Gardeners love hydroponic gardening because of the flexibility that it offers on whether to have your garden indoors or outdoors. If you know the correct steps of creating your own hydroponic garden, you are going to expect not just high quality vegetables, but also fruits and flowers.

In this blog post about hydroponic gardening, you are going to learn about the 3 Must Know Facts of Hydroponic Gardening.

No Soil Needed

Hydroponics is a way of gardening which does not require soil. Rather than being disadvantageous, this actually brings in a huge benefit because now, you are allowed to customize the medium for your plants according to the type of nutrients that they need.

Another nice thing about not using soil to grow a hydroponic garden is that your plants will now be free from microorganisms that live among the soil particles which can sometimes be harmful to your plants by spreading diseases or parasites.

Water + Nutrients = Effective Combination

One of the misconceptions that people have about hydroponic gardening is you just need water in order to grow plants of top quality. As the technique does not require the usage of soil, which should be the primary source of nutrients, you must mix distilled water with nutrients solution which can be bought at affordable prices.

Do take note that the nutrients solution required can be different when your hydroponic garden has a wide range of plants.

Grow Lights for Indoor Hydroponic Gardening

All gardeners should know that sunlight is extremely important for the growth of most green plants. If you are planning to have your hydroponic garden outdoors, then sunlight shouldn’t be a problem unless you want to have it under a shady place.

Hydroponic gardening offers a huge benefit for gardeners because it allows you to have your garden indoors, which is a huge plus for avid gardeners with limited outdoor space. Under such circumstances, it is advisable to get yourself a grow light which is not that expensive looking at the huge convenience that it brings for hydroponic gardeners who prefer their garden to be indoors.

Get Started with Hydroponic Gardening Today!

Hydroponic gardening is beginner friendly and one does not need to sweat the process of setting up a garden because as mentioned earlier, you can do all your gardening indoors. Also, it does not take a lot of investment to get started, all you need to purchase is a set of hydroponic toolkit which is very affordable for most gardeners.

If you are really serious about learning more on hydroponic gardening, be sure to get your hands on How-To Hydroponics by Keith Roberto as it details all the techniques, steps, tools and secrets on how to become a successful hydroponic gardener.

With that being said, if you are an organic gardening newbie, this gardening tips blog post is for you. In this gardening blog post, we are going to list the 6 organic gardening secrets that you, as a newbie must know.

Organic Gardening Secret #1 Start with Basic Materials

As a newbie, you don’t really need to spend thousands on gardening tools, supplies and materials. If you think that by spending thousands buying these so-called “magic bullets” is going to bring you a grand harvest season, you are wrong!

Start with the basics. You will need organic materials such as yard waste, kitchen scraps and leaves, rotten fruits and so on as fertilizers. If you are worrying about pest problems such as spider mites, Japanese beetles, tent caterpillars and others, affordable organic pesticides is always available.

Organic Gardening Secret #2 Finding the Right Location

There are a few things that you must remember when it comes to finding an appropriate location, just like what we have explained in our basic vegetable gardening tips, for your organic garden.

You need to make sure that your organic garden will get an adequate sunlight exposure. Also, there must be a water source nearby because it is a must to water your garden everyday. If you are planning to have plants with soft stems, make sure that the location that you choose is free from strong winds.

Organic Gardening Secret #3 Preparing the Soil

The next important thing after finding your garden a nice location will be the soil preparation process. Soil plays a huge part in your organic garden because the plants depend on nutrients that they can get from the soil.

Some of the things that you should monitor when choosing the types of soil to your for your garden are pH value, dampness, level of nutrients and level of air contained in the soil. The easiest route to take will be to purchase a bag of organic soil that can be used right away.

Organic Gardening Secret #4 Composting Your Garden

You can always purchase a bag of organic fertilizers for the compost of your organic garden but the more common way will be to use organic domestic waste such as kitchen scraps, vegetables and fruits leftovers, leaves and many more.

If you pick the latter, make sure that you have a consistent supply because they tend to have lesser nutrients as compared to a purchased organic fertilizers.

Organic Gardening Secret #5 Can You Sell Your Harvest?

