In Organic gardening , just as in any garden, it’s extremely shattering to find your newly planted brassicas have been nibbled in the night by slugs and its easy to reach for the slug pellets, but you could do more to reduce the slug population in your garden yourself. After all, slug pellets aren’t the best things for you to eat, and just when the slugs are most active (in wet weather) the pellets are least effective. Slug pellets can also kill some of the most beneficial insects and beetles. Birds and animals eating the dead slugs littered on the surface may also be harmed if you don’t remove them quickly.

The Garden Slug which is a burrower and surface feeder will eat roots and cut plants at the bottom of the stem while the Keel slug lives underground and attacks roots and potatoes. The huge long slugs that you see do very little damage to your vegetables as they live on rotting vegetation and fungi etc.

If you don’t like to use slug pellets but prefer to carry out some kind of Organic garden pest control then there’s a range of things you can do to reduce the slug populations in your garden.

Thorough cultivation of the soil in spring exposes the slugs and their eggs to various predators, but if you follow a no dig discipline of cultivation, then keep the weeds down, as they are also a food source for slugs.

Beer and milk traps are valuable but you should sink the trap into the soil leaving the rim about 1.5cm above ground level to prevent good beetles etc from crawling in. You should implant the traps approximately one metre apart in a grid format.

Slug hunting at night is highly successful in severely reducing the population in your garden. On a warm damp evening you leave the house with a torch and a stick with a long darning needle fastened in one end. Stab the slugs where you see them and shove them into a box of salt. Sounds disgusting, I know, but well worth the effort. You may get the most slugs this way.

You can enhance the number of beneficial insects that hunt on slugs by placing small wooden boards or roof slates inbetween rows as shelter for predator beetles and insects. Slugs will also be attracted, and these you can simply destroy along with their eggs.

If all this seems a bit too ‘hands on’ then I suggest you consider a commercial kind of Organic garden pest control in the form of microscopic worms known as Nematoda.

A natural predator of the slug, these nematodes (or to give them their proper plural, nematoda) are naturally present in their millions in all well balanced garden soil. Nematoda infest the slug by laying their eggs inside its body, so killing the slug during the Nematodes’ reproductive cycle. The Nematoda, when applied to the garden, strengthen the natural population of Nematoda in your soil, providing improved natural Organic garden pest control.

You apply the Nematode worms by watering can or by Superspray type garden feeder attached to a hosepipe for larger areas. Once you cease applications the numbers of Nematoda will reduce to its original level.

You should enjoy up to six weeks long lasting control from one application, and Nematoda are safe to children pets and wildlife. They’re safe to use on food plants and aren’t adversely affected by rain.

Organic Pest Control in the Organic gardening vegetable patch is all about suppressing the slug level to an absolute minimum and so maximising your return on your vegetable yield.

All you have to do is look at a water garden fountain and you’ll instantly appreciate the benefits of having one in your backyard. There is a 3 Tier Corner Deck Pond that I recently bought that is perfect for both indoor or outdoor use.

It fits in nearly any corner (which provides several options for water garden designs). Made of solid wood, its also lined with a durable pre-formed hard plastic liner. A 200gph magnetic drive pump and tubing are also included. The water flows from three spouts to create an wonderful, amazing sound, which plants, fish and anyone looking at it will enjoy.

The best part – assembly is minimal since each tier comes fully assembled. Definitely worth a look if you are searching for something unique for your backyard, or indoor sanctuary.

We all have our own taste regarding what we want to surround ourselves with. My husband and I have mixed traditional furniture along with a few antiques. We decided to incorporate antiques into our home because it is over a hundred years old. We have used soft colors on the walls in the various rooms of our home. We both work in offices that have all white walls so we decided to use color on the walls at home.

My girl friend and her husband have very modern tastes. They have their living room and guess bath room done in black and white. She wants to create a similar effect in their yard. She bought black pots and was going to fill them with white flowers. She knows that I like to garden so she asked me to visit the nursery with her to help pick out the white flowers. I personally thought this sounded like a boring idea. Their home is white with black trim. The white flowers would blend into the background of the house and would not be noticeable. My friend insisted that this is what she wanted. We picked out several long lasting annuals that do well in containers. She bought petunias, salvias, star flowers, geraniums and begonias. The white flowers were pretty, but I felt they needed color. I did talk her into buying some greens to plant in the pots with the white flowers.

