Want to start a butterfly garden to attract beneficial bugs and pollinators to your yard? Want an easy plant to start with? How about Buddleia or Butterfly Bush? Here’s our garden quick tip for this month – short and sweet and easy to swallow in a few minutes. Continue reading “Garden Quick Tip: Start a Butterfly Garden with Butterfly Bush”
Sure, you’ve got grow boxes or mounded earth beds but what makes a complete raised bed garden? Following are some simple tips and personal recommendations for beginning your food producing garden. Continue reading “Raised Bed Garden 101”
As a gardener who enjoys flowers and bees more than I enjoy pulling weeds, I’m very happy to share with you my favorite ground cover plants for pollinators and people. These are sure to please! Continue reading “Ground Cover Plants for Pollinators”
Raised bed garden, lasagna garden, year round garden and whatever your zone, these tips for “later spring” gardens will work for you. Simply adjust up or down as many weeks as you need to account for your last frost date for your area. I’m in zone five, so if you’re in zone ten, you’ll need to do quite a bit of adjusting, fyi. I’m also including my review of The Organic Canner, by Daisy Luther, in this post because this book helped inspire me to make more concrete growing plans in the garden this year. I know I want to make some of her recipes and put them up, so I’m figuring out what and how much to plant. Continue reading “Raised Bed Garden: What to do in Later Spring”
These instructions will vary a bit by month, depending on your zone (see below for links to zone specific posts from great garden/homestead bloggers). Add a few weeks to this timeline if you live in a zone lower than five; subtract a few weeks in you live in a zone above five. If you garden with raised beds, either framed or swaled (permaculture), here are some tasks to be engaging in to prepare for the spring garden. Continue reading “Raised Garden Beds: What to do for Spring?”
Are you thinking about starting a compost pile to grow great food for your garden’s soil right in your own backyard? Are you tired of throwing away kitchen scraps and watching them get carted off to the landfill? There are a lot of composting methods out there but may I suggest 3 reasons to use a compost tumbler? Continue reading “3 Reasons to use a Compost Tumbler”
(Here’s a revisit to a revamped blast from the past from the archives at Homestead Lady.)
So I went to see my chiropractor/acupuncturist and he asked why he was seeing me again so soon – this sounds like the set up for a joke. Anyway, I told him that for two days I had been fighting a six inch chipper and the six inch chipper won. He looked at me sideways for a minute and then started writing on his chart while he chuckled and said, “Most people have pretty standard stories about how they got hurt but your stories are always so interesting!”
So glad I could entertain. But, as a result of the battle, I have a few words on mulch and compost; what they are and what the difference is between the two. Continue reading “Mulch and Compost”
We have our first snow of the season coming this week and I’m so far behind in the garden. I scrambled to get my DIY Winter Plant Protection over my sage plants today. Learn a few tricks from our ancestors on how to protect herbs and tender perennials. The best part? It’s cheap! Continue reading “DIY Winter Plant Protection”
Why grow your own food? The answer’s in the question – because its your own. Food. That you grow. No shipping, no oil strikes; no grocery store, no middle man; no market forces, no GMOs. Just you and your dirt. Its about your safety, your family, your way of life. Just do it. In any way you can, grow food. AND YOU CAN!
There are cottage gardens and English gardens and xeriscaped gardens and children’s gardens and on and on and on. Ever been in The Garden of Whatever? This post was originally released last year but, in case you’re feeling the gardening blues, I’m re-releasing it in honor of all us garden nerds! The perfect gardens really only live in our heads – come be with me in the garden of whatever and feel better about your own garden… Continue reading “In the Garden of Whatever”