A lot of organic gardeners want to sell their harvest with the hope of making some extra cash. If you are considering this, you need to know that some countries, such as the United States, legally regulate the organic food production industry.

This means that you need to obtain a license or a certification from the local authorities before you can market your harvest as organic food.

Start Your Organic Garden Today

It is very simple to manage an organic garden that will give you tons of benefits.

If you are serious about starting your own organic garden, Organic Gardening by Geoff Hamilton is a must read for all organic gardeners as well as gardeners who are just starting out with organic gardening. Get it while Amazon still offers a 30% discount for it.

In this tomato gardening blog post, we are going to give away 6 Tips to Apply Container Gardening to Tomato Gardening. We often plant our tomatoes on the ground because the plant can grow to a height of around 6 to 7 feet. Even so, it is still possible to opt for container gardening to plant your tomatoes, which allows you to have tomato plants either indoors or outdoors.

Container Gardening for Tomato Gardening Tips #1 Container Size

As mentioned above in the introduction, tomato plants are relatively big in size when they are fully matured. If you choose to apply container gardening to tomato gardening, you need to make sure that the containers that you picked are at least 12 to 14 inches in diameter.

If you fail to provide the recommended container size for your tomato plants, they will not be able to last for the whole season. Even if the plants manage to survive, you can’t expect a harvest when every tomato gardener in the country is seeing a red tomato garden.

Container Gardening for Tomato Gardening Tips #2 Proper Soil Mix

You should pick potting soil instead of garden soil to fill up your containers for tomato gardening purposes. Using potting soil helps to prevent compaction, which will slow down the growth of your tomato plants and might even kill it.

pH balance of the soil used is another important factor that you should pay particular attention on. Make sure that the soil can provide sufficient nutrients for the plants and do mix them properly before filling up the containers with them. Also, cover up the holes at the bottom of the containers using stones that are slightly larger to prevent the soil from flowing out while you water the plants later on.

Container Gardening for Tomato Gardening Tips #3 Fertilizers

Fertilizers provide the necessary nutrients that assist in the growth of your tomato plants. Tomato plants require weekly fertilizing and fertilizers of top quality must be used in order to let the plants have optimum growth.

Organic fertilizers are more preferable these days, especially when most gardeners harvest tomatoes to make food and juice. You may also want to check out some liquid-based fertilizers which will assimilate much faster into the soil, allowing the plants to absorb the nutrients more effectively.

Container Gardening for Tomato Gardening Tips #4 Watering

Tomatoes are fruits filled with juices and thus, if you want to get juicy tomatoes during the harvest season, you must make sure that you water the plants consistently everyday. When the temperature seems to be high and the soil is drying up fast, water them twice a day.

Container Gardening for Tomato Gardening Tips #5 Stakes

Stakes are optional when you plan to plant tomatoes using containers. However, if you have the stakes in place, the chances of the branches breaking up will reduce. Also, by not allowing the plants to climb high up, you are actually exposing them to ground pests such as slugs and parasites.

If you plan to place the container indoors, stakes will not be required because the plants are not exposed to rough weather conditions and the risk of having ground pests indoors is reduced.

Container Gardening for Tomato Gardening Tips #6 Pest Control Plan

Having a pest control plan for your tomato plants is just as important as the watering and fertilizing. A pest infestation can kill off the whole container of plants literally overnight if you don’t have a plan in place.

Consider stocking up your gardening warehouse with some organic pesticides that will eradicate common tomato plant pests like grubs, caterpillars, slugs, aphids and so on.

The following are some recommended pest control products to get rid of garden pests that will consider a tomato plant as their comfort bed:

Grubs: Safer Brand Grub Killer Concentrate

Caterpillars: Green Light Organic BT Worm Killer

Slugs: Monterey Sluggo Snail and Slug Control for Organic Gardening

Aphids: All Natural Insect Repellent

Start Planting Tomatoes Using Containers Today!

People tend to have the misconception that tomato plants must grow on the ground so that they can enjoy an optimum growth rate. However, if you practice the tips listed above, you can expect a basket of red and juicy tomatoes in the harvest season just like other tomato gardeners.

