Flower Gardening Tips – Help Creativity Bloom in Your Flower Garden

Flowers immediately enliven any garden with their vibrant colors and sweet aroma. When planted in the right combination, they can keep your garden looking bright and beautiful year round. Following are flower gardening tips to help you become a more effective and creative flower gardener.

Great Gardening Ideas For Your Used Coffee Grounds

We are big believers and followers of organic farming and gardening. But alongside that we also enjoy a cup of really GOOD coffee. This ends up in a pretty large pile of used coffee grounds from our plungers by the end of the week. We personally like plunger coffee better than the drip filter stuff. The eco-nature of the our lifestyle negates the use of electric percolators etc and the plunger lets us each control how strong we want the blend! This also leaves a really course ground coffee which we need to dispose of on the island. So what to do with the used grounds? Well we collect them all in a special bucket and transfer them up to our organic farm and garden. Luckily with the volume of farming and gardening done by Jeanie and Josefa, these grounds never go to waste!

Why Grow Vegetables At Home?

Take good care of your soil once your vegetables are planted to stimulate better growth. You’ll need to get rid of weeds. You’ll also want to break up the soil to let air in and help conserve moisture. If you let weeds get out of hand, they’re hard to keep up with. Weed every day to to save yourself extra work. Weeds steal food from your plants – just one more reason to get them out of your garden!

5 Top Indoor Bonsai Care Tips

Discover the top five tips that will help you master indoor bonsai care and grow amazing bonsai trees that will impress everybody.

The Power of the Flower – Horticultural Therapy

Okay you flower addicts, nature lovers and freeloaders, sit on the couch and listen up. It’s time for therapy! The experts have confirmed that gardening, my favorite addiction, is therapeutic. Hallelujah! “Horticultural Therapy” is a multidisciplinary program of study involving fields such as horticulture, psychology, landscape architecture, education, gerontology, sociology and urban planning.

Farmers Markets – Grown In The Hood

Each week Marin residents have a choice of 7 farmer’s markets to shop at 6 days of the week! When we shop at our local farmer’s markets, the middleman is eliminated so our money goes directly to the hardworking farmers and our produce is fresher and much more nutritious. I mean why suffer through eating 4-6 servings of fruits and vegetables each day if the nutrients are all lost in travel? I may as well go back to my favorite breakfast of non-champions; the holy chocolate croissant and a cup of muddy Jo. Right?

10 Ways to Eliminate Garden Pests

Garden pests are not hard to get rid of with a few simple precautions. Some successful gardeners use covered frames, which are wooden boxes covered with glass, cloth, mosquito netting or mosquito wire. Glass and cloth coverings protect your plants from heat and cold. They also allow you to plant earlier than normal.

A Cottage Gardener’s Dream – Annie’s Annuals

Many years ago, when I was a goody-two-shoes student sitting in the front row of my Master Gardening class, Annie Hayes, owner of Annie’s Annuals, came to speak to us horticultural wannabe’s. There she was, Missy Botanist, proudly standing in front of the classroom holding up her healthy, hearty plants and spewing off the Latin names, while most of us gardening eggheads could barely recall the common name.

Edible Gardening – Snack Time!

Did someone mention food? It must surely be time to take a break from work and EAT! Snack time rules! This summer my dwarf cherry tree, which grows outside my writing studio, had the largest crop of cherries in its twelve-year history. By some miracle, maybe my cranky old cat, the birds didn’t get to them first. To reward myself for suffering through writing and rewriting yet another semi-poetic and polished sentence or two, I frequently get up from my desk, walk over to the tree and pick a handful of organic cherries to help fire up the next round of synapses.

Conserving Water This Summer In Your Yard

Many state water districts estimate that homeowners use over 50% of their summer water for landscape irrigation. In light of global warming and drought, doesn’t that make you feel a little guilty? It’s time to end our long, luscious love affair with needy, thirsty plants. We all had a good time and have fond memories of those days spent in the hot August sun running around with the hose, all codependent! Yards that conserve water with drought tolerant or native plants are now all the rage.

Choosing a Specialty Garden

Gardening is a rewarding and potentially profitable past time. Many things must be considered when choosing a garden that specializes in a particular plant or type of plants. This article offers some guidelines to help beginning gardeners decide on a specialty garden that suits their interests, gardening environment, and life style.

Homemade Hydroponics – Hydroponics Growing Media

Growing plants using hydroponics means you are growing without soil. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that you are growing plants without a soil replacement. While not strictly necessary it is usually advantageous to use some form of growing medium. Here’s a quick run down of the kinds of media available to you when gardening without soil.

Flower Garden Composting for True Organic Fertilizer

For flower gardens, your compost mixture should be made in layers using nothing except green organic materials. Those with a disdain for using chemical fertilizers can create their own compost pile using organic waste material to use on their garden or in separate containers.

Seven Tips To Keep Your Lawn In Tip Top Condition

A healthy and attractive lawn is one feature of a home that most people value almost as much as the house itself. Lovely lawn care can add tremendously property value to your home purchase, so it is important to keep your lawn maintained and manicured as much as possible.

Garden-Fountains Can Be Provocative and Calming

Garden-fountains are provocative. They can be as noisy as a cascading waterfall or as serene as a water lily sitting on its surface. It might be a playfully bubbling garden-fountain or a mysterious black pool reflecting the silver moon. Its moods are elusive as it ripples, rushes, gurgles, splashes, drips, leaps, babbles, trickles, roars or simply lies still and quiet.