Month: July 2021

1. Practical Matters

Some of the main reasons that stand out are as follows. Containers can be moved as most appropriate and needed; some are even on wheels, and they come in all sizes. Furthermore, they are increasingly made of sturdy lightweight modern materials. Best of all you can readily move them away from areas prone to deer and other hungry animals and place your plants in a protected spot, like a deck, patio, screened porch or even indoors. Rex Begonia make great additions to container planters.

You can avoid the need for fencing in some cases. You can move the planters according to the amount of sunlight needed. You gain flexibility of all sorts, such as planting flowers in window boxes and on railings or walls. You can easily keep changing your decor.

2. Beautifying the Outdoors of Homes

Choosing containers is a wonderful way to express your personal tastes. You can use contemporary, traditional, eclectic or contrasting styles to make a statement. This will be recognized by visitors the moment they step up to your home. This can be done by decorating the mail box, having large planters by the driveway and at the entrance of your home.

My favorite spot at my home is my deck that I surrounded with azaleas and ground covers, and on the deck I had colorful flowers that would have been eaten had they been outdoors and unprotected by fencing except for the large azaleas. One of the flowers I could and did plant, however, without the deer eating them were lambs ears, lavender. Some ferns survived also.

In the gardens of row houses and town homes, I marvel these days at how owners and renters have transformed small spaces by the very clever artistic use of planter boxes and a variety of pots some made from old objects they happened to have. These features often fit in well with decorative stepping stones or small raised garden beds. The raised beds make the task much easier both for establishing a proper soil with less digging and to reach everywhere for keeping the area tidy and lovely. In that way. they resemble planters and pots.

3. Spiffing Up the Indoors of Homes and Apartments

In large open spaces, usually inside contemporary homes, very large planters are sometimes used beautifully as dividers to separate living sections for beauty and privacy while maintaining an open airy feeling.

The trend in kitchens is for them to be open to the living areas. This fact makes people all the more interested in incorporating pots for both herbs and for plants and flowers to beautify their space and improve the air quality. There are many attractive and whimsical planters and stands for use indoors as well as outdoors.

House guests always appreciate a small plant or vase with flowers in the bedroom or in the bathroom. After all, bathrooms, like kitchens, have become a place that is important for relaxing and for the eyes to feast upon. I find that for bathrooms small plants or vases usually work best, but of course it all depends on the size of the space and your taste.

These are some highlights on the topic. In conclusion, it should now be increasingly evident why decorating and gardening are facilitated and enhanced by planters, pots and vases that are to your liking.

When it comes to pest control, you can spend all sorts of money hiring exterminators or buying smelly (and often toxic) sprays and chemicals for your home, but in some cases, you may not need to go to such extremes. There are a lot of completely natural insect and pest control remedies out there, many of which our ancestors have been using with great success for countless generations. You’ll be pleased to know that many of these useful items can be found in the average household.

Though pest control can refer to dealing with pest birds, bugs, and rodents, this article will focus on getting rid of insects.

Insect Control in the Garden

Believe it or not, aluminum foil can successfully keep hungry insects and slugs away from your vegetable garden. Simply mix strips of aluminum foil in with your garden mulch to deter bugs and slugs. In addition, since foil is reflective, it will shine light back up onto your plants, giving them a solar boost.

Mothballs are another handy insect control device for the garden. You’ve probably heard of using mothballs in the closet to protect your sweaters, but you can also use them to kill bugs on potted plants. Simply place the plant in a clear plastic bag (i.e. a cleaning bag), add a few mothballs, and seal the bag for a week. When you take the plant out, it will be bug-free (and moths will stay away for a while too). Animals also hate the smell of mothballs, so you can toss a few into your garden and flowerbed as well, to keep away cats, dogs, and rodents.

Did you know onions are a natural pesticide as well? Here’s an easy-to-make concoction that will repel insects (and animals too) in your flowers and vegetables: Use a blender to puree 4 onions, 2 cloves of garlic, 2 tablespoons of cayenne pepper, and one quart of water. Put the mixture aside and then dilute 2 tablespoons of soap flakes in 2 gallons of water. Pour all the contents in your blender, stir it up, and this gives you an Eco-friendly bug spray to use on your plants.