Get yourself some cheap gardening containers that are big enough and start to plant tomatoes today!

Most vegetable lovers or vegetable gardeners love to have or see a garden full of red and juicy tomatoes, especially if they are planted organically. In this tomato gardening blog post, we are going to show you 5 tomato gardening secrets that successful vegetable gardeners use to grow organic, red and juicy tomatoes.

Tomato Gardening Secret #1 Keeping Garden Pests Away

Garden pests is one of the few serious problems that come as a result of growing and maintaining a tomato garden. Once they get themselves into your garden and if you have no prevention measures, your ripe tomatoes or tomato plants may be gone literally overnight.

There are a few natural pest control methods that you can use in order to keep the invasion of different types of pests under control. The following are a few product recommendations that you can try using to combat garden pests that target tomato gardens.

Slugs: Slugs and snails are one of the more serious pest problems that a tomato gardener can have. Get yourself some organic slugs and snails pest control products such as Monterey Sluggo Snail & Slug Control For Organic Gardening.

Grasshopper: Grasshoppers are can feast on green leaves that grow on your tomato plants. Start deploying grasshopper baits all around your tomato garden today because a grasshopper infestation can be a real headache for you.

Hornworms: Hornworms, just like any other leaf eaters can destroy your garden overnight, especially when sunlight is so important for tomato plants to create food for themselves. Opt for an organic caterpillar killer if you spot any signs of hornworms in your garden.

Aphids: Aphids can pose a serious problem to your garden, especially when they start to breed among themselves and what they do is that they suck your plants dry, literally. One biological way to get rid of them will be deploying aphid parasites at their breeding spots. You can normally spot them on branches or under the leafs.

Tomato Gardening Secret #2 Get A Suitable Site

Tomato plants require a garden site that is exposed to at least 6 hours of sunlight a day. If this condition is met, your tomato plants will be able to grow healthily at an optimum rate.

Also, you need to make sure that you can easily water the site that you dedicate for tomato plants. Apart from the sunlight, they also require consistent watering in order for them to produce juicy tomatoes.

You may consider getting or building yourself a greenhouse as greenhouse gardening is another great way to plant tomatoes.

Tomato Gardening Secret #3 Know When to Harvest

Yes, this is very important. There are a lot of gardeners who had their planting and growing efforts wasted because they fail to harvest at the right time.

You need to harvest your tomatoes when they start to ripen. If they are left unattended, birds and other garden pests will take care of them for you, flushing all your previous gardening efforts down the drain.

Tomato Gardening Secret #4 Choose Organic Fertilizers

First of all, we can’t stress enough that the usage of chemical fertilizers is not very good as compared to using organic fertilizers for tomato gardening. One of the major proven reasons is that tomatoes that are grown organically are way more juicier and tastier.

There are a lot of organic fertilizers that are being sold in various online stores which you can check out. Do pay attention to the labels because some organic fertilizers are only meant for certain types of plants.

If your tomatoes are going to be consumed by friends or family members later on, it is even more important for you to stay away from using chemical fertilizers because the chemicals will transfer itself to human bodies when the tomatoes are being digested.

Tomato Gardening Secret #5 Let Tomato Plants Climb

Tomato plants depend on solid structures like cages, sticks or steel bars to grow vertically. A lot of new gardeners let their tomato plants grow on the ground, which is a bad choice to make. Such a move will only expose the plants to pests as well as plant diseases that are being transmitted via the ground.

Start placing cages and other types of support structure in order to help your tomato plants grow vertically today. Also, make sure that the structure is high enough as tomato plants can grow to a height of 6 to 7 feet.

Get Started with Tomato Gardening

With the tomato gardening secrets listed above, we at Garden Stuffs don’t think that tomato gardening will remain difficult for both experienced and new gardeners. All you need to do is to make sure that you have the right tools and materials such as high quality tomato seeds, mulch, soil and others.

Without further ado, let’s get your tomato garden up today!

