Garden Supplies

One of the very first steps in starting a garden is to pick up the necessary garden supplies!  This can be a few things, or a quite a few things, depending on what you are looking to achieve.  Gardening is a long process that takes time to figure out what you want your garden to look like!  After you have figured it out, getting there is more than half the fun.

Here are some basic supplies that can get your garden growing:

• Seeds – things like seed starting kits, soil mixes for seeds and even mature plants are a great place to start when thinking about forming a garden
• Flower or vegetable gardening?  Or perhaps both?  Things you need to think about here is purchasing flowers, flower supporters, fertilizers and soil.  There is also fertilizers that are made specifically for flowers and some for fruits and vegetables.
• Pots and Planters – you have a variety of options to choose from! Pots, planters, window boxes, hanging planters and so much more are available for purchase.
• Yard & Landscaping supplies – such as edging and mulch, fences, trellises, and lawn care supplies
• Composting – composters, worm bins, and accessories.
• Garden Tools – this one is very important!  You need things like:  garden carts, labor-saving tools, planting and weeding tools, pruners and loppers.
• Watering – you have to make sure your plants and flowers get plenty of water!  Things likes hoses, watering cans and rain barrels are a great start to a garden.

After a few supplies, and a lot of love, your garden will be growing in no time!

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Hirt's Gardens

Hirt’s Garden is a company that sells plants, seeds, bulbs, garden products and more.  This company was established in 1915 by Samuel Hirt and is one of Ohio’s oldest horticultural establishments.  They specialize in the hard to find garden goodies that many of us are looking for today!

Everything from hard-to-find perennials, unusual and exotic house plants, and seeds and bulbs from around the world are available through Hirt’s Gardens.   They have a retail greenhouse and garden store located in Ohio as well an online site for people to purchase from any time of day or night.

If you are looking for great gardening supplies for a reliable company that has been around for quite a while, think about giving Hirt’s Gardens a try for your next gardening needs!

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A Large Garden Gnome

Many people, like myself, are fascinated with the adorable little statues known as garden gnomes.  I was first enchanted by them after watching the sweet and charming movie Amelie. A garden gnome or lawn gnome is a figurine of a small humanoid creature, usually wearing a pointy hat, produced for the purpose of ornamentation and protection from evil sorcery, typically of gardens or on lawns.

Garden gnomes are readily available at all kinds of home and gardening shops and these adorable figurines range drastically in prices.  These figurines originate in 19th century Germany, where they became known as Gartenzwerg (literally “garden dwarf”).  Whatever they are called, they add a lovely addition to any garden.

Although these garden figures are quite adorable, they are often the target of pranks! The act of taking the gnome and returning it to the wild is known collectively as “gnoming”.  No gnoming for me, just enjoying these adorable statues.

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Gardens Alive

Gardens alive is a company that is dedicated to gardeners’ needs.  The company is one of America’s lading mail order companies that is dedicated to biological control of garden pests!  They strive to keep the environment as the number one priority when it comes to pest control.

They sell a variety of fertilizers, fungicides, and insect sprays, among other products as well.  They even specialize in specific products, such as fertilizers for growing tomatoes or insect sprays for strawberries.  They care about what you are growing and what is the prefect product to make it a bountiful crop!  From flowers, to produce, to orchards, they have everything you need to keep it growing and in bloom.

You can purchase their products online, which have rave reviews, at very reasonable prices.  When it comes to gardening and growing, you can never have too many great products to help along the way.  Gardens Alive is a great place to start shopping and thinking about how to help this seasons’ crops!

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Garden Lighting

Garden, or landscape, lighting can be a wonderful addition to your home garden! Landscape lighting or garden lighting refers to the use of outdoor illumination of private gardens and public landscapes; for the enhancement and purposes of safety, nighttime aesthetics, accessibility, security, recreation and sports, and social and event uses.  This is the perfect way to let your garden shine – literally!

There are a variety of garden lighting options to choose from. Conventionally generated and sourced electricity remains the most used source for landscape lighting in the early twenty-first century. With the combination of energy costs from energy demands, increasing availability of sustainable design methods, global warming considerations, and aesthetic and safety concerns in garden and landscape design the methods and equipment of outdoor illumination have been evolving.

One of my favorite types of garden lighting is solar powered.  The increasing use of solar power, low voltage fixtures, energy efficient lamp bulbs-xenon bulbs-fiber optics, and creative lighting design are examples of innovation in the field.

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Better Homes and Garden

Unless you have been living under a rock, you are probably quite familiar with the magazine, Better Homes and Gardens.  After all, Better Homes and Gardens is the fourth most popular selling magazine in all of the United States!  The incredibly popular magazine focuses on interests regarding homes, cooking, gardening, crafts, healthy living, decorating, and entertaining.