Black pepper is another home remedy that works great for pest control in the garden. If insects are harassing your flowers, plants, and vegetables, simply mix pepper with flour and sprinkle it around your plants. Bugs won’t be so eager to munch.

Lastly, you can make your own rock dust to get rid of insects in the garden.

Insect Control in the House

Dog and cat food, which is often left out around the clock, can be quite a temptation to ants and other insects. A simple way to make these six-legged intruders lose interest is to place a border of baking soda around the pet food bowls. Baking soda won’t bother your pets (though they probably won’t be keen on the taste), so it’s no worry for them if they lap a bit up with their meal.

Another household item good at getting rid of insects is vinegar. For example, if your latest trip to the farmers’ market brought back fruit flies as well as healthy victuals, then you can make traps for the flies by filling an old jar about halfway full with apple cider vinegar. Punch a few holes in the top, screw it back on, and the fruit flies will be attracted and trapped.

These are just a few of the easy ways to use simple household items to get rid of insects. So when you’re having a problem, don’t be so eager to pick up a can of chemical-filled bug spray. Look for natural solutions, and you will very likely find them!

• Telling The Difference Between Harmful and Helpful Insects
• Asian Vegetable Garden
• Black Flowers

Homemade Pesticide Recipes

How would you like to know a few homemade pesticide recipes that are not only safe, but will cost you next to nothing? It’s still possible to keep your garden free from pests without toxins and harmful chemicals.

Most chemical pesticides are toxic to humans as well as pets and small animals that may enter your yard or garden. That’s why homemade pesticides make a lot more sense.

Here are a few of the most common homemade pesticide recipes for your houseplants, yard and garden.

Homemade Pesticide For Snails and Slugs
Diatomaceous earth is a powder-like dust made of tiny marine organisms called diatoms. It is effective on soft-bodied insects as well as snails and slugs. Just spread it on top of the soil and it works by cutting and irritating these soft organisms yet is harmless to other organisms. You can also put out shallow dishes of beer to trap snails and slugs.

To Keep Bugs Away From Houseplants
This is the safest natural pesticide for any home gardener and is effective on a variety of bugs and insects. Mix 3 tablespoons of liquid detergent into a gallon of water. Use in a sprayer bottle for houseplants.

Another Bugs Away From Houseplants Mix
To keep bugs away from houseplants, mix 1 clove garlic, 1 small hot pepper and 1 quart water in a blender. Pour into a spray bottle and apply to plants. Putting hot sauce on a cotton ball in a house plant pot will also repel pests.

Cabbage worms and Spider Mites Mix
For garden pests like cabbage worms and spider mites, mix 2 tablespoons of salt in 1 gallon of water and use in a sprayer bottle.

To Control Garden Pests
Gather together a collection of dead bugs, crush them up and mix with water. Strain the mix until it will come out of a spray bottle. Only use this mix outside.

Spearmint Hot Pepper Horseradish Spray
This is effective on many different kinds of outside bugs and insects and should be an outside spray.

• 1/4 cup of hot red peppers
• 1/2 gallon water
• 1/4 cup of fresh spearmint
• 1/4 cup horseradish, both root and leaves
• 1 tablespoons of liquid detergent
• 1/4 cup green onion tops

Mix the spearmint leaves, horseradish, onion tops and peppers together with enough water to cover everything. Then strain the solution. Add a half-gallon of water and the detergent. You can use this to spray almost any plant safely. Store the mixture for a few days in a cool place.

Natural Pesticide for Aphids and Whiteflies
Mix a few drops of dishwashing detergent with water and spray on plants leaves. This is extremely effective in controlling many soft-bodied insects such as aphids and whiteflies.

Homemade Pesticide For Roses
In your blender make a solution of leaves from a tomato plant 4 pints of water and a tablespoon of cornstarch. Strain the mix and spray on roses as a natural pesticide. Keep any unused spray refrigerated.

Natural pesticides can work well for any home gardener and are much safer for you and your family. After you try a few of these recipes you’ll understand that they really work. If you want to control pests naturally instead of chemically, homemade pesticides may be the ideal choice.