Greenhouses provide the warmth and humidity so that plants can have optimum growth. However, gardening problems like having garden pests in the greenhouse is very likely as well because they enjoy the conditions within the greenhouse. They often sneak into the greenhouse via holes and small gaps.

7 Tips for Greenhouse Gardening Pest Control

Without further ado, let us look at what are the 7 greenhouse gardening pest control measures that you can apply or implement as soon as possible so that the comfort bed of your plants will not be destroyed by these notorious creatures.

Frequent Cleaning and Maintenance

Just like any other gardening tools, your greenhouse requires cleaning and maintenance as well. Be sure to give dirty spots some scrubbing so that fungus and bacteria will not have a chance of breeding.

Apart from that, you must also schedule for an annual greenhouse cleaning (normally in the summer). For this, you need to transfer all the plants and equipments out. Clean the walls, corners, racks, secluded spots and floor using detergent and warm water so that insects, germs and bacteria will be killed.

Blanket Scan on Plants

Sorry for over-exaggerating the process but you need to make sure that your plants are free from pests infestation before you move them into your greenhouse because once in there, pests will breed at optimum speed.

If there are any stems or leaves that are damaged, remove them from the plants. You can also place your plants in water in order to drown these creatures.

Chill Pests To Death

When you face pests infestation problems that are very serious, you may want to put your greenhouse into chilling effect during the winter so that pests, including their eggs and larvae, will be frozen to death.

Most plants can live through the “short winter” that you put up so you should not be worrying about the bad effects that this will have on your plants.

Sterilize Your Gardening Materials

Again, this is not a hypocrite move if you really want to prevent any pests that our eyes cannot spot them directly. Sterilize your gardening tools using a basic water-detergent solution.

Also, instead of using normal garden soil that might contains eggs or small pests, you should use potting soil that are purchased from nurseries as they are sterilized and full of nutrients.

Daily Inspection

While working on your garden everyday, you must also look out for the signs of pests. If you spot the normal characteristics of a plant being infested, you should immediately remove the plant from the greenhouse and treat it separately.

You may want to segment out your greenhouse so that there is a space for you to treat infested plants. Most of the time, pests will release some kind of chemical substances to attract more of their species. Thus, moving your plants out of the greenhouse may not be the choice.

Mesh Screens to Stop Flying Pests

Another greenhouse gardening pest control measure will be to install mesh screens on all air ventilation facilities, if any. However, you must not seal out every air vent of your greenhouse.

Setting up mesh screens on all air vents can prevent flying pests such as roaches, hornets, moths and whiteflies from entering your greenhouse via the air vents.

Natural Biological Control

You can always combat pests by introducing their worst natural predator into your greenhouse habitat. You can always purchase ladybugs and praying mantis egg cases from nurseries or online stores to be placed within your greenhouse.

Here comes the question. What if there is no more pests and your natural helper starts to outgrow the number of pests? Well, they will die off due to the lack of food. They don’t feast on your plants due to hunger so don’t worry about that.

Enjoy Your Greenhouse Gardening Pest Control Tips

There you go, the 7 Tips for Greenhouse Gardening Pest Control. Just like any other gardening methods such as vegetable gardening and Japanese gardening, handling gardening problems like pest infestation requires time and effort.

With this, we hope that you will enjoy greenhouse gardening more. If you are looking to learn more about greenhouse gardening beyond the tips here provided by the Garden Stuffs team, check out the greenhouse gardening books below that we personally recommend.

All the best for your gardening,

Garden Stuffs Team

In this greenhouse gardening tips article, you are going to learn about 10 Must Know Benefits of Greenhouse Gardening. Once finished, you will learn that this advanced form of gardening is actually worth the money due to the benefits.

Greenhouse Gardening - Next Level Gardening Method

As said earlier, it takes a lot of courage and motivation to build your own greenhouse. Only those who are serious about gardening or those who are passionate about gardening will pay the money to build their greenhouse.

By bringing your gardening to the next level, you will put in more efforts into gardening due to the motivation it gives you and with the advanced facility, you have little room to worry for gardening problems, which will distort your fun with gardening.

