardening methods which could increase yields with less effort. Fukuoka spent over three decades perfecting his so-called “do-nothing” technique: commonsense, sustainable practices that all but eliminate the use of pesticides, fertilizer, tillage, and perhaps most significantly, wasteful effort. Here are the strategies we used which enabled us to greatly increase our garden yield, while requiring less time and less work. 1. With ‘no-till’ gardening, weeding is largely eliminated. 2. Gardeners are always on the lookout for free sources of clean organic mulch to add to their garden.
Maintain a Weedless Organic Garden Maintain a thin mulch of weed-free organic material. Snuff out any weed seeds that blow in or are dropped into the garden by birdsUse drip irrigation. Whenever watering is called for, avoid watering with a hose to avoid promoting weed growth in paths and between widely spaced plants. Those are the basics of keeping my garden free of weed problems, with different techniques to counter the spectrum of defenses put up by the worst garden weeds. Over the years I’ve honed some details of this weedless gardening system, and I’d like to share them with you. Organic Fertilizer and Mulches A particularly nice aspect of this weedless gardening system is how much it simplifies fertilization. Where extra nitrogen might be needed, I use soybean meal, which supplements the diet of young trees, bushes and intensively grown vegetables. Because organic mulches are the main source of nutrients in weedless gardening, I tailor which mulch I use to the particular plant’s needs. Drip Irrigation Feeder tubes.
Why Natural Insect Control Works Better Thirsty? The unique leaves of this cup plant (Silphium perfoliatum) hold water for insects to drink. I’ve always been an organic gardener. Early on, I thought natural insect control meant using an “organically approved” insecticide, such as rotenone, to defeat leaf-eating insects — especially my arch-nemesis, the Colorado potato beetle. I dusted my potato patch several times a season in a struggle to keep the beetle’s exploding population in check, barely managing to bring in the crop. One spring I vowed to use no rotenone at all in my potato patch, even if it meant losing the crop. That was my epiphany about the true nature of the teeming insect community around me, and my garden’s relationship to it. Using natural insect control makes perfect sense to me now. My fundamental mistake was assuming “organically approved” insecticides made more sense than using any other garden chemicals. Encourage Insects in the Garden Many beneficial insects feed on pollen and nectar produced by flowers.
Make Your Own Pop Bottle Drip Irrigation System | You Grow Girl The last time I forgot to water my outdoor potted plants and discovered them completely wilted and hanging on the cusp of near death, I decided it was time to take action. Some of the plants on my deck receive a full, searing sun all day long during the hottest mid summer days. While these plants thrive under such conditions if properly taken care of, they will die quickly if they don’t receive enough water. Although it has been unusually rainy this year in these parts, full sun deck plants will still get extremely hot and dry very quickly. One of the best ways to provide a steady water supply to your plants without your constant attention is the gradual watering system or drip irrigation. The materials you will need are as follows: 2 litre plastic soda bottle or water bottle that still has the lidDrill and small drill bitSharp knifeCutting surface Drill 4-8 small holes into the cap of the plastic bottle.
Organic Gardening Tips