Education
7 Gardening Tips that Save you $$$!
It can be easy to spend a lot of money every year creating a beautiful yard. These gardening tips can help save you money now and for seasons to come.
1. Plan your vegetable garden according to what your friends and neighbors are planting so you can share your vegetables when they’re ready for eating. Often I’ve had too many of one kind of vegetable I couldn’t give away because my friend’s were ripe at the same time. (Tip: When this happens check out Canning and Pickling recipes to make the most of your crop. There’s nothing like Homemade Pickles! and this recipe is so good)
2. Start composting for free fertilizer . You can use your kitchen scraps and coffee grounds to create great soil. It’s very easy and it helps keep our earth greener by recycling things that don’t belong in a landfill anyways. Check out the information here on composting
3. Intelligent Design- Planning your lawn and garden with the help of professionals will save you time, money, and frustration by having experts provide plants and advice that are ideal for your situation. A hardy and drought tolerant outdoor space can make your life easy and save you money year after year.
4. Save yourself money long term by purchasing better quality gardening tools up front and you won’t have to replace them often. Better quality equipment will last for years, saving you dollars because you don’t need to replace them every planting season. Same goes for gardening gloves- make sure you buy the best you can afford so they last all season.
5. Try using stone or rock in your garden as ground cover instead of traditional mulch is a long term solution. This will save you cash since you won’t need to buy mulch in the spring and fall every year. Who wants to keep hauling and spreading mulch for the rest of their life?
6. Check and adjust your sprinklers regularly. You’d be surprised how much difference it can make to tune up your sprinklers once a month. Traditional Florida advice is to water 1″ per zone for most lawns in the summer. Ensuring you are watering properly saves you money, reduces your environmental impact, and can decrease pest problems.
7. Plant perennials in your flowerbeds instead of annuals. As they multiply each year you can cut them back and share with your friends so you both have lovely gardens and save money at the same time.
Create Your Own Butterfly Garden!
With just a little bit of planning, you can have beautiful butterflies and hummingbirds flocking to your garden. That’s good news for gardeners because not only are these winged creatures fun to watch, they’re essential pollinators. Create a butterfly garden!
The key is to know what hummingbirds and butterflies look for, which is flowers with nectar. So when you select nectar-rich plants for your garden, look for varieties that are both prolific bloomers and have a long bloom time. Prune your plants to prevent excessive woody growth and encourage the growth of new flowers.
Try these tips from Monrovia, one of the leading growers of plants:
• Hummingbirds are attracted to bright orange, red and hot pink blossoms. Their long, narrow beaks can reach the nectar of long, tubular flowers such as the Balboa Sunset Trumpet Vine with its large scarlet blossoms, and the Goldflame Honeysuckle, which has vibrant yellow and red flowers. Other good choices are the Super Red Flowering Maple and the Navajo series of Salvia, available in many colors, including bright red, rose and salmon red.
• Not all hummingbirds feed at the same height, so plant an array of shrub sizes and climbing vines for food sources.
• Butterflies are attracted to yellow, orange and red. They too are seeking nectar, but their mouths, or proboscises, are much smaller, so they prefer flatter flowers they can perch on while they feed. The no-fail plant for butterflies is the Butterfly Bush, or Buddleja. However, since they can get too large for some gardens, consider the Petite series of Dwarf Butterfly Bushes. Petite Indigo has a profusion of lilac-blue flowers; Petite Plum sports reddish-purple blooms and the Petite Snow has pure white blossoms.
• Lilacs are favorites of butterflies, but don’t typically flower well in climates with warmer winters. The Blue Skies Lilac produces huge clusters of light lavender-blue flowers that don’t require winter chilling. Butterflies love Coneflowers, such as the bright pink Pixie Meadowbrite. Asters are great because they bloom well into fall. The new Farmington Aster has a profusion of lilac bloom clusters that butterflies flock to.
• Supply a source of water. Hummingbirds enjoy flying through a fine mist, which cools them off. Butterflies like drinking from shallow puddles. Position some large flat rocks in a sunny spot, on which butterflies can sun themselves to warm their wings.
Gardening with Kids!
We can see how nature is treated these days. It is a sad thing to know that people do not pay attention so much anymore to our environmental problems. What can we do about this? It’s as simple as starting with the children. It is good to see the children’s involvement with environment-friendly activities. One such nature-loving activity that children could easily get their hands on is gardening. Why should you consider gardening for your children?
Here are the benefits that gardening could easily provide the children with:
1. Science
In planting, children are indirectly taught the wonders of science like the plant’s life cycle and how human’s intervention can break or make the environment. They can have a first hand experience on the miracle of life through a seed. This would definitely be a new and enjoyable experience for the kids.
2. Life
Watching a seed grow into a tree is just as wondrous as the conception to birth and growth of a child. In time, kids will learn to love their plants and appreciate the life in them. Gardening could actually help simulate how life should be treated — it should be with care. The necessities to live will be emphasized to kids with the help of gardening – water, sunlight, air, soil. Those necessities could easily be corresponded to human necessities, i.e., water, shelter, air, food. By simply weeding out, one could educate how bad influences should be avoided to be able to live life smoothly.
3. Relaxation
Studies show that gardening can reduce stress because of its calming effect. This is applicable to any age group. More so, it stimulates all the five senses. Believe it or not, gardening may be used as therapy to children who have been abused or those who are members of broken homes. It helps build one’s self-esteem.
4. Quality Time with the Family
You can forget about your stressful work life for a while be soothed by the lovely ambiance in the garden. You can play and spend quality time with your children. You can talk while watering the plants or you can work quietly beside each other. The bottom line is, always do what you have to do, together with your kids. You might discover a lot of new things about your child while mingling with them in your garden.
5. Sense of accomplishment
Children love to see something they have built and watch it grow! Watch as when your friends and family come by when your child gets excited to show off their creations in the garden. There is nothing more fun than watching the sense of wonder in a child’s eyes as they show you something they have created.
Let kids become aware of their environment’s needs. And one way to jumpstart that environmental education may be through gardening. It’s hitting two birds with one stone — teach them to respect life while you bond with them.
