| On gardening with crap you can find around the house |
[20 May 2009|08:03pm] |
Just thought I'd share some tips and tricks that I've learned over the years:
For tomatoes, bury a cup of sugar, epsom salts, and a banana peel. It makes great fertilizer. Also, the squishy, half-rotten tomato, toss it outside. Next year, you'll have a bunch of tomato-plant sprouts.
I bet, that if you get a red bell pepper, and do the same, you'll have pepper-plant sprouts. Red, green, yellow and orange are all just stages of ripeness for the fruit.
I also bet that you can do the same with any hard-shelled squash. Though, if you don't have a lot of bees, butterflies, or similar things, you'll have to take a paintbrush to the flowers in order to get fruit.
You can sprout garlic from a clove of it that you got from the grocery store.
You can also sprout potatoes from ones you've gotten at the store, but it's not reccomended. However, seed potatoes at local farmer's markets are pretty cheap.
A great bug-spray/fertilizer takes one cup bio-degradable dishsoap-- Ivory's a good one, one cup mouthwash-- something like Listerene, and a cup of "tea" made with chewing tobacco, in a hose-sprayer. Spray your plants. It keeps things away and nourishes your plants.
Also good for nourishing plants: tea with sugar, tea-leaves, coffee grounds, egg-shells, old newspapers, and other "organic" garbage-- barring dairy or meat products. Dairy and meat products are bad for gardens.
A LOT of plants we refer to as "herbs" are actually European weeds.
Mint is a notible weed-- it spreads *everywhere* and is notoriously hard to kill. The suggestion is, to put the mint in a pot before putting it in your yard. They're also pretty easy to grow from cuttings: just put a cutting in a bit of water in a sunny window and leave it alone for a week or so.
Chamomile is an annual, but it re-seeds itself pretty easily, if you don't remove all of the flowers for tea.
Garlic, chives, and onions are perennials in Ohio. All it takes is one clove of garlic to grow a whole new bunch. Chives and regular onions are like any other bulb-plant: if you leave 'em alone, they'll multiply by themselves.
You can make a gourmet, flavored oil by putting a chive-flower in a bottle of olive oil.
Horehound, basil, and roses are great companions for tomatoes.
An old fork and spoon are invaluable gardening tools. You can also start a compost heap by drilling some holes in an old trash-can, and burying the bottom part of it.
Are there any other tips/thoughts/ideas that others want to contribute?
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