Reduce, Reuse Recyle, how many times have we all heard that...

BUT it can be a great way to do things.

 Things can get very costly out there if you have to buy everything new so I asked 

a few friends and had a few ideas of my own I thought I would share with you.

Be a scrounger! Containers and plant starting trays can cost a bundle. I found 4 huge plant containers in someones big trash! They now house many of my herbs. Need to start seedlings? Save your egg containers. The cardboard ones are great and will decompose.All those plastic tubs your strawberries and cherry tomatoes come in, perfect mini greenhouses! (wash well first)

We had a lovely gazebo, then we had a snow storm, we no longer have a gazebo. We collected the poles and they will now become extra poles for my pole beans. The netting? It will be used to cover my plants like broccoli and cabbage to keep the moths out of them. Awesome!

What about an old pool that has been well used but no longer any good. We cut it up into flat pieces and used it to cover our wood pile and the raised boxes to keep weeds down between seasons.

Have an old wheelbarrow and fireplace liner? We did so it now keeps our wood stove ash nicely housed and covered through the winter until they can be used!

I also got some great ideas from my gardening group friends!

Gardening Jones offered these suggestions! Reuse cardboard boxes and corn stalks to cut down on weeds, use an old garden shovel for your house numbers, glass bottles work as mini cloches to get a jump in the season, her garden gate is the foot board from an old metal bed, a broken windmill lawn ornament supports vining crops, plastic milk jugs painted black help hold the heat in the mini greenhouse.

You can check out her blog here, It's great! Gardening Jones Blog

And my friend Jack Sisler offered these,

Use three or four layers of old newspapers with straw on top between their rows of sweetcorn and other vegetables to keep the weeds down. Can be tilled in prior to the next growing season. Toilet paper and paper roll tubes are used by many for seed starting. 

I hope these suggestions help or inspire you to try some of your own. Happy Gardening!!

On the Hunt for the Tomatoe Horn Worm (and other garden pests)

As a new organic gardener I have had to learn a lot about things that will cause problems in my garden and one of those is garden pests. Bugs and other creatures that will cause LOTS of problems in your garden. I hate bugs in any shape or form and I really hate the ones who try and eat and destroy my good garden veggies and fruit. (although at this point if they wanted a cucumber or two I would probably not fuss=). I have had to do research on the internet to find home organic remedies for what will get rid of these pests without killing off the bumble bees and other little critters that you need out there.

Living in a very warm area we gets lots of bugs but the one I have way to may of is grasshoppers. I have a LOT of grass hoppers, if you know anyone who likes to eat them, send them over, they could have many a meal from my garden. I looked on line to see how to get rid of them and found a very unique way to rid yourself of the little bugger. Flour, plain old all purpose flour.You put it in a paper bag, poke holes in it and then early morning you sprinkle it over your tomatoes or whatever else it is on. It supposedly gums up the grasshoppers mouth so they cannot eat anymore. My concern became if it will do it to grasshoppers will it do it to the good critters? I have not found an answer to this so I have chosen to not do it and just go to my garden a couple of times a day and whack them off with my hand or take a couple of cucumbers and whack them together with the grasshopper in between. It usually does the job.

 One of the biggest and nastiest things I have found is the horned tomatoes worm. This bug is big, probably the size of my index finger. And nasty! No mater what you do that sucker sticks to the branch no matter what. And if you leave it, it will eat everything in site on your tomato plant and I mean everything. This is the third one I have found in my garden and it had only eaten a little bit, but the first one I found had eaten a whole plant before I found it.

So I found a solution for these nasty huge things and it is very effective, knock them off and beat the crap out of them until they can't come back.My block of wood for just this purpose =)

Of course there are other endless little bugs, you could go on  forever, but I won't. These two are the ones that bug me the most and these are my organic solutions.I do have other garden pests, that I will not get rid of.

The fence I have up stops the big dogs but it will not stop Tucker. He certainly thinks it is not there for his benefit at any rate. So we watch him when we are out there to make sure he does not ruin anything and let the fence works for the big dogs. It does work for them.So this is the way it will be.=)