Save Up on Grocery Expenses

Tough economic conditions is pushing up the prices of groceries, which include vegetables, flowers and fruits. Greenhouse gardening will provide you and your family with consistent supply of fruits, vegetables and flowers and the best about this is that you have the control of planting what you want all year round.

Planting your own crops will significantly reduce the expenses on them. Greenhouse gardeners will normally break even the cost of building a greenhouse with the savings from planting their own crops within one year or two.

24/7/365 Consistent Gardening

With a greenhouse, you can ignore and evade almost all the season changes and weather conditions all year round. Extreme temperatures, excessive rain or long droughts will not cause any serious problems to your greenhouse gardening efforts.

Thus, the planning of your garden will no longer depend on the weather, giving you the much needed flexibility of when to go ahead with any forms of gardening.

Protection for Plants

If you plant your plants inside a greenhouse, they will be shielded from problems like rough weather (strong wind) and serious seasonal pests infestation (locust swarms, Japanese beetles, tent caterpillars, spider mites and many more).

Plants are extremely weak and the problems listed above will lead to total devastation. From this, we can understand how important the role of a greenhouse when it comes to protecting your plants.

Optimum Growing Environment for Plants

If you are into gardening for quite some time, whether it is vegetable gardening or herbs gardening, you will know that plants love warm and humid environments.

Using the greenhouse gardening method, plants will be placed under such growing environment, enhancing their growth. This is because the main purpose of a greenhouse is to secure a reasonable amount of heat and water vapors to maintain the warmth and humidity within the greenhouse.

No Season Gardening

Most gardener will face this and I doubt you escaped it. You are all excited to plant something in your garden, only to realize that the current season, due to the temperature, is not suitable for you to start planting. You will need to wait for some time. Until then, your excitement will slowly die off.

With a greenhouse, however, you will have control over the temperature of garden. You can start planting seasonal plants ahead of others or you can choose to delay your planting since you are the one in control now.

Ditch Landscaping

Landscaping is not something that can be done easily. Aspiring gardeners often give up just because they are unable come up with a proper landscape design or their design fail when it comes to the building process, either the design is not practical or the process is too labor intensive or expensive.

If you proceed with greenhouse gardening, you will have no worries about landscaping. Greenhouses of different shapes and sizes laid across your garden present a form of exhibition, which can be a great way to design your garden!

Easy Customizations

If you are a person who prefer unique stuffs, you can always build a greenhouse according to your preference. The truth is, building your own greenhouse is much easier than building a pond or a patio deck.

You can customize the size, number of doors, position of gardening tools storage, placement of plants and many more, just like organizing a botanical exhibition.

Greenhouse As All In One Gardening Place

One fuss that all gardeners will face is to figure out where to keep all the gardening tools such as electric lawn mowers, peat moss and others Some went ahead to build a garden store while others utilize the basement.

You can actually utilize your greenhouse for storage purposes as well. It will be very convenient as your gardening tools are close to you when you are going through your gardening activities.

Multipurpose Gardening Spot

A greenhouse can be seen as a gardening wonderland and you can almost plant anything that you like with it. People plants stuffs like vegetables, fruits, flowers, herbs and even cactus and bonsai using a greenhouse.

You don’t have to worry about the mix of plants as you are not planting directly onto your garden soil. Also, you can mix both indoor plants and outdoor plants without much restrictions with greenhouse gardening.

Get A Greenhouse or Not?

We have to admit that this gardening tips article is a bit bias towards greenhouse gardening as we are trying to highlight the benefits of it. Although it involves a huge initial investment, the money will be well worth it down the road.

There are some smaller greenhouses which you can get online such as from eBay or Amazon. These are much smaller compared to those glass ones. However, the effectiveness of securing warmth and humidity is about the same.

Bring your gardening to the whole new level, start greenhouse gardening today.

Garden Stuffs Team

Well, what is the dream of every tomato gardeners? All we want is to have the reddest, sweetest, and juiciest tomato in our neighborhood and be one of the earliest to taste our own sweet harvest during the tomato harvest season.

Without further talking, let us move into 10 tomato gardening tips which you can apply it immediately to your tomato garden or tomato plants. Trust me, you will see some improvements for the upcoming tomato harvest season if you apply the following tips correctly.

