Vegetable Gardening - A Hobby for Everyone By Mary Amos The Rewards of Vegetable Gardening If you love to have fresh produces in the spring and summer, you should consider creating a home vegetable garden. Growing a vegetable garden is a fun and healthy hobby that anyone can excel at. While gardening, you may find that your troubles and stresses of the day simply float away. Home vegetable gardening relieves stress and allows you to be out in the sun. Vegetable gardening is proven to lower blood pressure and clear the mind. Also, the act of nurturing plants and watching them grow is rather soothing. And it can look good too! The Pros of Organic Gardening One great aspect of home vegetable gardening is that it does not require a bunch of chemicals. Therefore, home vegetable gardening allows you to have more natural, juicy, and healthier vegetables that are also better for the environment. Using a lot of chemicals on vegetables is not only unhealthy for your body, but also t...

Top 10 Organic Garden Tips By Nova Person 1. Start with a good organic soil. The soil is the heart of any garden and a healthy, organic soil means a healthy organic garden. The key element in keeping soil healthy is to provide it with as many organic matters as possible. A good soil teeming with organic matters has the right consistency and allows water, air and the roots to penetrate. It can hold moisture but can also drain excess water. Once a good organic soil is achieved, everything else about an organic gardening seems easier to take care of. 2. Compost and Mulch. These two are the best organic concoctions that you can make inexpensively and you can use to effectively improve the overall condition of your garden. Compost is not just a fertilizer but a soil conditioner as well because aside from adding nutrients to the soil, it also helps to retain moisture and achieve the crumb-like structure of the soil. Mulch is also a good soil conditioner and it efficiently reduces, if no...

Easy Step-By-Step Container Gardening - Create a Thriving Vegetable Garden the "No Sweat" Way By Leona Stephens An attractive and thriving container vegetable garden can be yours. In this container gardening guide I'll give you all the information and tips you need to get started now. It's fun, it's easy. So let's go... Step 1 - Choose Your Veggies (Note: Use this guide to grow herbs, strawberries and flowers in your container garden too.) What do you want to grow in your container veggie garden? The only rule is to choose vegetables that you actually like to eat - it's one of the benefits of being a grown-up. There are many varieties of vegetables that have been developed especially for container gardening. Look for descriptive words like "bush," "compact" or "dwarf" when buying vegetable seeds or transplants (small plants ready to put directly into the garden). It's fun to start seeds indoors yourself (or in a min...

Top 5 Advantages to Growing Herbs in Pots By Joy Harrison Growing herbs in pots is a great to way to start an herb garden. Container plants can be kept indoors for a kitchen herb garden or can be placed around your garden outside. While most herbs are easy to incorporate into an outdoor garden and can thrive even in less than ideal soil conditions, there are some distinct advantages to growing herbs in pots as well. Here are my 5 favorite things about Growing Herbs in Pots: 1. You control the growing conditions. All plants need three main things in order to grow successfully; sunlight, soil and water. Your herb garden, both indoor and out, will only flourish if it has enough sunlight; for most of the day. When you grow herb in pots, you can place them anywhere whether it's a sunny spot in your yard or a southern facing window in your house. You also control the temperature and moisture of the soil. It's easy to control the environment with indoor herbs since you don...

Top Tips for Choosing Orchid Planters By Matt C Clarke Orchid planters offer a slightly more stylish and decorative way of displaying your orchids than standard plastic pots or baskets often do. There are a huge array of planters available to you so you should have no trouble finding one to suit your orchid. They come in all shapes and sizes with a huge range of designs, colours and textures. This is my brief guide on what to look for in a suitable orchid planter. Buying a decent planter follows the same basic rules as any other orchid pot. The pot should be able to hold your orchids roots tightly but still allow good air flow and drainage when filled with a good potting media such as bark or sphagnum moss. Try not to buy a planter that is too large for your orchid, they won't appreciate the extra space. An added advantage of using planters or at least planters designed for orchids is that they are usually made of clay which is naturally slightly permeable when turned into...

Mixing Your Own Potting Soil By Sheila Sweeney The most cost effective way to have a quantity of potting soil for your use is to make it yourself. The following is information on how to do that. Soil . A more appropriate term is soil media because the material being sold as potting soil is actually soilless. Outdoor soil isn't suitable for potting plants because it can compact in the pot, causing drainage problems for the plant. It can contain weed seed, disease organisms, and insects. What the soilless media provides is support for the plant by anchoring the roots and a medium for water and food to enter the plant through the roots. There are many options for potting soil that can be purchased ready mixed. Pro-Mix is a professional potting mix which is light and fluffy and doesn't compact easily. There are also types of soil specifically formulated for orchids, cacti, African violets, and seed starting. I find it cheaper and just as effective to mix my own. Basic mix ....

Why Grow Your Own Herb Garden? By Sarah Duke If you're like a lot of people, you enjoy cooking with fresh herbs. And just like many others, you likely depend on your supermarket for your supply of fresh herbs. If so, you're almost certainly paying too much. Instead, if you decided to grow your own herb garden, you could enjoy fresh herbs whenever you like for a small percentage of the cost that they would be at the supermarket. There are a number of advantages you'll enjoy when you decide to grow your own herb garden. First of all, you'll save yourself some money. Even though the start up costs related to raising herbs might be somewhat costly, through time you'll discover that you're paying just a few cents for the same fresh herbs that would cost you several dollars at a market. The second advantage is that you can enjoy more variety in your herbs. Many supermarkets carry just a couple of varieties of each herb. Yet there are numerous varieties of basil...