We brought the flowers to her house and I helped her transplant the small plants into the containers. This was in the spring of the year. We live about eighty miles apart so we do not get to each other’s home very often. We usually meet mid way between our homes when we get together. I asked her often how the planters were coming along. Her answer was always that they were growing. In mid July I stopped to see my friend at her house. I could not believe it when I walked up to her door step. The white flowers were beautiful and were growing very well. In the middle of each pot the white geraniums were replaced with a vibrant red one. The combination was great. My friend had an additional surprise for me in the house. She had bought red accent pillows for the living room as well as some red glass pieces. In the bathroom she decorated with red towels and rugs. The splash of color made the rooms appear warmer and more welcoming. My friend said that the white flowers helped her make the decision to add some color. The flowers were beautiful, but no one noticed them because they blended in to their background. The red color caught people’s attention, and then the entire pot was admired.

f you’re not the type of person that wants to spend their time managing an elaborate fruit or vegetable garden, you might want to think about planting and maintaining an herb garden. While the product might not seem as significant, you’ll still enjoy the constant availability of fresh, delicious herbs to flavor your meals with.

First you’ll need to pick the herbs that you’ll plant. You might have a hard time doing this because of the huge choice of herbs available. But the best way to choose is to do what I did; just look at what you have in your kitchen. By planting your own collection of these herbs, you can save money on buying them from the grocery store while having the added benefit of freshness. Some of the herbs you might start with include rosemary, sage, basil, dill, mint, chives, and parsley.

When choosing an area to put your herb garden, you should remember that the soil should have extremely good drainage. If the dirt gets watered and stays completely saturated, you have no chance of ever growing a healthy plant. One of the best ways to fix the drainage problem is to dig a foot deep in the soil, and put a layer of crushed rocks down before replacing all the soil. This will allow all that water to escape, thus saving your plants.

When you are ready to begin planting herbs, you might be tempted to buy the more expensive plants from the store. However, with herbs it is much easier to grow them from seed than it is with other plants. Therefore you can save a bundle of money by sticking with seed packets. Some herbs grow at a dangerously fast rate. For instance, if you plant a mint plant in an open space then it will take over that area in a matter of days. The best way to prevent this problem is to plant the more aggressive plants in pots (with holes in the bottom to allow drainage, of course).

When it comes time to harvest the herbs you have labored so hard over, it can be fatal to your plant to take off too much. If your plant isn’t well established, it isn’t healthy to take any leaves at all, even if it looks like its not using them. You should wait until your plant has been well established for at least several months before taking off any leaves. This wait will definitely be worth it, because by growing unabated your plant will produce healthily for years to come.

Once you’ve harvested your delicious home grown herbs, you’ll want to use them in cooking. Why else would you have grown them? Well first the process begins with drying them out. This is easily achieved by placing them on a cookie sheet and baking them 170 degrees Fahrenheit for 2 to 4 hours. After they’re sufficiently dried to be used in cooking, you can consult the nearest cookbook for instructions on using them to effectively flavor a dish.

If you want to store your herbs for later usage, you should keep them in a plastic or glass container. Paper or cardboard will not work, because it will absorb the taste of the herbs. During the first few days of storage, you should regularly check the container and see if any moisture has accumulated. If it has, you must remove all the herbs and re-dry them. If moisture is left from the first drying process, it will encourage mildew while you store your herbs. Nobody likes mildew.

So if you enjoy herbs or gardening, or both, then you should probably consider setting up an herb garden. It might require a little bit of work at first to set it up for optimal drainage, and pick what herbs you want to grow. But after the initial hassle, it’s just a matter of harvesting and drying all your favorite herbs.

Other articles
building a pergola
pergola designs
pergola plans

My husband and I used to have a large vegetable garden. We would grow a wide assortment of vegetables as well as tomatoes. We would have plenty of vegetables to eat fresh and also we would freeze green beans, corn and peas. I would can tomatoes, dill pickles and a variety of jelly and jam. One year my sister-in-law gave me a salsa recipe that was suppose to be very good.

