Backyard Gardening Tips

Featured Articles

Remedy For Ant Hills In Gardens And Lawns

3:00 pm by webmann in backyard garden, garden, lawn care

Ant hills can ruin a yard pretty quickly if not taken care of. The remedy for ant hills in gardens and lawns is to deal with them immediately upon finding them. Easy to say but if you don’t know what you are doing it can be a real challenge.

About 15 years ago my wife and I bought a duplex thinking the we would make lots of money and pay off our mortgage quickly. We didn’t realize the problems we were buying into as the previous owners were experts at deception. Not to go into too much detail I will only talk about the yard, it was a mess and needed plenty of love and care.

When we bought the place the yard looked great because they had laid new sod and planted lots of flowers. All of this was done to cover up the nightmare just below the sod. Lawn and garden pests galore. We thought the yard had a nice slope to the side walk but it turned out the it was not a slope but a hill, one big huge ant hill.

It took a lot of work to get rid of the pests in our garden and lawn, not just ants but also earwigs, which gross me out. If I could have done something to get even with the previous owners I think I would have taken all the ants and earwigs and move them directly to their new property, but then again I am an honest person and couldn’t do that.

We tried a home remedy for ant hills in gardens and lawns that a friend told us about but we ended up going to our local lawn and garden store to get real advice from a professional and in just a few weeks they stopped coming around and now our lawn and the slope to the side walk is all landscaping and not a big ant hill. We have since sold that place and moved into our dream home where we hired a professional to check out new property before we signed the dotted lines, although today we have protection against crooks like those people that sold us that place.

Comments (0)

Backyard Gardening Can Be A Fun and Creative Backyard Project.

2:10 pm by webmann in backyard gardening, garden, gardening

I love summer and when it finally arrives here on the east coast of Canada we don’t waste too much time getting into it. We have our dream house now and spend a lot of time in the backyard, but it’s not quite what we want just yet.

We have a lot of things to do during the nice summer months. Things like so many others associate backyards with, like family picnics, BBQs, swimming, and outdoor sports. Even though we love all that fun stuff there was something missing in our new backyard and that is growing a vegetable garden.

You might say why bother but I was raised on a farm and we grew almost all the food we needed to get through the long cold winters and I miss that. Buying everything from the grocery stores seems so boring and things just don’t taste the same do they. Take the time to learn to garden and you will be amazed at what happens.

I truly believe the benefits of growing a garden real out-weigh any work involved in gardening. Check out the benefits to backyard gardening and determine if growing a garden is for you.

There are many design ideas for your garden, even designs that limit the bending over that so many find difficult. Raised garden beds work great for people with limited mobility.

Just because I said a veggie garden doesn’t mean it really has to be a veggie garden. If you prefer flowers then you go with flowers. We already have a backyard filled with beautiful flowers so we want to go to the next level with veggies. A flower garden really turns heads. I even take a camera with me when I go for my walks because so many people have lovely flower gardens.

Vegetable gardens are a perfect way to save some money on food and to impress all your friends. Many vegetable gardens are composed of potatoes, carrots, tomatoes, and beets. We tried the tomato thing last year now we know we don’t need to plant so many tomato plants. If you are able to successfully grow these foods, you and your family could enjoy them as a tasty treat or part of a meal.

It may sound like a contradiction but I think the best benefit to backyard gardening is the relaxation. Gardening requires a fairly large amount of work when done correctly it just doesn’t seem like work. In fact, my mother and father were gardeners and I could tell that gardening was a great way for them to relax.

As a kid I didn’t think it was too relaxing because my pace didn’t seem to be fast enough for Mom and Dad. I was much more willing to go play in the hay or chase cows.

In your garden you can work at your own pace and take breaks as you feel you need them. The lack of stress doing gardening this way has a big payoff in great food and even a longer life with less stress.

Even though I didn’t care for gardening as a kid I did learn things that help me today so don’t be afraid to get your kids in on the fun of gardening. I just remembered how much I did enjoy eating out of our garden, Mmmmmm.

So give backyard gardening a try. You can start with tomatoes like my wife and I did. The size of your garden is totally up to you so don’t push it to the point that you don’t relax any more.

Comments (0)

How To Deal With Garden Pests.

11:31 am by webmann in garden pests, gardening

If we could garden without any interference from garden pests which attack plants, then indeed gardening would be a simple matter. But all the time we must watch out for these little foes little in size, but tremendous in the havoc they make.The same way human illness may often be prevented by healthful conditions, garden pests may be kept away by strict garden cleanliness. Composting is not the problem in gardens, it the piles of waste garden material because this give a great breeding place for those pesky garden pests and not just insects.

I like to use worms on my fishing trips but I do leave worms in the garden and only take those worms that venture onto the lawns late at night. I leave the garden worms for their constant stirring up of the soil which helps in aerating the soil allowing it to keep more air and water for available for the roots.

Many of our common birds feed on the insects that like to eat your leaves and destroy your garden. The sparrows, robins, chickadees, meadow larks and orioles are all examples of birds who help in this way. But it’s not just the birds that help keep the pesky insect population down, some insects, like lady bugs, feed on other harmful insects.