Space Up Seeds When Planting

Most vegetable gardeners plant tomatoes using seeds. You need to provide some space between tomato seeds when you start deploying them into the soil.

Apart from giving them space to spread their branch further in the future, doing so will decrease the amount of competition for nutrients, which might slow down the growth of your tomato plants. Another alternative for space them out will be to transplant the plants 2 weeks after they start to sprout.

Fan Your New Tomato Plants

Many have no idea about this but fanning your sprouting tomato plants will actually help them to develop their better stems.If you live in a windy area, providing a breeze for your tomato plants should not be a problem.

If you plant your tomato indoors, you can always place them in front of a fan for 5 to 10 minutes twice a day. If your area is not as windy as others, you can always try out some outdoor fans which are available at most gardening supplies store.

Expose Tomato Gardens to Sunlight

Just like what we learned about roses in gardening caring for roses, tomato plants love sunlight as well. Make sure that your tomato gardening spots can receive ample sunlight exposure.

If you plan to plant tomato indoors, which is another popular tomato gardening method, you should then get some fluorescent grow lights. Place your young tomato plants directly under these lights for 13 to 18 hours a day so that they can have the same growing effect as if they receive enough sunlight exposure.

Heat Up Soil Prior to Planting

If you want to harvest your tomatoes way before the harvesting season, one of the things that you can do is to heat your soil prior to planting your tomato plants.

No, don’t burn or cook the soil! What you can do is cover up the soil at your intended tomato plating spot with thick black plastic sheets.

Plant Them Deep

To help your tomato plants in developing a better root system, you should plant them deeper into the soil. If your tomato plant comes in a pot, you should bury them deeper into the soil by digging a deep hole.

As roots can start growing out from the stem of tomato plants and the stem will grow towards the sunlight, you shouldn’t be worrying about how the plant is going to adapt itself after you plant them deeper into the soil.

Delayed Mulching or Use Plastic Mulch

Every avid gardener should know that mulching helps in containing water and prevents plants from contracting diseases that come from the soil due to the reduced splashing of soil onto the plant.

As tomatoes love soil that are well heat up, mulching the soil prior to their planting may counter your efforts of trying to warm the soil up using black plastic sheets. Thus, you should only mulch a few weeks after your planting or opt for mulching using plastic mulch.

Bottom Leaves Removal

Once your tomato plants reach a height of about three inches, you must remove leaves that grow within one inch from the ground. Doing so will help your plants to fend off unwanted and troublesome fungus infections.

These leaves do not receive a lot of sunlight exposure and soil born funguses may be splashed onto them while you are weeding or watering the plants. To make sure that funguses stay away, you can always spray an adequate amount of compost tea on your plants as part of your tomato gardening efforts.

Frequent Watering

Just like any other gardening methods for vegetables, watering plays an important role. If you water your tomato plants inconsistently, the blossom end may start to dry off and rot.

However, when your tomato plants are nearing their harvest season, you should reduce the amount of watering so that the harvested tomatoes will be sweeter as they concentrate their sugar in the fruits. Watering too much at this stage may cause the fruits to drop way before they are ripe.

Proper Pruning

What you are aiming to prune here are the suckers that grow on the crotch joint between two branches. All they do is to consume extra energy and they are useless as they don’t normally bear fruits.

You can also slightly prune the leaves so that the layers become thinner to allow sunlight to reach the fruit. Do not take them off completely because the leaves conduct the photosynthesis process that creates food particles for your plants.

Prepare for Harvest Season

There are two types of tomato plants that you should know of for your tomato gardening efforts so that you can prepare for the harvest season.

Determinate type tomatoes start to ripe all at once and you must prepare to harvest a large amount of them at one time. As for indeterminate type tomatoes, you can set them to ripe earlier by pruning off the main stem tip of the plants.

Tomato Gardening Tips Conclusion

With that, we conclude the 10 tomato gardening tips that every tomato gardener should know. For the upcoming tomato harvest season, we hope that you can boast some red, ripe tomatoes in your garden to your neighbors.

