Garden Medley

Not everyone has a yard in which to garden. Apartment dwellers and condominium owners in particular face this dilemma.

Fortunately, it’s not that hard to grow beautiful plants indoors. You may be somewhat limited in what you can grow – no tall trees or string beans, but you can easily beautify the inside of your home with plants.

An indoor garden helps to purify the air inside your home, so it’s quite beneficial in addition to being attractive. Plants also provide an atmosphere in which it is easier to relax.

There are many plants you can easily grow indoors. Just visit your local garden center and you’ll see plenty of plants suggested. They will include zebra plants, ferns, cacti, some varieties of roses, money plant and many others. (more…)

Organic gardening is one of the big catch phrases for gardeners right now. Many people truly love keeping their garden organic. But with all the challenges of gardening, why would you limit yourself to organic methods?

The decision relates quite a bit to the value we have learned to place on this planet. Many chemicals work well enough to help your garden grow or to kill pests, but they aren’t so good for the environment. They can also leave unhealthy residues on your foods.

An organic garden is friendlier to wildlife. This doesn’t mean you’re going to lose your entire garden to pests such as squirrels; it means you learn friendlier ways of scaring them off. It also means you won’t be killing the bugs that are good for your garden while you try to kill the ones that are damaging it. (more…)

Most people love butterflies. They’re brightly colored, beautiful and bring to mind pleasant childhood memories. And children love to chase butterflies.

However, many people have trouble attracting butterflies into their gardens. They may occasionally flutter by, but they won’t stay.

The trick to getting butterflies in your garden is to plant a garden that will attract them. You want plants that they will lay their eggs on and plants with nectar they love.

Which plants you use varies by the kind of butterfly you want. I’ve had success attracting Anise Swallowtails with my fennel bush. One year we had caterpillars all over it, which led to cocoons, and my daughter got to see the butterflies hatch from the cocoons. It was very exciting for her. (more…)

One of the simplest looks to a flower garden is the wildflower garden. I love these simply because you don’t have to be so orderly with wildflowers. It’s also often easier to find native wildflowers to limit the amount of care your garden needs.

In general, wildflowers cope better with adverse conditions. They have not been bred, after all, for perfect soil and watering. You can get a glorious range of colors and shapes even when the growing season has not been kind to your other plants.

Most wildflowers love a bright, sunny spot. Remove all weeds and loosen the soil, then plant the seeds according to package directions. Plant them in spring for best results, but you may be able to get away with a summertime planting in some areas. (more…)

Squirrels are cute, fuzzy and look so sweet… at least until they start destroying your garden.

Gardens are almost irresistible to squirrels. Gardens offer an easy food source to them, and many popular garden plants taste great to squirrels.

A fence is not sufficient to keeping squirrels out of the garden. They’re great climbers and many of them jump quite well too. Especially if you have a tree overhanging your garden, don’t assume that a fence will do much of anything to keep squirrels out.

Repelling them humanely is quite challenging. Most sprays and such aren’t all that effective. You can use products such as Ropel to discourage them from chewing on furniture and such. You can also install a motion sensitive water sprinkler such as Scarecrow to scare them away gently. (more…)

We decided to go ahead and pick the carrots from our garden. There was a pretty good number of them, but none grew terribly long. I think my husband is getting frustrated with our garden this year, since everything that looked to be growing well was more or less baked by the heat wave back in July.

All in all, though, the carrots did well. We grew some odd varieties, and in all honesty most of them made me not want to grow them again. Poor taste.

My daughter was quite excited about one carrot in particular that had grown out in three ways.

This has been a very frustrating year for vegetable gardening for us. We’ve had much more success in the past than we have had this year. I think the unusual heat wave did a lot of the plants in, even though we tried to keep them well watered.

We did leave a few carrots in the ground, just to see how they flower. I like the idea of letting the kids see the entire life cycle. I’m not sure that we’ll manage to keep them going long enough for that, as my understanding is that they flower in their second year, but only in some climates. I guess it will depend in part on how our winter goes.