The ichneumon-fly helps too. And toads are wonders in the number of insects they can consume at one meal. The toad deserves very kind treatment from all of us.

Each gardener should try to make his/her garden into a place attractive to birds and toads.

1. A good birdhouse, grain sprinkled about in early spring, a water-place, are invitations for birds to stay a while in your garden.

2. If you wish toads, fix things up for them too. During a hot summer day a toad likes to rest in the shade. By night he is ready to go forth to eat but not to kill, since toads prefer live food. How can one “fix up” for toads? Well, one thing to do is to prepare a retreat, quiet, dark and damp. A few stones of some size underneath the shade of a shrub with perhaps a carpeting of damp leaves, would appear very fine to a toad.

There are two general classes of insects known by the way they do their work. One kind gnaws at the plant really taking pieces of it into its system. This kind of insect has a mouth fitted to do this work. Grasshoppers and caterpillars are of this sort. The other kind sucks the juices from a plant. This, in some ways, is the worst sort. Plant lice belong here, as do mosquitoes, where the male goes for the plants while the females go for us. All the scale insects fasten themselves on plants, and suck the life right out of the plants.

Now can we fight these chaps? The gnawing fellows may be caught with poison sprayed upon plants, which they take into their bodies with the plant. The Bordeaux mixture which is a poison sprayed upon plants for this purpose.

In the other case the only thing is to attack the insect direct. So certain insecticides, as they are called, are sprayed on the plant to fall upon the insect. They do a deadly work of attacking, in one way or another, the body of the insect.

Sometimes we are much troubled with underground insects at work. You have seen a garden covered with ant hills. Here is a remedy, but one of which you must be careful.

This question is constantly being asked, ‘How can I tell what insect is doing the destructive work?’ Well, you can tell partly by the work done, and partly by seeing the insect itself. This latter thing is not always so easy to accomplish. I had cutworms one season and never saw one. I saw only the work done. If stalks of tender plants are cut clean off be pretty sure the cutworm is abroad. What does he look like? Well, that is a hard question because his family is a large one. Should you see sometime a grayish striped caterpillar, you may know it is a cutworm. But because of its habit of resting in the ground during the day and working by night, it is difficult to catch sight of one. The cutworm is around early in the season ready to cut the flower stalks of the hyacinths. When the peas come on a bit later, he is ready for them. A very good way to block him off is to put paper collars, or tin ones, about the plants. These collars should be about an inch away from the plant.

Of course, plant lice are more common. Those we see are often green in colour. But they may be red, yellow or brown. Lice are easy enough to find since they are always clinging to their host. As sucking insects they have to cling close to a plant for food, and one is pretty sure to find them. But the biting insects do their work, and then go hide. That makes them much more difficult to deal with.

Rose slugs do great damage to the rose bushes. They eat out the body of the leaves, so that just the veining is left. They are soft-bodied, green above and yellow below.

A beetle, the striped beetle, attacks young melons and squash leaves. It eats the leaf by riddling out holes in it. This beetle, as its name implies, is striped. The back is black with yellow stripes running lengthwise.

Then there are the slugs, which are garden pests. The slug will devour almost any garden plant, whether it be a flower or a vegetable. They lay lots of eggs in old rubbish heaps. Do you see the good of cleaning up rubbish? The slugs do more harm in the garden than almost any other single insect pest. You can discover them in the following way. There is a trick for bringing them to the surface of the ground in the day time. You see they rest during the day below ground. So just water the soil in which the slugs are supposed to be. How are you to know where they are? They are quite likely to hide near the plants they are feeding on. So water the ground with some nice clean lime water. This will disturb them, and up they’ll poke to see what the matter is.

Beside these most common of pests, pests which attack many kinds of plants, there are special pests for special plants. Discouraging, is it not? Beans have pests of their own; so have potatoes and cabbages. In fact, the vegetable garden has many inhabitants. In the flower garden lice are very bothersome, the cutworm and the slug have a good time there, too, and ants often get very numerous as the season advances. But for real discouraging insect troubles the vegetable garden takes the prize. If we were going into fruit to any extent, perhaps the vegetable garden would have to resign in favor of the fruit garden.

A common pest in the vegetable garden is the garden worm or tomato worm. This is a large yellowish or greenish striped worm. Its work is to eat into the young fruit.

A great, light green caterpillar is found on celery. This caterpillar may be told by the black bands, one on each ring or segment of its body.

The squash bug may be told by its brown body, which is long and slender, and by the disagreeable odor from it when killed. The potato bug is another fellow to look out for. It is a beetle with yellow and black stripes down its crusty back. The little green cabbage worm is a perfect nuisance. It is a small caterpillar and smaller than the tomato worm. These are perhaps the most common of garden pests by name.

Comments (0)

Having Trouble Keeping Cats Out Of Your Garden?

3:17 pm by webmann in backyard garden, backyard gardening, garden, gardening

Hey, get out of my garden, you, you CAT and get off my patio furniture!!

