Gardeners are always looking for little tips and tricks to make gardening easier and more productive. These are a few that have been gathered from local farmers and gardeners in the Lansing, Michigan area. These little tidbits will help a garden reach its peak performance without breaking backs or budgets.
10 tips for a Bountiful Garden
Keep Bugs Out of the Garden
Bugs can ruin plants in even the most prudent of gardener’s gardens. They often work at night and most people aren’t aware of their presence until the damage has already been done. Following a couple of these hints may save an entire year’s worth of crops.
Dust your bulbs with medicated baby powder before planting them to keep bugs from eating them.
Slugs hate evergreen needles. Use pine needles to mulch around squash and zucchini plants to keep the slugs away.
To keep snails, caterpillars, and tomato worms out of the garden make a mixture of garlic and mineral oil and spray it around the perimeter. Mix one head of garlic with six tablespoons of mineral oil and one pint of water.
Check Out: Common Garden Pests
Green Gardening Tips
- Make self watering containers out of milk jugs. This is both easy to do and costs next to nothing. These containers are low maintenance and can support surprisingly large plants.
- Make bright colored and waterproof row markers for the garden. Take popsicle sticks and staple seed packets to them. Cover these with plastic sandwich bags to keep them safe from the rain. They will remain bright through the entire growing season. At the end of the season take off the plastic bag and toss the marker into the compost pile (or save the entire thing for next year).
- Toilet paper rolls. Use those empty rolls as seedling starters. Cut them in half and cover the bottom with paper towel. Fill them with planting soil and there you have starter cells at almost no cost!
- Make mulch out of old or leftover carpet. Cut the carpet into strips and lay it between the garden rows. It will kill weeds and act as mulch for the vegetables. It will also keep shoes from getting muddy.
Farmers Favorite Gardening Hints
- Don’t throw away banana peels or coffee grounds. Banana peels are high in potassium and phosphorus, while coffee grounds are high in nitrogen; work them into the soil around your plants. Roses love this one. Coffee grounds also keep root maggots from eating root vegetables like carrots and radishes.
Check Out: Understanding Composting
- Tomatoes thrive in high temperature soil. Cover the ground around tomato plants with black plastic trash bags to heat up the soil around them.
- Scare deer away from the garden with old white sheets. Cut them into small strips and put up a line about three to four feet in the air. The scraps blowing around in the wind will look like the white tail of a deer. Showing a white tail is a sign of danger. This should keep the pesky deer away from your corn and peas!
Tips like these come from everywhere. Anyone who gardens probably has a tip or two they’d be willing to share. Keep them in a notebook or old recipe box with your gardening tools. Take a bit of time to reread them a week or so before starting a new garden. Maybe there will be something in there that will come up this year.