Backyard Greenhouse

These are great for growing a wide range of plants. First of all, in the summer they are perfect for tomatoes. This is especially true if you live somewhere that has a lot of chilly nights even during the summer. Since things like tomatoes and zucchinis need heat and humidity to grow to their peak, it’s important to have something like this on hand of you want to get those huge tomatoes you’ve been dreaming about. In the spring and fall, these greenhouses also make PERFECT areas to grow mushrooms.

Composters

These are what I would call an essential component of even a small backyard garden. Sure, you can buy the fertilizers and nutrients to make your soil strong– but why? What’s the point of spending money on something that you can get for free? Sure, there is the initial cost with a composter, but this is greatly mitigated by the years of soil amendments that you’re not being forced to buy every year.

Rain Barrels

Out of all the things you can buy for your garden this year, a rain barrel may be one of the most cost effective. If you have a regular shingled roof then I wouldn’t recommend using the water from your rain barrel on any food plants. The chemicals in your roof leech into the water, and that’s not something I want to put on my food. However, the water from the roof is perfectly fine for your flowers and any other ornamental landscaping that you don’t want to spend money on the water for.

First of all, it’s a very common mistake to look at bees and think to yourself “they want to sting me”. The reality is that bees are exceptionally docile and they rarely ever sting humans. In fact, even beekeepers that regularly mess with their hives without smoking them barely EVER get stung. A lot of this bad press is because of the faulty notion that hornets, wasps, and bees are the same thing. They’re not. In fact, hornets and wasps will generally sting you as much as look at you. Bees, however, are exceptionally docile and you REALLY have to go out of your way to get stung by a honey bee.

Second, a lot of people just assume that it is illegal to keep bees in an urban garden. This is sadly true in some places, but most cities either explicitly allow beekeeping or simply don’t have any laws to regulate it in a backyard setting. The truth is that you’ll never really know if it’s legal in your area until you search online for the regulations around your area. Different countries, counties, and cities will have different “departments” that these regulations fall under, so I can’t really help you there.

For anyone that decides to take on beekeeping as their next big project, a great way to get started is by getting a Top Bar Beehive. These are sometimes called “Kenyan Hives” due to their popularity in the African nation. They are easy to clean and very easy to maintain, while also being very modular. This means that you’re able to put the thing just about anywhere, and you can easily clean it out when you need to.

Enter the Bokashi Compost Starter. This thing puts the “friendly” back in both “user-friendly” and “eco-friendly”. The way it works is pretty interesting, but I’ll give you the basics. The Bokoshi is essentially a five gallon bucket that you can use to create compost inside your house. Obviously, not everyone has access to a giant backyard or even a small one that they could make a compost pile in. However, just about everyone has a little corner that they can shove a bucket in to make compost with. This thing will fit under your sink, it’s square so it’ll fit in the corner, and you can put it just about anywhere. The great thing: no stink. It doesn’t stink like rotting food like an actual compost heap does. On the contrary, it smells like nothing at all– you can’t even smell the thing.

Something that I really like about this thing is the spout on the bottom. This is a great add on for making something like compost tea. Compost tea is essentially the water left over after you soak compost for days. The water is super-rich in nutrients that are perfect for indoor plants. Since it’s very hard to mulch in compost with household plants given their size, it’s nice to be able to put nutrients back into the soil with a non-invasive method like using compost tea. Consider this the number one choice for any apartment gardener.

The way they work is pretty simple. They start off as a wine bottle (already spreading joy), and then they end up in a recycling facility. Companies like “GrowBottle” take that old, used wine bottle, wash it, cut off the top, sand the edges, and turn them into kitschy planters. The simplicity in manufacturing is really cool, but the simplicity of use is even better.

When you get one of these things, they come with clay pebbles, a wool wick, two halves of a wine bottle, and some seeds. You fill up the bottom with water, invert the top half and stick it into the bottom, and run the wick down the neck of the bottle into the “reservoir”. You put the pebbles down over top of the wick, and they soak up the water being brought up from the reservoir. The great thing about using pebbles instead of dirt is that they won’t get saturated like dirt does. You won’t have to worry about drowning out your plant, and the wick will water it for you so you can really just forget it entirely. These are great to use for growing anything that doesn’t have a big taproot, so think basil and things like that.

The best thing about this is that it’s recycled from a preexisting product, and requires barely any machining or work in its construction. It’s always a great idea to buy things made out of recycled products because, let’s face it: we all generate a whole lot of crap. However, it is equally important to think about how much extra energy had to be used to make the new products out of the old ones. Some other recycled items require a lot of work to get them into their new form, effectively negating any good you would have done by buying recycled in the first place. Things like these grow bottles are a great way to avoid that.

First, keep in mind how garlic works. When you first plant it, it goes into what I like to call the “dormant” stage. Sure, it’s not really dormant in the classical sense of the word, but it’s dormant in the sense that it isn’t going to be turning any heads for a while. In most parts of the country, the winter is a time for garlic to store up energy and weather the bad… weather. That is, it spends all its time storing up energy all winter for its impressive skyward explosion in the spring time.

Because of this, it’s ok to plant garlic a little later than you’d plant other crops, and that’s great because not everyone plans as well as they should. All you have to do is get yourself a clove of garlic and drop it into the ground. It’s fairly simple, but keep a few things in mind.

