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10 Fall Tasks For Gardeners
Before snow flies or torrential rain falls, there are some chores that gardeners should tend to so that everything will be shipshape next Spring.
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How-To: House Backyard Chickens in Style
My friend Beth, who I've known since high school, recently started a blog to update her friends and family on her latest domestic adventure — raising backyard chickens. Since Beth never does anything halfway, she and her husband Craig built a chicken coop that is super cute and matches their 1922 Craftsman home.
She writes, "I paid my way through college 10 years ago raising and killing chickens and also had laying hens.
Nice and New: Gardener's Fall Finds
Vermont-based gardening company Gardener's is one of my absolute favorite resources for gardening and landscaping supplies and advice. I recently received its Fall catalog in the mail, and I was impressed with all of the great Fall-related gardening finds that are currently available through the retailer.
I'm totally coveting this Orchard Rack ($99.95).
VeggieTrader Turns Lemons Into . . . Carrots?
Home gardens are all the rage, and if you have friends who grow their own produce, you probably end up eating a lot of it too. One downside to getting down and dirty in the garden is that you often have way too much of one thing (kale, anyone?) and not enough of another. Enter VeggieTrader, a new website that wants to help gardeners swap their surplus fruits and veggies for crops that might not have come up so well.
Garden Therapy: Hearty Plants For the Black of Thumb
If you're hopeless with plants, don't resort to plastic potted palms. Try succulents instead. These low-maintenance plants seem to flourish with a lack of attention.
Among Small Businesses, Office Gardens Are Sprouting
A number of boutique companies have begun offering a vegetable garden as an added perk for their employees. A garden requires virtually no resources, yet it can bring in huge benefits for the company, such as an increase in office morale, a pronounced focus on worker health and wellness, and an edge over other competitors.
Minneapolis, MN-based branding agency Haberman invested $10,000 to set up a garden for its 30 employees.
Garden Therapy: Shake and Bake Bugs
Diatomaceous earth (aka, DE) is a naturally occurring, soft, chalklike sedimentary rock that is made from tiny, fossilized water plants and can be easily crumbled into a powder. In its powder form, DE dehydrates an insect's exoskeleton, killing them, so it makes a great nontoxic pesticide. You can disperse DE around your garden to protect your plants.
Northeastern Tomato Blight Caused by Home Gardening
A fast-spreading fungus has ravaged tomato crops across the Northeast and mid-Atlantic, wiping out this year's crop and causing the price of heirloom tomatoes to skyrocket by 20 percent. But the cause of the pandemic is something that's much more innocent than you might think.
In a recent New York Times column, renowned farm-to-table chef Dan Barber discusses the aggressive disease, known as late blight, that has wiped out 70 percent of this year's heirloom tomato crop.
Garden Therapy: Ethel Rose Glove
Just because you're getting dirty doesn't mean you can't look your best. Made of snag-resistant, two-way stretch spandex and a rubberized grip with reinforced fingertips, and available in a range of chic patterns, Ethel gloves bring fashion, function, and protection to your gardening routine. Better yet, they're machine washable!
Cool Idea: A Shoe Organizer as a Vertical Garden
Vertical gardens are a great choice for those of you who are space-conscious. But, unless you want to pony up for a Living Wall system or the like, they can be complicated and costly to build on your own. So, I was pleased to find a vertical garden made using an over-the-door shoe organizer on Instructables.
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