The magazine was founded in 1922 and is published once a month by the Meredith Corporation. The Meredith Corporation publishes a number of books on home economics and gardening under the BH&G brand, the best known of which is the Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book, colloquially known as the “Red Plaid” book. Now in its 15th edition (published in August 2010), the Red Plaid was originally published in 1930. Meredith also publishes the New Junior Cookbook for children learning to cook.

This is truly one of the best magazines out there for finding ideas on all home and garden projects!

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Plantswatch

In this PlantSwatch™ video it shows you how easy it is to select plants by color and hardiness zone to grow your garden.  It is truly an invaluable garden guide with over 230 popular plants from almost every variety in North America.  It retails for a mere $19.95 and helps you plan a more beautiful garden!

The video below is a short one, and it shows how wonderful Plantswatch is to use!  I’m a firm believer in any thing that will help my garden grow. I love it and have so much fun just looking through the swatches.  Check out the video below and leave us a comment about it!

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Door Prizes include:

• Tickets to California Musical Theatre: Frost/Nixon
• Gift Certificate to Cabo’s Mexican Restaurant
• Two  Tickets to Fleetwood Mac Concert & Dinner for Two
• Two  Tickets to Fight Night at the Red Lion
• Gift Certificate to Café Ettore
• Gift Certificate to Brew It Up

Plus, lots of great vendors. For more information, click here.

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Whether you live where it rains or where it pours, there’s a great, easy way you can conserve water for garden use.

Where I live (Calif.) that’s a very big deal, as we Californians head into a third consecutive drought year.

Rain “harvesting” isn’t a new concept, but let’s just say this oldie is a goodie.

It’s as simple as setting up a simple capture system to redirect rainwater off the roof to a barrel.

Collecting Water - photo by Prem Anand

Whether you use a wine barrel to collect rainfall from your rooftop or recycle waste water from household sinks, bathtubs, showers and washing machines, you’re doing your water bill and the planet good.

If all this sounds like too much work, there’s always a very easy way to save–turn off the sprinklers during the winter, sunless it’s really dry and windy, in which case run them every so often. Get to know your sprinkler system and learn how to turn it off.

According to local experts in my hometown, Sacramento residents devote 60 percent of residential water use to their outdoor irrigation, and of that, 40 to 60 percent is wasted, as most homeowners over water by 200 to 300 percent.”

You can buy rain barrels here. Or buy a whole rain water collection system here. Or, take a baby step and turn off your sprinklers in the winter time.

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If you are an avid gardener, or even not so avid, you probably have your own type of fertilizer that you prefer to use and probably something that it has in common with mine is that it is expensive.  It is almost alarming at how expensive a fertilizer can be. Sure, we all want big and beautiful blooms but does it have to be so expensive to create those blooms.  The answer, of course, is no, it doesn’t need to be that expensive.

Instead, you can make a number of fertilizers using everyday items that you find at home.  Not only is it more inexpensive, reusing, and recycling the materials around your home is a great way to be a “green” gardener.

Tip #1:  It’s all in the grounds

The first time I heard this being suggested, I was a little surprised.  After all, doesn’t coffee stunt growth, I mean, that is what happened to me.  Fortunately for my plants, coffee works as a great fertilizer for gardens and instead of throwing your leftover coffee away, why not save it for your garden.  With this fertilizer, you actually don’t use the grounds but you use the coffee that is brewed from the grounds.  Once you have a pot of coffee, add it with another 4 pots of water for a 1:4 ratio.  This will give you your fertilizer and you can use it on your plants every other week to see some pretty amazing results.

Tip #2: Apples aren’t just used to keep the doctor away

Okay, maybe it’s not apples exactly but using a homemade fertilizer that has 1 tablespoon of apple cider vinegar and one gallon of water, can add a definite boost to your plants.  This fertilizer is great for house plants and it does an amazing job at boosting those green leaves.

Tip #3: Keep your fish tanks clean

This may seem like a strange tip but if you have a fish tank, your dirty fish tank water works as an excellent fertilizer since it is chalked full of nitrogen, which plants need in their soil.

Tip #4: A little Epsom for you and me

I love having baths and nothing is as nice as a bath with Epsom salts.  It can clean those pours and relax those muscles after you have spent a day out in the garden digging up that new flower bed.  What is even better, a mixture of 1 tablespoon of Epsom salt and 1 gallon of water can really help your tomato plants and other plants that require a higher level of magnesium to thrive.

Tip #5: Get cracking

The last tip that I am going to recommend as a homemade fertilizer is egg shells.  Whenever you make some eggs, save the shells until you have a fair amount. At that point, simply crumble them and then sprinkle them in the soil around your plants.  This provides your soil with much needed calcium carbonate.

And there are a few tips to get you on your way to not only saving a few nickles and dimes but also towards being an organic gardener.

Sirena Van Schaik

photo credit: © Fallsview | Dreamstime.com

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