By Melanie Mathieson
The Gardening Guru
- Aphids: Plant onions around plants susceptible to aphid infections, especially roses.
- Attracting bees: To attract bees to your vegetable garden, plant geraniums amongst your vegetables.
- Flowering herbs such as bee balm, borage, and lavender also attract bees, plus can be used for their herbal qualities.
- Basil: Basil planted among tomatoes will enhance the flavour, as well as keep bugs at bay.
- Remember, many tomato recipes also call for basil.
- Blood meal: Also a great fertilizer and also deters small herbivore pests (i.e., squirrels, chipmunks, etc.) and deer.
- These animals hate the smell of the blood in blood meal because they are plant eaters. Some say dampened blood meal is even more effective.
- (Note: raccoons have been noted to be attracted to the smell of blood meal. A very generous sprinkling of red pepper flakes after bulb planting should deter them from digging in your bed).
- Bone meal: This is a gardener’s must. When planting any bulbs, it should be mixed in the hole with soil before placing in the bulb.
- In an established bulb garden, sprinkle on top of soil and work in lightly, in the fall before frost. Can be added to a planting hole for seedlings in the flowerbed, as well.
- It is important to follow the directions on the package carefully.
- Container planting: If planting a large container and you want to conserve soil, fill the first one-third of the pot with Styrofoam cups (broken up), small plastic pots, gravel, bark mulch, or packing Styrofoam peanuts.
- The filler will allow you to add soil on top (this lightens the load in the pot if you have to move them around a lot).
- Cutworms: In August, the cutworm moth is attracted to jars of vinegar sweetened with molasses. Set these traps throughout the garden.
- Dandelions: To keep dandelions and other weeds like quack grass from growing up between the cracks of your sidewalk or patio, sprinkle with pickling salt or vinegar.
- Both are great natural herbicides.
- Dusty Miller: Did you know that Dusty Miller flowers in its second year? To get yours to bloom, you must pot them in fall and move into the house.
- Treat as a houseplant all winter. Then in the spring after frost danger, plant outside and you soon will be rewarded with orange-yellow flowers.
- Lawn care: If the season is dry and your lawn is going brown, don’t despair. Although not pleasing to the eye, this is your lawn’s way of handling the drought.
- This is a stage of dormancy for your grass. If you had a healthy lawn to start with, your grass will return to a green state after a good rain.
- Making horseradish: Freeze horseradish roots before grating. The frozen root will be easier to grate fine and your eyes will not tear.
- Peppers: When peppers begin to blossom, spray with a solution of one tsp. Epsom salts to a litre of warm water (mix well before spraying).
- Spray solution directly on leaves. Repeat every other week for as long as there are blooms.
- Plant ties: Clean but old pantyhose make very durable plant ties when staking your plants.
- Roses: Never water roses in the evening as it promotes disease. Water in the early morning and give them a good soaking, rather than several small waterings.
- Soaking encourages deeper and stronger rooting.
- Slugs: Fill a juice container with a spout with warm water and a package of yeast. Bury in the garden with the spout at ground level and the lid on.
- Slugs crawl in but cannot come out (yeast will not be destroyed by rain and sun).
- Toads: Toads are insect eaters and keep pests at bay in your garden. Encourage toads by making some cool shady spots with plants, as well as installing a toad house or two.
- A toad house can be made easily out of an inverted clay pot with a chip out of one side to make a door.
- Place these homes amongst the shady spots in your garden and let the toads go to work.
- Watering flowers: Cold water from a hose sprayed directly on petunias and geraniums cause the flowers to turn colour or go brown.
- Make sure you water the soil only, or leave water in watering cans overnight for use the next day.
- Watering plants: Fish aquarium water makes a super nutrient tonic for watering house or garden plants.
- Watering your lawn: A lawn should never be watered by you spraying it with the hose and moving around the lawn. This makes the roots grow upwards in search of precious drops of water.
- When the weather turns dry, so does your grass and it will die.
- To maintain deep-rooting grass, you must water each section of your lawn a minimum 30 minutes with a sprinkler. The water soaks deep into the ground and the grass roots go deep in search of this water.
- If you care for your lawn in this matter, it will go into dormancy (see hint above) and will survive dry spells.
- Wood ashes: This is an economical fertilizer and at the same time keeps pests away from roses, onions, radishes, and the vegetables of the cabbage family.
- Sprinkle liberally on soil around these plants.
