Martinis and Marigolds - Refreshingly Quick Tips for Home and Garden
Controlling Insect Pests in Your Garden
Jul 26, 2024
As gardeners, we deal with lots of challenges in our gardens.
Unwanted insects in your garden are just that: unwanted. Unwanted insects may eat and destroy your vegetables and prized flowers, something both farmers and home gardeners have in common.
Organic gardening is a means of controlling unwanted insects naturally, without the use of dangerous pesticides.
Read on to find out how to control unwanted garden insects naturally that are also cheap, easy and good for the earth.
Getting Started with Composting
Jul 18, 2024
I love this time of year! We are so blessed with the bounty of summer fruits and vegetables. I hope that you are finding delicious ways to enjoy them!
But we are also faced with the resulting peels and pits that many times end up in our trash. According to the EPA “The estimated 35.3 million tons of wasted food that went to landfills in 2018 represents 24.1 percent of all MSW landfilled.” Somehow that just doesn’t make sense, since all of this organic waste can quickly break down and return lots of nutrients to the soil.
So what’s a home gardener to do? Composting your kitchen and garden waste is a great way to reduce the amount of waste you dispose of in the trash. By composting, you can generate a free source of nutrient-rich material to help improve your garden.
Read on to find out how to get started!
Grilling the Garden
Jul 11, 2024
With summer in full swing, the bounty of fruits and vegetables available is almost overwhelming. Grilling is an ideal way to cook not only meats, but fruits and vegetables as well.
Never done it before? Don’t worry - the good news is that grilling perfect produce is easy. Read on for a few helpful hints to make your fruit and veggie grilling a success.
Spending Too Much Time Watering?
Jul 04, 2024
In most of the US the heat of the summer is upon us. This is the time of year that we see our plants drooping under the hot summer sun and we need to spend more time watering. Hmmm or do we?
Not if you use my secret weapon. Read on to find out how to decrease the time you spend watering your flower beds, giving you more time to relax and enjoy your garden.
It's Too Hot to Plant - Now What?
Jun 27, 2024
The heat of summer is upon us in most of the US. While it might be tempting to continue planting, the next optimum time to plant perennials and shrubs is fall.
So what' a gardener to do besides maintenance chores? (And hopefully by following our tips you don't have too many of those!)
Read on for 5 of my favorite gardening-related and relaxing things to do now that the rush of Spring planting is over.
Creating a Garden Butterflies Will Love
Jun 20, 2024
When creating our low maintenance garden spaces, it’s fun to provide a habitat for garden visitors like butterflies. Butterflies can add even more beauty to already beautiful landscape. I love sitting on my deck and seeing them flutter from one plant to another along with the bees and hummingbird moths. It’s fun to see them enjoying all of the flowers that I spent so much time planting.
Butterfly gardens require several things to be successful. Read on to find out how to create a garden that butterflies will 'flock' to.
Using Bud Vases to Deliver Big Impact
Jun 13, 2024
With summer in full swing you probably have lots of blooms in your garden. There is no question that extravagant bouquets of flowers make a stunning visual statement. But there is also a special and rare beauty to be found in single blooms. Read on to find out how Paula Marolewski uses bud vases to bring the beauty of flowers to every room.
5 Tips for Relaxing Summer Entertaining.
Jun 06, 2024
If you been following our suggestions for creating a low maintenance garden, hopefully you're ready to spend some time relaxing and enjoying your hard work. As summer approaches it's also a great time to share your beautiful outdoor spaces with friends and family.
As a young housewife in the late 80's I tried really hard to make my guests feel special at parties and picnics. I would obsess for weeks about the menu, decor and how my house looked. And, of course, with Martha Stewart's rise to fame, it was easy to feel inadequate.
But as I grew older, (and realized that Martha had an entire staff to make her events look amazing), I decided it was more important to spend time with my guests than to spend time impressing them.
Read on for my tips on how I now have fun at my own parties!
Don't Forget The Foliage
May 30, 2024
As you’re planning your summer garden, don’t forget the foliage! Foliage plants are chosen for the beauty of their leaves, rather than their flowers. Some foliage plants have colorful leaves, such as coleus. Others have striking geometric patterns, like the canna lily (which also has showy flowers). Still others are selected because of their unique shape, such as cactuses or succulents.
Read on for three great ways to use foliage plants in your garden.
5 Tips to Help You Keep on Gardening
May 23, 2024
A few years ago, I had the privilege of teaching my Container Gardening Secret Sauce workshop to a group of lovely seniors at the Phoenixville Senior Center. They were a fun and engaging group. Several of the attendees approached me before the talk and shared how they had a large garden for years but now 'just couldn't do it any more.' Other folks had moved to apartments or assisted living and were attending the workshop looking for ways that they could grow a few plants indoors or on their patios.
I started The Relaxed Gardener to provide people with ways to spend less time working in their gardens and more time enjoying them. I also wanted folks to not feel like they had to completely give up gardening as they got older or perhaps did not have as much time as they had in the past. Rather, I wanted to help them find ways to pare back what they were doing so they could still enjoy gardening even if they did not have a lot of time or when some aspects just became physically impossible. (That's why all of our tools are designed to be ergonomic, comfortable and reduce hand strain.)
Read on for 5 Tips to help you keep on gardening!
Getting Started with Growing Vegetables - A Beginner’s Guide
May 16, 2024
Although I’ve been gardening for almost 40 years, I’ve never really been a vegetable gardener. I played with a few tomato plants in pots on my deck but never anything more serious than that. Maybe it’s because I spent my teenage years helping my parents in the huge vegetable garden they planted every year. I personally would have preferred to use that field to house a horse, but that’s a whole other story!
But this year, I decided to give vegetable gardening a try. It’s been a really fun journey despite the heat this summer offered and in this article I’m going to share the steps I took.
If you’ve never grown vegetables before, read on. I hope I can inspire you to give vegetable gardening a try!
3 Tips for Growing a Low Maintenance Garden
May 09, 2024
We all want to have beautiful gardens in the summer. But who wants to spend hours and hours tending plants that are high maintenance or just don't do well? Not me.
I love to garden but I also like to 'set it and forget it'. Meaning, I want to plant something and have it look great with very little maintenance. Impossible, you say? Not really.
Read on for my secrets to a low maintenance garden.
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