• How to Identify and Eradicate Garden Pests
• Garden Starter Kit With Seeds
• Cbvb.Com

In this article we will discuss how to design a strictly formal garden on a large, rectangular area. Designing formal garden needs a little bit of hard work on your behalf. You have to keep all the main points and area in mind while designing a layout. It is said that formality and symmetry go hand in hand, therefore it is vital for you to set up a central axis around which borders and features would be arranged. It is often observed that the main viewing position in the house rarely central to the lawn. Usually a good deal of work is done on the left side of the axis and the right hand boundary is at an odd angle.

The patio should be set up in a symmetrical layout as far as it reaches to a curved step down onto a garden. There are so many things and factors which hinder your way to build a perfectly symmetrical patio. You can make use of two narrow raised beds along the edge of the patio to get a formal layout of the patio, but remember they may not be firmly symmetrical. The width of the beds along with other things around them should be around 400 mm (16 inches).

The steps like all other layouts are flush with the lawn along its entire length and this would extend to a path running out to a fountain and circular pool. To achieve the formality, the either side of the path is set with lavender hedge. The path can be extended to the farthest end up to the seat or you can end it at the pond, all depends on your design and choices. Two beds approaches the house long the paving area from the end of the garden. They are idea for herbaceous flowers or bush roses. To achieve the formality, you need to plan your planting such a way that they will present and image of each other.

For winter season, you can maintain the formal spirit of your garden by introducing some evergreen shrubs in your garden. It is a great idea to include an evergreen shrub in the center of the bed; a tall, narrow conifer will certainly look more effective. The best place to plant the shrubs is on the back of the seat. Herbaceous flowers and roses on either side of the seat will emphasize the colorful scheme and provide scent for those sitting nearby.

What you need to do is to emphasize the clever selection of the plants for your garden to give it a formal touch. The left hand side of the house contains a significant pergola underneath which is a passage to garden. The paving under the pergola leads you to the utility area and further extended towards a small kitchen garden. Soft fruits and vegetables should be grown in this small kitchen garden, and the two sections of the garden are separated by a formal hedge. Though, both the sections of the garden have an easy access.

The left and the right hand corners of the garden can be used for storing compost and garden rubbish.

Some Cool Facts About Tulips

• Tulips have been around since approximately 1554 making them one of the oldest garden perennials.
• Visitors from the Ottoman Empire to Europe wore tulips in their turbans. The tulip flower means lale in Arabic and is considered a holy symbol.
• Between 1634 and 1637 tulips almost crashed the Dutch economy as they became so incredibly popular their value increased and they were traded like currency!
• The Turkish Ottoman Empire experienced a period known as “tulip mania” between 1718 and 1730, when the cultivation of tulips defined nobility and privilege. A common uprising and revolt occurred when the price of bulbs became too much for ordinary folk to bear.

How to Grow Fantastic Tulips

Tulips are fond of mountain region climates by nature, however, a quick tour of your neighborhood each spring will reveal many gardens contain a glossy display of colorful tulips. What’s the secret to growing tulips?

Tip 1. Buy reputable tulip bulbs from your garden center and make sure full instructions are written on the back. That sounds obvious, but as a regular at garden centers, I’ve noticed a few cheap brands skimp on some important details such as what time of year to plant them, what shade/sun is required, and how deep to plant the bulbs.

Tulips should be planted with the pointy end upwards, and around 20-25cm underground. One of the most common errors when planting tulip bulbs is to plant them too shallow. Depending on the kind of tulip you buy, each tulip could yield between 1-4 flower heads, and most need to be planted around 20-25cm apart. I have seen people plant them closer together, however this will cause you problems in future years, when you dig them up to space them out a bit (as the plant is perennial and grows back and ‘spawns’ new blooms each year – in English and European climates, especially).

Tip 2. Deciding where to plant your tulips can be part of a grand experiment. This year, I planted some in a border near daffodils, some in hanging baskets where I had a spare bit of space, one or two in a ground planter and approximately 40 in row sets under wood-chip bark. Each lot of tulips have come up, successfully revealing the gorgeous bloom for which they were intended! (You can see by now I’m a bit tulip-crazy!)

