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Vegetable Gardening It Is All In the Planning! (compost tumbler)

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By Cecil Flynn

 Nothing beats fresh vegetables that you have grown yourself. Not only does it taste great, but it tastes so much better because you helped it grow! There is a great personal satisfaction in growing your own garden and enjoying the delicious produce you will harvest. But, to grow the perfect vegetable garden you need to have a plan. Once you know where you are going with your garden, everything will fall into place!

Location

Find a sunny area of your yard where your garden will get full sun almost all day. If you think about a farm where they grow vegetables by the acre, there is usually no shade. The entire crop gets full sun all day. Full sun provided the best growing conditions for your crops, so make sure you choose the sunniest spot in your yard for your garden.

You need to make sure the area is level as well for proper watering. You dont want your water to puddle at one end, drowning some plants while others suffer from drought! If you need to, terrace your garden or create raised beds that you can add soil to so the surface is level.

What to Grow

Some people get a little over zealous when then plant their garden and try to grow every crop under the sun! When harvest time rolls around they have no idea what to do with all the extra produce that their family doesnt want. A good gardening rule is to only plant the kinds of vegetables that your family will eat. In addition, only plant as much as you can use. We have all seen people bring bags of zucchini to give away at work because they grew too much. If you do end up with too much produce from your garden, you can take it to a local farmers market or food pantry.

Good crops for home gardens are corn, beans, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, beets, and of course squash and pumpkins. Plant the taller crops so they dont shade the small crops, plan your garden according to height. Remember that viney plants like squash and pumpkins will need a lot of room to spread, so plan accordingly.

Growing your own garden is great for the whole family. It is a wonderful way to teach children responsibility and help them understand where their food comes from. With a little planning you and your family can have delicious vegetables that you can proudly say you grew yourself!

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Cecil loves working in the yard and working throughout the house. As a author he enjoys writing articles about his favorite topics like gardening. You can read all about several types of garden carts on his website..

How to Deal Effectively with Slugs and Snails in Your Garden

By Jeffry Bullock

 One of the most common problems faced by gardeners is the one of slugs and snails. Even experienced gardeners tear their collective hair out at the destruction these creatures can cause. So I thought I would give you a few tried and tested tips, and some others perhaps not so well known, to help you deal with them - you won’t get rid of them all together, but at least you will be able to keep them under some sort of control!

They may not all work for you - a lot depends on just how bad the problem is where you live - but it is certainly worth trying some if not all of them.

Barriers:

These methods will be more effective against snails than slugs, as slugs live in the ground and can therefore avoid barriers.

On your garden borders, you can use barriers around plants, such as crushed eggshells, grit, bran, or wood-ash or soot. The theory is that slugs and snails are reluctant to cross these materials and will therefore wander off elsewhere to look for their next meal. Make sure you put plenty down without any gaps.

Scatter oat bran around your plants - slugs love it, but if they eat enough, they expand and die!

Petroleum jelly smeared thickly around the rims of pots has a similar deterrent effect.

You can purchase copper tape with an adhesive backing, which you can stick around the pot sides - this gives the snail a small electric shock as it tries to cross.

Traps:

Use beer traps - very effective at dealing with both slugs and snails, and you can buy these from a garden centre. Place the trap, filled with cheap beer, in a hole with the top at soil level. You can also use out of date fruit juice, or even milk just about on the turn. Alternatively, make your own by cutting off about 3-4 inches off the base of a plastic drinks bottle.

After eating your half grapefruit, cut a small hole and place the skin upside down on the soil. Slugs love it and will congregate inside and each day you can collect them up.

Collect all the slugs and snails you can find in the late evening, when they start to become active and drown them in a bucket of heavily salted water. Plain water will not work - they will simply swim to the surface and crawl out! Or, if you know where they hide out, you can gather them up during the day - try looking under logs or bricks, and shrubs, any dark, damp corner.

And what to do with the slugs you’ve collected? If you put live slugs or snails into your compost heap, they will probably stay there, as there is plenty of matter for them to feast on. You can also put the dead ones in there too, those in the beer traps including the beer - but scoop the dead slugs and snails out of the salty water first.

Predators:

For a biological control, you can use nematodes - microscopic parasites that kill the slugs above and below ground. Obtained from organic garden suppliers, you simply mix the powder with water and spray on to the soil using a watering can. This can be effective for around six weeks.

If you are lucky enough to have the space, adopt some chickens or ducks - they just love eating slugs - and you can have some free eggs into the bargain.

Make your garden wildlife friendly, to encourage the natural predators of slugs and snails to come and visit. Dig a pond to encourage frogs and toads; leave out food for hedgehogs; and put up bird feeders. This will not provide an ‘instant fix’ for the problem, but in the long term will give you a healthier garden with fewer pests.

Till next time, happy slug hunting!

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Monday, May 31st, 2010 at 1:50 am and is filed under gardening. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.