As a gardener, whether you grow fruits and vegetables or flowers – or some combination – you can’t have pests ruining your garden. Pests can eat your crop, suck the juices of the plant, stunt the growth, and even kill the plants you’ve spent time growing.

What can you do? You can go the hard line, chemical route, where you spray chemicals on your plants and pretend there are no real negative effects. But you and I both know there has to be a better way – and there is. You can have pest control for your plants that is truly organic. Whether your plants with pests are outside or indoors, organic pest control is worth using.

Bugs, Bugs, Everywhere?

If your plants are plagued with insects that want to feed off them and ruin them, you have to find an organic pest control. For your plants, chemicals are a bad idea. For one thing, remember that fruits or vegetables that might have been sprayed with chemicals must be washed thoroughly before you can eat them. And while most of us wash our fruits and vegetable anyway, is there anything better than popping a right-off-the-vine cherry tomato into your mouth as you garden? Or tasting a tangerine while you harvest a bucketful to take indoors? No more of this if you use chemicals to get rid of insect varmints.

So what can you do? First, let the good bugs get rid of the bad bugs. Got aphids on your roses, fruit trees, or vegetables? They suck up the nutrients from plants and are very destructive. Most of their natural predators have succumbed to the common usage of pesticides. Those who survive become resistant to pesticides. Adult and larvae ladybugs are known to eat 50 aphids a day. You can attract ladybugs to your garden – one way is to use a natural product that has pheromones that attract beneficial insects (including ladybugs). You can also purchase ladybugs over the internet or at some home and garden stores.

Weeds Are Pests, Too!

For weeds, many people automatically turn to the chemical weed killers. This isn’t a good idea. For one thing, just like with antibiotics, the continual use of chemicals to kill off pests can result in “superbugs” or “superweeds” that are chemical resistant.

What can be done? Try natural methods of organic pest control for your plants! One such method is to pour boiling hot water onto weeds that are growing up in the cracks of a driveway or sidewalk. This will usually kill them (a second application may be necessary).

Pesty Animals?

As for animals that are pests, protecting your plants with organic pest control services for animals is usually a matter of a barrier method. Most of us aren’t interested in killing off every animal that bothers our garden – though we might be tempted!

Instead, try using a fence or plastic protection. Individual animals can be deterred in animal specific ways, all. For example, one type of organic pest control for your plants from deer is to sprinkle human hair clippings around in the garden. They will not consider your garden a safe place if they smell human.

Birds can be tricked. Hanging pie tins in fruit trees or garden plants to catch the sunlight can work. So can hanging red Christmas balls within the tomato plants while the tomatoes are still green. The birds will try to peck the red balls. When they learn they aren’t edible, they’ll leave the later ripening fruit alone!

Our Bush Early Girl tomatoes are finally taking on some colour. We are really curious to give them a taste and I have been going out to the garden every day to see how they are coming along.

We bought them from McArthur’s Nursery the first of June and kept them in containers, bringing them in and out of the garage at night until the threat of frost was pretty much done. That’s usually after the second week of June.

We did get close a couple of nights with temps all the way down to 2 degrees Celcius.

By the time we got them planted in the garden we were already getting fresh strawberries from our raised bed strawberry patch. It’s about a foot above ground and surprised us how early it produced. But we didn’t complain, just stuffed our faces.

It’s great to be able to walk in so many different directions here in Moncton.

I don’t like walking and when I do it’s to get from point A to point B and I don’t waste any time getting there. Then I had a heart attack that wasn’t fixable and walking took on a whole new meaning.

Living is a good incentive for walking but I it was so easy to get bored out of my mind. Then I started gardening and walking took on a whole new meaning for me.

Now when I go walking I see things I didn’t see or bother to look at before. As a wokaholic my life was just one big blur and I only thought about making money, nothing else mattered.

Going from 100 mph in life to not being able to go for 5 minutes is scary and a real eye opener.

Today I go for a walk almost daily if the weather permits. I still can’t walk in the cold or if the wind is too strong.

Like I have heard so many times before and just laughed but once I lost my health and strength I realized it was time to stop and smell the roses, not just fly by them.

Leaving For A Walk

Allow me to take you on a 40 minute walk through one of our neighbourhoods here in Moncton. I like to see what has changed each time I return to the same path for walking.

I have to grab a raspberry before I go though, just a minute please.

Forgive my poor picture taking abilities, I shake a bit.

I will eventually buy an newer camera that will take out most of my shaking and will allow me to take some close up shots. This camera won’t allow me to get any closer than a foot and half or the images get blurry, so no close ups this year.

I don’t take many pictures from our street as the neighbours seem to have better things to do than tend gardens, but I don’t have to go too far before I find others who love gardening.

Just around the corner from our house is a path that crosses about 5 other streets. It sure beats walking on the main road and gives me a great starting point for any of the streets along the way.

I like the vines that grow on the fence that you can bearly see in the picture above. They look stunning in the fall when the leaves all turn shades of red.

We have planted a couple of these vines on our property fence for privacy. They have already started to cover parts of the fence and by next year at this time they should be well covered.

A little further along the path there are some trees covered by the vines and it looks so much like the lush growth you would see in the southern states where they get a lot more sun than we do.

The path makes it easy to get from one place to another so that I don’t have to walk through areas in our city that are just plain ugly to look at.

I get so inspired by what other people grow in their yards that by the time I am done my walk for the day I am revved up to do better in our yard.

I get so many ideas for our yard but need to take the time to learn all the names of the plants I see so I can grow them.

