Great Organic Gardening Tips That Will Help You Out

 If you enjoy being outdoors, doing things with your hands, and having a real, tangible result for your work, gardening may be the perfect hobby for you. Gardening not only improves the look of your house and provides fruits and vegetables, but it also improves your own stress level. Read on for some tips silt fence!

Use mulch to add nutrients to your soil. Mulch is a much better way to amend your soil than fertilizers because it comes from natural ingredients in your garden. Commercial fertilizers may contain undesirable chemicals. In addition, mulch is free. All you need to do is compost your clippings and yard waste in a compost bin. Before long, you will have enough mulch for your entire garden.

Plant a little catnip or wheatgrass in the area surrounding the plants that your cat is devouring. You can also put something on top of the soil around the plants that has an offensive smell to cats, such as mothballs or citrus peel.

Use a sanitary laundry basket to pick your fruit and vegetable harvest. They are reusable and already have holes so you can rinse the dirt and debris off your yields. It acts like a strainer and will replace the function of wood baskets. Save money and stay green at the same time.

Tender deciduous shrubs are very fragile, so protect them. Tender, potted shrubs must be protected when the weather is cold. Try to tie the tops all together and cover them with a sheet, large piece of cloth, or blanket. This will work better than wrapping your plant with plastic, because air can still circulate, which will help to prevent rotting.

You can use natural waste items around your home to benefit your plants. For example, plants that prefer high acidic soil love a mulch mixed with coffee grounds. Cinnamon can be used as a natural fungicide for potted plants. And of course, there are the myriad benefits of a home compost pile.

Test your soil before purchasing fertilizer. Fertilizers provide essential nutrients to plants, such as phosphorus, potassium and nitrogen. However, fertilizers can be very expensive. By testing your garden soil to see which nutrients it is lacking, you can avoid spending extra money on a complex fertilizer, and instead purchase a fertilizer containing only the nutrients that your soil requires.

Make sure your plants are always evenly spaced by turning your rake or shovel handle in to a measuring stick. Simply lay a yardstick next to your shovel and copy the markings to the handle with a permanent marker. The next time you're ready to put in new plants all you'll need is your shovel.

A helpful solution for getting rid of a few slugs in your garden is to set out a container of beer. Just take a small plastic cup or container (plastic margarine bowl works great) and tuck it down into your garden beds near the area where the slugs are known to appear. Be sure the lip of the dish is level to the ground and then fill it with beer. The beer attracts the slugs into the dish where they will drown. You will have to dispose of the slugs and reset the beer "trap" every couple days, but your slugs will disappear.

As you read earlier in the article, gardening has a diverse set of benefits that make it a great hobby, from improving property value to putting delicious and healthy food on your table. If this sounds like a good way to spend your time, apply the tips from this article and start your own garden!