The best looking tulips, health-wise, are the ones I planted in full sun in a hanging basket. The leaves are pest-free, and the potting mix seems to have nurtured them into full bloom. The only negatives are tulips near the sides might not reach a good height as the top is touching the hanging basket chain. Planting many and close together in a small hanging basket does work, yet considering they top out at about 30 cm tall, take that into account when deciding where to plant them. By the way, these tulips are sharing the basket space with pansy flowers, which seem to be amiable companions for them. My other lot are in a ground planter with a cyclamen, and whilst they seem happy, the cyclamen is not. I’m not sure they like sharing space with other bulbs (the cyclamen, that is).

One thing to remember wherever you plant your tulips, the green leaves come up around February time, the flowers mid-late April, and the blooms are all done by June at the latest. For the rest of the year the bed will look a bit bare. I suggest you plant something compatible with them on the surface, so if you are not too sure about this (I wasn’t) experiment with hanging baskets to see what works. Around the neighbors’ houses I’ve seen tulips planted under low-lying ground cover plants, the grassy borders of tree trunks, or pansy flower beds. I can see why no-one puts them under a large bush – they need light and height. If surrounded by too many bulbs they won’t come up so great either, it seems from my observations. However, the exception to that rule seems to be they will share a spot with the humble daffodil – as long as there’s room – otherwise the “daff” wins the spot, every time. by inference, you’ll need to prepare any bed you plant tulips in by digging the soil over deeply (to 35-40cm) and pulling out bulbs that are already in there by hand. These include bluebells, daffodil and snowdrop bulbs which could all potentially inhabit a garden bed. This is particularly relevant if you’ve inherited a new garden to play around with. If you haven’t seen the spring flower show, be prepared to dig!

Tip 3. The pests that can attack your tulips include the four-legged kind! The bulbs, which resemble onions in their smell, are attractive to burrowers when tulips are newly planted. There’s not much food around in October/November time, as autumn becomes winter, and believe me, if you’ve spent hours planting a tulip bed, as I did, you won’t appreciate a badger coming around and having a little meal. The solution here is to plant the bulbs at the correct depth in the ground (25-30cm), cover with soil, firmly press down and immediately water. One of the main reasons I put mine under wood-chip this year was to deter cats using the bare bed as litter tray (and possibly digging them up), and foxes deciding the bare garden was a good area for them to pass through, have a little sleep, or bury some bones they are fond of.

Once the tulips begin to show signs of budding, there is the need to watch out for squirrels. They love to eat the head of the tulips! After all that effort you could lose them all – so aside from using an air rifle and being an incredible shot – if you live near squirrels you can forget about growing tulips. Have a little think about this – how many tulips do you see growing in public parks where squirrels roam loose? Exactly! (Or maybe public gardeners are a great shot?)

Another pest which can put little holes all through the leaves is the common garden slug. Slug pellets will keep them at bay, but not totally eliminate them. If you are not too worried about a few nibbles, the tulip flowers will come up just fine, but the leaves look a little mottled. I’ll say straight off I use organic pellets so the birds can eat the dead slugs, which seems a pleasing result for all concerned.

In a second and third year of growth (which you will get if you plant little ground covers, pansies or compatible plants with shallow roots above your tulips) the leaves are much more robust. After the first year you will have a super-strong showing. Add fresh manure or garden compost around Autumn and re-cover the bed with wood-chip or the plants I’ve suggested. I’ve noticed slugs can also be slowed down by wood-chip (which is why I tried this as we are infested with the critters where I live), and of course, the usual slug traps will work too. When you notice more blooms, or crowded beds, you need to dig up the plants just after they bloom, and replant them (deeply) to give them the extra room needed for your next season (usually do this every four years or so).

You should be able to avoid the pest of tulip fungus as long as you keep the bed moist, but not over-watered, and remember to give them a little water on a dry day. This was another reason I tried wood-chip this year, to keep the level of moisture locked into the bed. This has worked a treat, and I now have a garden full of glory. I hope you have an amazing time experimenting with tulip growing in your garden!