First, stay away from garlic you buy in the grocery store if you can. This garlic is often treated with a chemical that inhibits the growth of roots to make the bulbs keep longer on the shelves. Second, make sure you’re getting a breed that is suitable for the time of year you’re planting and the part of the country you live in. Some people find that “hard neck” varieties often do better in harsher climates, but that can sometime be a subjective estimation and you should decide for yourself what’s best.

Also, don’t forget that if it’s too late to plant your garlic outside, there’s always the option to grow it indoors in pots. There are a lot of great, eco-friendly pot options out there that can be a great substitution for outdoor planting.

Thankfully, there’s something to do with this food waste other than simply chucking it into the trash: compost it. Composting is one of those ridiculously simple things that just about anyone can do, but barely anyone actually does. There are a lot of reasons for this, but primarily it’s because most people live in apartments, and they therefore think they can’t get do composting. They worry about the smell, the mess, and a number of other things that they really don’t need to worry about.

The truth is that composting doesn’t really smell all that bad, and will only have a noticeable smell if you’re doing it incorrectly. If you keep a proper balance of mulch or peat moss, then your compost should have a very earthy, very sweet smell. It shouldn’t smell like rotting food, so that takes care of the smell issue.

In terms of the mess one can expect from composting indoors, well a lot of that is based on you. Improper care of your composting bin will definitely lead to some cleanliness issues, but that could be said about any other appliance you use. With regular maintenance and a little common sense, keeping your composting bin clean should not be difficult at all. In fact, there are a lot of different composting bins online that are perfectly suited to being used in an apartment setting. If you don’t have any experience with composting, these bins are a great way to get started. Sometimes you can even find full kits with everything you need to get started.

All of us can do a little more to lower our negative footprint on the world. While it’s definitely better to just not waste the food in the first place, composting can be a good way to do something useful with the food you would otherwise just toss away. At least this way you get some great soil for an indoor herb garden or something like that.

First, what are open pollinated seeds? The short answer: they’re seeds that are produced by the natural cross-pollination of two parent plants. “Natural” cross-pollination simply means that the pollination occurred via wind, insect transport, or some other such natural means of genetic dispersal. The result? Well, that’s the important part of this whole thing.

See, open pollination results in viable next generation seeds. You grow a row of open pollinated plants, they exchange genetic material, seeds are formed, and those seeds will create yet more plants next growing season. It’s a beautiful cycle that means you’ll never have to buy seeds again if you pay attention to how you propagate your plants.

On the other side of the spectrum, you have your F1 hybrid seeds. These hybrid seeds are the product of two distinctly different parent plants being bred artificially to produce uniform offspring. While there are definitely some interesting features you can get out of these hybrids, there are some definite drawbacks that all gardeners should be aware of. The biggest of these issues is that F1 hybrids are often sterile and will not produce viable seeds for next year’s harvest. Also, the lack of genetic diversity in the seeds causes them to mature at a very uniform rate. While this might sound appealing, it creates an issue with a small-scale garden by causing either feast or famine with harvests. It’s easy for gardeners to feel overwhelmed with how much is ready to harvest all at once, and this can sometimes lead to waste.

No matter what you decide to plant in your garden, it’s important to have the necessary information to make informed choices. As more and more people are deciding to take on the daunting task of becoming backyard farmers, this information is becoming more and more important by the day.

It’s strange to think about how many people never seem to even think of indoor herb gardens. Somehow, the idea of growing food inside can become lost on people. For those that take the plunge, your rewards will be sweet– with fresh basil and oregano being pulled from plants five feet from your skillet or crock pot.

One of the major considerations you need to keep in mind whenever you’re searching for an indoor herb planter is the amount and type of space you’ll be keeping the planter in. For example, you wouldn’t want to get one of those huge wall planters while expecting to place it near any furniture. Since these planters will often drip, having them anywhere near your furniture will lead to something of a horrible mess. In fact, most gardeners and indoor herb enthusiasts recommend smaller planters and taller plants.

One great example of a plant that would be perfect for this methodology would be rosemary, oregano, and certain breeds of “non-bushy” basils. A great benefit of basil is that if you prune it regularly and appropriately, the plant will constantly be growing back new leaves all winter. By selecting plants that do this, you can save enough space that you won’t need a huge indoor herb planter. If this is your first time trying to grow plants indoors, then you may want to start small and work your way up to larger planters over time.

Raising plants indoors has a number of benefits. Whether it’s the purification of your air or simply growing some extra herbs and spices for yourself, growing indoors offers us gardening fanatics something to keep ourselves busy with during the winter.

The National Pesticide Information Center reported that in 2010, 1,514 inquiries were made about mothballs, a 30 percent increase from 2009. Of those, 862 were incidents such as toxic exposure, including 617 reports of misapplications. Nearly 200 incidents involved children younger than the age of 5, placing mothballs’ main chemical, naphthalene, at the top of the “25 active ingredients for incidents.”

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, naphthalene can cause multiple problems when inhaled or ingested, such as cataracts, anemia, liver damage, and in infants, neurological disorders.

These plants depend on water from calcium, and when the rain does not come on a regular basis, blossom end rot appears. The brown or black spot is where the fruit emerges from the blossom. Fruits that are affected cannot be helped. For still developing fruit, regular watering will help. To help the soil retain moisture, water deeply and mulch around the plants. Liming in another option, which will supply calcium and will increase the ratio of calcium ions to other competitive ions in the soil.

Another cause of end rot is too much nitrogen fertilizer. High nitrogen also encourages more leaf growth on vegetables, annuals, and perennials, frequently at the expense of produce and flowers. If you notice these symptoms on a plant, you can do your best to treat the issue, but in many cases the damage is done.