Nothing like digging your hands through your garden only to come up with a mitt full of CAT POO or going to sit on your patio furniture only to find cat hair and a dead mouse. I’ve heard that’s a sign of a cat’s affection, well I don’t want their affection if that’s where it leads.

Your first line of defense when keeping cats out of your garden is to make sure that you have your boundaries secure. If there are any gaps in your fence, you should make sure that you block them to prevent any low access. Cats are very agile animals, and can jump very high. Normally they can jump a fence, which is why you should also invest in string or taut wire across the top.

If a cat has made his way into your garden, it may be hard to get him/her out. Most people choose to use dogs, simply because dogs are known to dislike cats. There are several dog breeds out there that completely dislike cats, such as pit bulls and Dobermans. Cats are completely fearful of these breeds, and will flee if they see them around.

We have a Pit Bull, her name is Honey, and she is the sweetest pet. Okay she is great with people and loves attention but I would not trust her with another animal of any kind. A friend was telling me that he had a girlfriend who came home to find one of her two cats missing, well except for the tail and for that reason I would never let Honey run loose in my yard just to control the local cat population.

We do notice that when she is tied outside there are no cats to be seen.

Honey loves the water and will chase the sprinkle all day if we let her, but cats on the other hand, we most cats are known to despise water. If you spot a cat in your garden, water almost always gets him out. All it takes is a bucket of water or a well aimed squirt with a garden hose to make him run away. After you have hit the cat with water several times, he should get the hint not to come back anymore. If he comes back, simply squirt him or throw more water on him until he gets the idea.

Protecting your plants is a different story. Mothballs are said to be very effective, as cats don’t like the smell. You can use mothballs around your plants, garden borders, or even along the fence. There are other repellents that you can use as well, such as cayenne peppers, tobacco, lavender oil, citronella oil, mustard oil, and even lemon grass oil.

If you visit your local hardware or lawn store, you can find motion activated sprinklers. They work great in keeping cats out of your garden. Once you install the sprinkler system and a cat comes into the area, the detector will pick up the cat’s presence and immediately shoot out a jet of water that will douse the cat. In most cases, all it takes is a few times of exposure to the sprinkler before a cat learns to stay out of that area.

Sound devices that feature high frequencies are also a great way to scare off cats, although they aren’t annoying to humans. You can find several different models, such as those that stay on all the time, and those that are motion detected. To use this type of device, you’ll need to make sure that the model you have is strong enough to cover the entire area. If you model you are using is strong enough to cover your entire garden, it should suffice in scaring off any unwanted animals.

You can also use commercial repellents as well. Commercial repellents use scents to keep cats away, and shouldn’t be used near any food crops. Due to their high chemical content, commercial repellents can pollute your crops. You can find them at your local department store, with several varieties to choose from, many of which will fend off other animals from your garden as well.

If you have a garden, it can be very annoying if cats and other animals decide to make your garden their home. If you stick to your guns and do your part, you can prevent them from bothering your garden or your crops. Once you have secured your boundaries around the garden, you should try using water first. If water doesn’t seem to work, you can look into another method, such as commercial repellents.

You could also have motion sensors that play an audio file when triggered. You could add one simple bark you record of a pit bull barking at another animal and you could really cut down on the animals that roam your yard at night. It doesn’t have to be a long recording that would wake your neighbors, not at all, it only takes one bark and they get the point.

I am sure you will find your garden clear of cat bombs and your patio furniture missing those gifts of love from the neighborhood cats.

Comments (0)

Backyard Landscape Design Can Be Fun And Rewarding

2:43 pm by webmann in backyard gardening, garden, gardening

Anyone with a backyard who wants to enjoy being out there will at one time or another think about backyard landscape design. Though there are many simple things that one can do in the lawn, there are some who want to have something stunning and relaxing for when they have the time to sit out there and enjoy their space. There are some great ideas out there, and they are just waiting to be found. It is really easy to come up with unique ideas as well. There are many ways to plan a yard, and there are as many ideas as there are yards. The point it to make if feel like home outside as well as inside the house.

One of the most expensive ways to work with backyard landscape design is to have a program designed for that purpose. I’m not sure if that is out there, but I know this is often included in programs used to help blue print new homes. Along with putting the home and with all of the details, most of this software can also aid in backyard landscape design. The best thing about it is that it can usually give an estimate of the final cost with all of the things that have been added to the design.

If this is not an option, backyard landscape design can be done just by mapping out the dimensions of the yard on a large sheet of paper and then working on what might be best or desired. It might take a little time, but cutting out small paper representations of each addition and then taping them on the paper might help a person to see where they are going with their backyard landscape design and what they might need to remove. We often think we have more or less room than we really do, so getting it to scale is important.

Many have seen spectacular backyard landscape design in magazines or on television. Though they may not be able to remember exactly how something looked, that might be for the best. Though a design might have looked good, it is always more special if the backyard landscape design a person goes with is one that is unique in at least a few different ways. Much like a home, the yard should reflect a little about the people in the house, and it should also feel like home. An exact copy of something else won’t have that cozy feeling many look for when landscaping their yards.

Comments (0)