Serenity in the Garden

Worm tubes from National Gardening Association  Want to know a great way to  enhance biological activity in  your garden? Think of it as adding  probiotics to your soil.... Worm Tubes!  It is a fun way to use your vegetable food waste without the hassle of true composting. Worm tubes attract worms to your garden and this, in turn, creates rich, worm casting-filled composted soil for you to use.  Josh shows us how - click here And did you know that  worm compost suppresses plant diseases ? Research has shown that worm compost can successfully suppress  Pythium aphanidermatum  - a mold responsible for the dreaded 'damping off', where seedlings and young plants rot away at the base of the stem. The microbes  in the compost are key. They chemically prevent (disrupts the signalling)  the  Pythium  pathogen from accessing the plant.  This is why you should consider making worm compost with a 'worm tube' ...

We all know that herbicides can harm us and the environment, so it follows that scientists are studying natural weed control methods.   A team at Michigan State University  recently studied the effectiveness of   mulched maple and oak leaves on common dandelions in bluegrass lawns. The team tested chopped up leaves of red maple, silver maple, sugar maple and red oak and looked to see how they worked to suppress dandelions in a lawn. They found that after one and two mulch applications (at a high rate of mulching)  up to 80% and 53% reduction in dandelions was achieved, respectively. This makes sense since leaves lay naturally on a meadow and are not blown off. They block light and water and suppress weed growth.. But we, lawn owners, immediately blow off all the leaves on our lawn in our early spring 'clean up' which opens up sun to all weed seeds.  We then apply pre-emergent weed ...

 I have written about the Native Americans'   Three Sisters Garden  (corn, beans and squash ) but I neglected to tell you of the  Fourth Sister ... a very important member of this family! This is from  Hubpages :  "Fourth Sister, didn't look anything like her other sisters, although she was as tall and as slender as First Sister (corn) . That seemed fair to all, because Third Sister and Second Sister shared similar but different features. They could climb and run, while their other two sisters were forced to stand tall and proud." Mother Sun explained that each sister had her job and each had to benefit from and protect one another.  But Fourth Sister's job was most important of all -- for she was the  guardian of the North ,  planted firmly, to protect others from the robbers who soon would come. The fourth sister was the elegant sunflower. The Sisters are known to the Native Americans as th...

Farm in Upstate NY - photo Jan Johnsen I often write about creating beautiful outdoor environments to lift our spirits and enhance our wellbeing but we cannot be comfortable if the health of our planet is deteriorating. We talk about restoring balance to the earth. This starts with the soil. Once the soil is revitalized the  atmosphere and weather will correct itself.   Here is why: the sky and earth interact. In other words, droughts come from poor soils, pollution and other inharmonious activities on the ground. Fix the soil and the droughts and storms will subside.  So start with fertilizing the soil - this does not mean applying more soluble  nitrogen fertilizers loaded with anhydrous ammonia or nitrates. Doing this to plants is like feeding them amphetamines. Reliance on poisons to grow our food is one of our major problems right now.  Changing thi...