Natural Garden Tricks - Worth Trying?

As I scour the blogosphere absorbing the overwhelming amount of information on gardening, I've come across many natural/household gardening tricks that I've been mulling over using in our garden this year.

1. Eggshells

Apparently eggshells can be used for a lot, see this post from Care2.com - pest deterrent (slugs), starting seeds, general composting, and putting in planting holes for tomatoes and peppers to provide extra calcium. I've decided to save some shells for the tomatoes/peppers, but I've also read the eggshells do not provide any immediate calcium benefit - the shells need to break down for that. But hey, why not get that started?

2. Epsom Salt

Pinterest has been blowing up with "use Epsom salt for fertilizer." I investigated a little more and I guess Epsom salt contains magnesium, which can help with yellowing leaves in tomato plants. There is a very thorough, sciencey article about Epsom salt and gardening on the National Gardening Association's site. They recommend testing your soil for magnesium contents before applying and that other minerals in your garden can hinder its absorption (calcium and potassium). I guess I should get around to that soil test....

3. Dawn

I've seen a couple different recipes for using Dawn dish soap as a natural insecticide. This post gives a good low down on how to use soap on your plants. I've seen another recipe that mixes Dawn with Listerine and Cayenne Pepper. I'm not sure what pests we are going to encounter, since I've never gardened here before. So far the only bugs I've really found outside are earwigs (eww), grubs, and centipedes (double eww).

Anyone try one of these before? Or is me spraying plants with Dawn dish soap just crazy talk?

Comments

Garden Noob's July Recap

Dear Time, Please stop moving. Thanks, Me Hello August, or what I like to call the gateway month into Christmas. The garden has been moving along. I did a major cleaning this weekend of overgrowing leaves and vines, tomato suckers, and ripped out all our broccoli and cauliflower. They had issues, let's just leave it at that. Sadly I didn't take a lot of pictures of the work I did because quite frankly, I was frantically trying to get it done before a very busy weekend. I'm glad I did as this week has been nothing but rain, so all my freshly groomed plants can soak it all in. Our first tomatoes are starting to turn red, mostly the Romas and heirloom cherry tomatoes. I find that I like these heirloom versions much better than the standard grocery store ones. Go figure. :-) Hubby also has a baby watermelon. Watermelon are notoriously hard to grow out here, so we'll see how he does, but so far, so good. Zucchini is ...

Plant Problem #2: Peppers

My peppers are looking funkified. I know it's a horrible picture, but I'm sure you can see those blackish spots. I'm not sure if they have picked up the previous plant herp, aka fungus, that the broccoli and cauliflower had. Or maybe some other kind of blight? I'm treating it with the fungicide and rolling with it. I've come to accept the fact, long before we even started this whole gardening thing, that not every plant was going to be a winner. If they don't make it, they don't make it. C'est la vie. For a dose of good news, we had our first zucchini harvest this week. I made lovely zucchini ribbons with a meat sauce for a couple lunches this week. In the background, you'll notice a zucchini accident (young one I broke while trying to trim off dead) and a pepper. Apparently, you are supposed to remove the first peppers to encourage growth. So I lopped him off and here's to hoping between that and the fungicide, the p...

Oh the Humanity or Things that Make Me Cry

Ok, I didn't cry, but I wanted to. We decided to start hardening our seedlings this weekend. Basically this means putting them outside for periods of time to get them used to wind, climate, sun, whatever - the outside. I put them on our deck's railing, since we were using our table to transplant the carrots and parsnip into pots. Side-note : We do not expect the carrots and parsnip to make it. Apparently, carrots and parsnips do not transplant well, but we started growing them before we knew that. They are very spindly with fragile roots, so this doesn't surprise me one bit. Live and learn. But I still felt bad and wanted to give them a shot at life. So they are in pots. Everyone was happy and healthy until about 5pm, when a storm tried to blow in. And when I say blow, I mean blow. Cuz this happened to my BEAUTIFUL lettuce, kale, and spinach seedlings - flop. Dead. They were my strongest, healthiest looking seedli...

Project Garden Noob - Year 6

Search This Blog