Hitting the bottle
Put empty water bottles in the bottom of your large pot before adding the dirt. This allows for better drainage and makes the pot lighter if you have to move it.
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A Hiking Camping Tip
/Updated /1 Comment/in Outdoors and Garden /by Dana JCarry oranges with you on a hike or when camping. You can drink the juice, rub the peel on your skin for an insect repellant, and when the peels dry, they will burn and keep bugs away from your camp with the lovely orange smell.
But that’s not all. You can run a whole orange through a blender, strain it, and spray it where ants come in. They don’t like the smell, and the oils from the peels kill them instantly. It isn’t toxic to pets or children.
From Waste to Garden Gold
/Updated /0 Comments/in Outdoors and Garden /by clf2naI am a gardener and this is a tip I use almost daily.
When I come across kitchen scraps, such as coffee grounds, vegetable peelings, or corn husks, I keep them! I place them into a large bowl, ( or you can buy a “fancy” compost container), and set them aside.
When I have a few free minutes, I take them to my backyard and add them to my compost pile. I dig into the middle of the pile, dump the contents, and cover them up with the remaining pile. My pile is about 5 foot by 5 foot, but could be any size.
Once the scraps breakdown with the help of worms and weather, I get beautiful garden gold, as I call it. It is a healthy soil amendment that boosts my flowers’ growth and improves my garden beds. All for free!
And I get the added benefit of knowing that I am helping keep our landfills smaller. A win-win, if you ask me.
Pool Noodle Potted Plant
/Updated /0 Comments/in Outdoors and Garden /by TeamEC²I ran into a problem when I needed to move my front porch flower pots so the housesitter would have all the plants in one place. The pots were just so heavy that they were very difficult and cumbersome to move.
That got me thinking: the roots of my flowers aren’t filling this whole pot, so why should I waste all that soil, which also caused it to be heavier? I loved my pots though so I wasn’t just going to exchange them. That’s when I came up with this cheap and thrifty tip:
- Grab a pool noodle.
- With an electric knife or your own method of cutting, slice off the end of your pool noodle.
- For smaller pots, place the pool noodle ring in the base and simply add the soil back on top.
- For larger pots (will depend on the diameter of both the base of the pot and the pool noodle), cut off several rings of the pool noodle, preferably of the same size.
- Add these rings in the base of the pot next to each other to create roughly one layer.
This saves space, saves soil, and adds an air and foam layer at the bottom of your pots which will oxygenate your soil and save a lot of weight.
Now, the next time you need to move your pots for the housesitter, like me, you won’t be at risk of throwing out your back!