I see quite a few clamatis in so many shades and shapes and want them all on my property.

Sometimes I see a yard that is butt ugly except for one plant that while it’s flowering takes your eyes away from the rest of their unkept yard.

The blue bells were gorgeous and covered the plant that was about 4 feet high and across. Just sad that they have no time to tend to the rest of their yard.

Just after the I get off the path that runs across the streets I see a couple of really cool trees in a couple of front yards.

Tree #1 – Huge Bunches of Berries

The berries on this tree were so heavy they arced all the branches on the tree. Looked like it was going to break the branches but it was the same last year and it did fine.

Tree #2 – Just Hanging To The Ground

Haven’t learned the name of this cool looking tree but if it grows those branches any closer to the ground I am sure they will start to root.

So far I am only 10 minutes into my walk and by this point my mind already starting to clear of anything negative and I start thinking about what I cdan do for next year to improve our own yard.

It is also just one direct I take out of the 6 or 8 directions I can go when I leave my own yard.

I pass an antique shop on my way around this route and they have the most gorgeous hanging window boxes every year. I am thinking about something like this for the two windows that face the street on our house.

I am just showing one window box here but they have three windows boxes across the front of their shop that make the entire street.

They just take my breath away and they are blooming all summer long.

Two weeks ago Jenny and I walked past a yard that had short little sunflowers growing. I thought he had planted them really late this year but when I went by them the last time, well take a look for yourself.

I am sure that last year they were all taller than my 5′ 9″ body before they started to even flower but this year they are still only about 4 feet high and flowering already, pretty cool.

Next year I would like to plant an entire row in the back of our vegetable garden. I have seen this in other places it looks pretty cool.

So as you can see I have a lot of beauty to look at while on my walks that keeps me calm and thinking positive. That helps me heal faster as well. The only thing is that I think I might walk a lot slower when things are so gorgeous but we have to stop and smell the roses, and all the other great flowers we just pass by in life.

It’s really hard to miss the fact that our planet needs our help. It’s all over the news and TV and has been for the past few years but I don’t see a lot of people doing anything to help. We are…

It may not seem like much but we have started gardening and planting more plants, trees and shrubs to help scrub the air of impurities.

I watched a video this morning that I found on WayneChecker.net and thought it was needed on my site as well. Take a few minutes and check out what Sophie has to say and then start doing your part if you aren’t already.

This is our first year at composting because we thought it was going to be complicated but it wasn’t and we wasted a couple of year while still adding waste to our local landfill instead of composting it and adding it to our backyard garden as fresh soil.

We started composting in the spring and have been totally amazed at how it has broken down into dirt, and has become great top soil we would have been paying for while we were sending yard and kitchen waste to the landfill.

Forgive us Mother Nature.

If you enjoy gardening but do not have the space then container gardening may suit you. There is no denying the pure delight of having your own garden. Being able to grow all manners of greens is a fulfilling practice. However, not everybody is fortunate enough to have their own garden. Urban dwellers for example, have to compete with little space, and their busy schedules make their gardening an improbable activity.

Container gardening, as its name suggests, is merely developing vegetables and flowers in pots or containers. Plants for  pot gardening aren’t as challenging as their outdoor equivalents.  For starters, let’s think about the most famous of these container gardening varieties – the cactus. Cactuses don’t need that much water. They don’t even require an everyday prescribed amount of sunlight. They are the perfect indoor plants for individuals on the go.

Cactuses aren’t the sole types of container gardening vegetation.  In reality, numerous pot gardeners despise cactuses as being too basic to raise and preserve.  Element of gardening is the trial of nurturing healthy vegetations, in any case, cactuses require little to no care as to warrant a tough experience.

You may wish to grow some herbs as part of your container gardening design. Choosing the correct containers for your herb garden is simple. They don’t need to be large and the common plastic pots will work beautifully. You can always use small terra cotta pots or ceramic containers for a more finished look. While the kind of pot isn’t important, the drainage is. Make sure there are adequate drainage holes. Herbs don’t like to sit in water and that is the fastest way to damage or kill your plants. Placing a coffee filter in the bottom of the container prevents any soil loss through watering. Herb container gardening is easy when you use caution in watering your plants.

The best types of herbs to grow are your favorite herbs. In other words grow what you love to eat. For the first time herb container gardener there are some stand bys that the experts suggest. Rosemary, chives and oregano are good choices for a first attempt. They are relatively small in size and grow more slowly than other options. Basil, thyme, and sage fall into this category too.

If you would prefer to grow vegetables in containers, where you want to place your container garden is the first thing you have to determine. Try to choose a spot that gets roughly five hours of direct sunlight a day.

The next thing to decide is what types of vegetables you want to grow. That will indicate the sizes of the containers. Any vegetable that will grow in your area will be fine using the container vegetable gardening method. A lot of success has been found growing eggplant, squash and lettuce in containers. Other successful stories include tomatoes, beans and onions. Pole beans and cucumbers can do very well, but give them plenty of space, as they are vine like plants.

Container gardening is an excellent option for individuals who have always wanted to produce their own plants but are always limited by the limitations inflicted by their habitat and their lifestyle. It is gardening made easy.

Another option if you want an easy to maintain, attractive container garden, is to choose perennials. These plants are hardy and can stand up to the elements due to their deep root system that annuals and other plants can’t. Perennials are an excellent flower option in creating beautiful container arrangements. Pick out your favorites and create a design you can enjoy for years to come container gardening ideas.