I love a good upcycling project. When I was writing Raised Bed Revolution, it was important to me to include raised bed ideas that didn’t require woodworking skills. Not everyone has the tools or the space to build a raised bed. However, there are so many options that don’t involve a lot of effort to get set up—old stock tanks, kits, fabric raised beds, an old suitcase or drawer, or an old washbasin. With some of these, you’re simply drilling a few holes for drainage.
Collecting seeds from your garden
There are many awesome reasons for collecting seeds from your garden. Besides an obvious sense of satisfaction, it’s also an easy way to shave some serious dollars off your gardening budget and preserve the tomatoes or nasturtiums your great-grandmother grew in her garden. As well, annually selecting your earliest, best-tasting, most productive, and disease resistant veggies will result in plants that are specifically adapted for your area. Flower gardeners can also play with breeding by saving seed from those plants that offer improved traits like larger flowers or unique bloom colour.
Guide to vegetable garden pests: Identification and organic controls
Every vegetable gardener faces pest issues from time to time, and learning how to manage the little leaf-munching menaces without using synthetic chemical pesticides is an essential step in growing a healthy, productive garden. To help gardeners with this task, we’ve put together this easy-to-use guide to vegetable garden pests.
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Flowering shrubs for your garden: 5 beauties for full sun
Choosing flowering shrubs for your garden can feel overwhelming, especially if you’re new to gardening. There are dozens upon dozens of choices at your local nursery, but not every shrub you come across is going to be a good fit. The key is to seek out low-maintenance flowering shrubs that bloom beautifully, without requiring a lot of upkeep. But, they also have to be gorgeous, too! Finding the right flowering shrubs for your landscape does take a bit of sleuthing, but the payoff is huge. When you take the time to carefully select the best shrubs for your growing conditions, the result is years and years of beautiful blooms.
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Hardy roses for the modern garden
When I moved into my first home, I inherited a lovely perennial garden from the former owner. The one corner of the backyard garden included a couple of rose bushes that had obviously been around for some time—one of them had enormous, thick canes with massive spikes. They terrified me. I promptly added rose gloves to my birthday list. Besides being a challenge to prune, my old rose also suffered after bad winters and had several pest issues, like black spot. Overall, I found it a finicky, hostile plant to care for and I told myself I’d never purposely add a rose bush to my garden. That was until a few varieties of hardy roses suddenly crossed my radar.
A Handy Guide to Harvesting Vegetables
Growing your own vegetables is a great way to provide your family with homegrown, organic food, but it’s not always easy to tell when crops are ready to harvest. Harvesting at the right time can have a big impact on crop yield and quality, and in order to help you get the most from your garden, we wanted to share our best tips on harvesting vegetables.