Garden Tips, Part 2

Ever have trouble with your garden tools getting rusty or not staying quite as sharp as they were when you first purchased them? It's important to keep your tools well oiled. A simple way to do this is fill a 5 gallon bucket 3/4 full of sand. Add in a quart or two of vegetable oil and dip your tools in the oiled sand to help keep them from rusting.

Plant sunflowers among your squash plants. Not only will vine habit squash use the sunflowers as a form of growth support but the sunflowers will also attract birds that will help keep the pest population down around your plants.  

As gardeners, we all hear about using raised beds to your benefit. But did you know there are multiple ways to create raised beds? Here are a few:

Logs: Choose straight logs about a foot in diameter to create bed edges. Smaller logs can be stacked to create a deeper bed. To build a bed that is 4x8 feet, you'll need two 7 foot logs for the sides and two 4 foot logs to put on the ends. 

Concrete blocks: Place concrete blocks with open ends facing up to outline the raised bed. The openings can be filled with soil as well and used as planting pockets for herbs or flowers. Best of all, you can build a bed as big or as small as you like.

Wood planks and rebar: You can construct this raised bed with leftover lumber of almost any dimension. Just make sure the wood is untreated so as chemicals don't leech into your garden soil. Hold the planks on edge with short lengths of rebard pounded into the ground every 2 to 3 feet. To build a 4x8 bed, you'll need two 2 by 12 planks 8 feet long, two 2 by 12 planks 4 feet long and 12 pieces of rebar 24 inches long. 

Sandbags: Using the long, slender bags of sand that are sold as traction sand, outline a bed. Stack the bags about two high. Plus, when you de-construct the bed for winter, you can use the sand for multiple other things in the winter, such as weighing down the back of a light ended pick up truck. 

Did you know that vegetables such as carrots come in a plethora of colors? Many of the vegetables at the supermarket have led us to believe that all carrots are orange, all cauliflower is white and all tomatoes are red. In reality, almost all vegetables comes in a rainbow of colors and each color offers a different range of health benefits. If you cannot find multi colored varieties at your super market or your farmers market, consider ordering seeds and growing your own! 

Weed Stopping Strategies: Every time you rototill or turn over your soil, you are bringing anywhere up to 5,000 weed seeds in every square inch! Rather than tilling try using a broadfork to loosen the soil without turning the upper layers. Once a garden is prepared, most weed seeds will come up in the first 3-4 days after working the soil. Use a sharp garden hoe early on to eliminate what will become tough to pull weeds later after their roots get a holding. Also, don't underestimate the power of mulch to keep weed populations down. 

I hope some of these tips have helped you in your on going quest to learn more about gardening and to be the best gardener you can be!