That year I planted celery, green bell peppers and one jalapeño pepper plant so that I would all the ingredients from the garden.
We had never tried to raise peppers before. I did not think we had a long enough growing season, but we soon found out that we did. We planted eight of the bell pepper plant. They came in four packs so we bought two packs. We put them out into the garden at the very end of May. By the middle of August we had so many bell peppers that we did not know what to do with them.

I went to look at the jalapeño pepper plant. There were over a dozen peppers hanging on the plant and there were still blooms to open. I looked up the salsa recipe that my sister-in-law gave me. The recipe made eight pint jars of salsa and the recipe called for two jalapeno peppers. I realized that we would not have had to plant the pepper plant we could have purchased two jalapeños.
We decided that we would put the peppers into the dill pickles we were going to make. I had never worked with jalapeno peppers before and did not realize that the oil from the peppers will burn your skin. By the time I was done cleaning and cutting the peppers the tips of my fingers were all red and they burned. I ran them under cold water and tried rubbing some ointment on them. The burn improved a little bit. I looked up peppers in a canning book. When I got to the section the title read in large bold letters, do not handle peppers with bare skin. When my husband came home from work I showed him the tips of my fingers as well as the caution sign. I told him that I could not believe that we were going to ingest a food that you are warned not to touch with your bare skin.

The salsa did turn out to be very good. We have extra tomatoes and peppers so we canned another double batch. We gave jars of the salsa as gifts and also used it as a condiment at home. Two peppers per batch was plenty of heat. The next year we did not plant the jalapeño pepper plant, borrowed two from the neighbor’s plant.

One of the most frustrating things that can possibly happen to someone who has slaved for hours and hours in growing a fruit tree is the unexplainable barrenness that can sometimes occur when there should be a plethora of fresh fruit. I know this from experience. My neighbors all consider me the gardening guru because of my extensive knowledge. But this is only because gardening has been my passion for years and years, and like a sponge I have accumulated so much information in my mind. My learning has also come from past experiences with failure. For about 5 years after I started planting fruit trees, I did not see a single fruit for all my labor.

I was in the gardening store, looking for some sort of new fertilizer to put my hope in for my quest to obtain fruit. I don’t know if there was a look of desperation in my eyes, but a kindly old man came up and started speaking with me. He introduced himself as Ralph, and for some reason I opened up to him and told him about all of my difficulties. I’ve never been the type to spill all my problems on anyone who asks, but Ralph seemed like such a nice fellow that I just couldn’t help it. And I’m glad I did, because what he taught me truly helped me to get my fruit trees in gear and start producing.

I learned that generally, the inability to produce can be caused by a number of factors. Sometimes the tree is simply too young; If your tree is less than four years old, you shouldn’t exactly expect it to be producing yet. If it has reached 4 years and you still have seen no sign of fruit, then you should start to think about other factors that might be causing the barrenness.

If the tree is undergoing any type of water stress (this can be poor drainage, too much water, or too little water), then it will have trouble growing. If you suspect this is the case, you should evaluate your own watering techniques and compare them with the needs of the tree to see if you are causing water stress. Also always be on the lookout for any diseases or pest damages. If your tree is constantly being molested by all kinds of little creatures, then you can’t expect it to be lively enough to produce fruit.

If your tree blooms but still doesn’t produce any fruit, this could be because of cold temperatures during the bloom. The coldness damaged the flower bud or damaged the baby fruit. Aesthetically the tree may look fine, but the inside could be damaged beyond any hope of ever seeing fruit. Unfortunately there isn’t much you can do in this case except for wait until next year and hope that it doesn’t happen again.

If the tree’s pollination process has not been fully completed, it could have troubles growing fruit. If you planted different varieties, you may find that the requirements are different than you had originally thought and they were incompatible. In this case you need to replant the correct combinations.

Once I evaluated the conditions of my tree and everything that has occurred in its life, I realized that not only had I cross pollinated slightly incorrectly, but I was also giving my tree too much water. After I fixed these problems, I had learned my lesson and I have not had any trouble bearing fruit since then.

So if you are struggling with a plant that is not being cooperative, you should consult an expert gardener. If you can find a gardening mentor like mine that is willing to teach you everything they know, then you should be able to get your garden on the right track with no problems.

Other articles
pergola plans
pergola designs
how to build a pergola