Be sure to share the jam, ketchup and recipes that you prepare using the tomatoes that you have grown yourself with your family members, friends and colleagues.

Until your next gardening tips,

Garden Stuffs Team

Lasagna gardening is being welcomed in most household all over the world due to its flexibility. The layering method used in this type of gardening helps to provide plants with ample of nutrients and will miraculously boost the productivity of your garden.

Without further talking, let Garden Stuffs show you how to create your own lasagna garden in no time.

Lasagna Gardening Step 1: Preparing the Site

Lasagna gardening does not require a big site to get started. Simply pick a small spot in your garden. You can always outline it with strings but this is not needed as the process of setting up the layers will not take a long time.

After choosing your spot for your lasagna, cover the spot with a thick layer of newspaper or cardboard. Doing so will help in the killing of weeds or turf that are found at the spot. Watering this first layer of your lasagna garden will help to hold them in place.

Lasagna Gardening Step 2: Layering

Layering forms a major part when it comes to setting or creating your lasagna garden. After putting down the thick layer of newspaper, lay down the second layer, which conforms of water-absorbent materials, for about 2 to 3 inches. One material that is commonly used for this will be peat moss.

4 to 8 inches of organic materials come next. You need to build your layers with organic materials like grass clippings and compost as this is the layer that increases the productivity of your lasagna garden. Same as the above steps, sprinkle some water over the layer after you are done.

Continue building your layer by alternating between the layering of water-absorbent materials and organic materials as shown above until the total height of your lasagna is about 17 to 25 inches.

You must sprinkle your layers with materials like wood ash and bone meal just before you start deploying the plants. Potassium and phosphorus will be two great additions to the layers. After these additions, water the the layers until they become a damp sponge.

Lasagna Gardening Step 3: Planting

Now, with your layers done, you can start planting your seeds or plants on the garden. Make a small hole that is not too big on the layer. Place your seeds and cover it up. You must water the garden throughout the whole year to maintain its productivity.

Due to the flexibility of lasagna garden, you can plant almost everything on the layers. Herbs gardening and vegetables gardening top the list when it comes to plants that are planted using the lasagna gardening method.

Conclusion on Lasagna Gardening

Although lasagna gardens are flexible in nature, it doesn’t mean that you can leave your plants to grow alone. Watch out for gardening problems such as infestation of pests and changes to the degree of soil pH.

You be also ensure that the layers receive ample amount of water throughout the year. There is a saying among gardeners, “if you cannot maintain a small lasagna garden, gardening is not for you”. Thus, we can always say that creating a lasagna in your garden is a great way to test your passion for gardening.

Garden Stuffs Team

Japanese Beetles Possible Damage on Garden

Japanese beetles feed on most plants that are available in your garden. They rarely pick their food and both the adults and grubs are cool-blooded plant killers.

They chew on flowers and leaves but leaving out the hard part, such as the stem, branches and the skeleton of a leaf. The grubs on the other hand work underground. They feast on roots and one catastrophic destruction that they can cause will be a large brown patch on your lawn.

Ways to Kill Japanese Beetles and Japanese Beetle Control

There are a lot of ways to kill Japanese beetles and we will explain each and every one of them for you in detail. Implementing all of them at once is not necessary because different geographical location might be suitable for different methods. Usage of these methods is also subjected to personal preferences and your type of garden.

Build Up a Repellent Wall

If you have a history of certain plants that will be infested with Japanese beetles during the spring or summer, you can always set up a repellent wall around the plants. The idea of this Japanese beetle control method is to chase these beetle pests away without having to work on destroying them.

There are a few things that Japanese beetles hate or will be harmful to them. Some of them are:

Soil with High pH - Japanese beetle hates to live on soil with a pH of 7 to 9. However, you need to know the adaptability of your plants to such high pH as well prior to adjusting the pH of your soil.

Larkspur - Japanese beetle will avoid larkspur as much as possible because larkspur will be toxic to them and will cause harm to their body. Thus, you can always plant some larkspur around your crops that are subject to Japanese beetle infestation.

Herbs Scent - Using herbs to repel insects is a technique widely used in vegetable gardening. Herbs like smartweed and geraniums work wonders when it comes to Japanese beetle control.

Set Up Japanese Beetle Trap

Japanese beetle traps attract the beetles into confinement by releasing pheromones of opposite sex and fake flower scent. The users of these traps seem to be fairly satisfied with the effectiveness.

Most of these traps are priced below $10 and you can see the effect (trapped beetles) almost immediately. Japanese beetle trap is a good buy if your garden is facing the infestation of Japanese beetles or other beetles alike.

Natural Insecticide

Natural insecticides that you can use are rotenone, sabadilla and pyrethrum. Most of these are available for sale in major nurseries near your home. Please enquire your nursery for usage instructions as well.

Manual Handpicking

Japanese beetles don’t bite and they are not poisonous either. Thus, it is definitely safe to pick them using your hands as a Japanese beetle control measure.

There are still methods that you can use to kill spider mites but before that, you must understand some basic characteristics and how they manage to destroy your plants easily.

Understanding Spider Mites

People sometimes call them red spider mites because there are some other species which are of different colors. The most common one will be the red.

Spider mites got their name because just like a spider, they have 8 legs. However, since they are too tiny in size, we are unable to count the number of legs that these creatures have by using our bare eyes.

Spotting fine webs that are being left behind by these tiny little creatures will be our best bet of knowing which plant has been infested and which plant are they going to move on to next. You should be able to differentiate between a spider mite web and a common spider web because spiders are usually large in size and it will be abnormal to have a red spider.

The following photo is one great example of how a spider mite nest looks like. Underneath the web, the whole colony is sucking the sap of your plant happily and it is just a matter of time that your plant will die due to dehydration.

Your Plants and Spider Mites

These creatures can infest on almost all the plants that you can find in your garden. Thus, a proper spider mite control is a must.

Basically, they are targeting all the nutritious sap which are stored underneath the leaves and stems of a plant. With this, we can easily understand why they can cause death to literally every single plant of Earth because most plants store their water and nutrients in order to survive.

Plants that are being attacked by them will have blotchy yellow leaves and the leaves will drop after their sap has been sucked dry.

Spider Mite Control to Kill Spider Mites

Applying spider mite control to kill spider mites is easier than it seems. Their characteristic as a pest that lives in a colony close down our scope on where should we target in order to kill them off once and for all.

Natural Insecticides

Natural insecticides such as Soap-Shield, summer horticultural oil spray, rotenone and pyrethrum are some of the proven solutions to handle a spider mite colony. Simply provide the list above to any nurseries and they should be able to come up with the natural insecticides for you to kill spider mites.

Chemical Pesticides

The usage of these pesticides will be subject to your personal preferences. You will be able to see fast results and a devastating effect on the spider mite colony because of their interaction with each other.

If you own a vegetable garden, a fruit garden or an organic garden, you are highly advised not to use such pesticides for spider mite control. As spider mites suck sap out of your plants, it is very likely that they will pass on the pesticides into your plants as well. Due care should definitely be taken.

Domestic Spider Mite Control

There are some alternatives that people are using over and over again to curb the infestation of these tiny red pests but these methods cannot guarantee success and the results vary from different locations around the country.

Some of the domestic control methods are:

• Sprinkling water and soap solution onto the colony
• Spray the colony with dormant oil
• Sprinkle the colony with a flour, buttermilk and water solution

Sounds odd? Well, it works for some so it is not harmful to try these methods out.

Deploying Natural Enemies

Biological control is not something new in gardening and handling garden pests. The natural predators that you can use for spider mite control are ladybugs and and lacewings.

The problem you might face will be the availability to find these insects. Nurseries may be selling them at a high mark up because rearing these insects is tough. However, if you can get hold of them online (Amazon), they can be very successful in assisting you to kill spider mites.

Apart from the ladybugs, you can also get Feltiella acarisuga, which is a type of tiny midgets that feed on spider mites. For only $139.80, you can get your 250 units of Feltiella acarisuga shown in the picture below. Click here now to get it.