garden

The Garden Dictionary

There’s so much to learn as a beginner gardener….To that end, here is a dictionary of important terms used in gardening. It covers everything except plants!

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Possum Problem Solved!- Geodesic Dome Greenhouse Finale

This is the last in a series of articles about the issues I’ve had in my geodesic dome greenhouse and grow tunnel. Here is the previous chapter, where I tell about the possum problems. With a feeling of failure weighing heavily upon me, I left the greenhouses to fend for themselves for a few weeks.

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Possum Problems: My Geodesic Dome Greenhouse Part 4

This is the fourth part in a series of articles on my self-built geodesic dome greenhouse. If you need to catch up, here is part 3. It’s All About the Possums! As if my problems with light and powdery mildew weren’t enough, I now had pest damage to contend with. Will it ever end?! The

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Quick Guide to The QLD Fruit Fly

The Queensland fruit fly is a serious garden pest that destroys a wide variety of crops by laying its eggs inside fruit and vegetables. This results in fruit which is full of maggots and rotting, sloppy flesh…in other words, completely ruined. While they are a nuisance for the backyard gardener, the damage they cause means

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Putting Permaculture into Practice

The best place to start with permaculture is your own backyard. That might be as small as a paved courtyard or as big as a farm; either way, anyone can put permaculture into practice. Permaculture is a flexible system that caters for every type of property. It allows you to start small, and build up

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How to Fill Raised Garden Beds with Premium Soil for $Cheap

High-raised garden beds are all the rage these days- and why not?! I’ve been using them for years for their many advantages. They’re fantastic to garden in, so convenient, easy to use and to water. But they’re not the quickest to fill, and they do take a lot of material. I’m going to show you

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How to Grow a TON of Pumpkins!

Pumpkins are part of the cucurbit family of vegetables. Cucurbits are veggies like cucumbers, zucchini, button squash, watermelons and even gourds. I’ve been growing and eating a ton of pumpkins this past year- I’ve eaten them fresh, frozen them, made soup, given them away, you name it. You can do this too, by following my

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Permaculture For Beginners (part 1)

‘Permaculture’ is one of those words we often see and hear when reading about gardening. It’s like some sort of mythical desert oasis…you’ve heard about it, you know it’s a good thing, but you can’t put your finger on what it really is and what it looks like in the real world. So what is

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Issues with Powdery Mildew- My Geodesic Dome Greenhouse Part 3

This article is a follow-up to ‘Problems with Light-My Geodesic dome Greenhouse Part 2’. Although I’ve been harvesting lovely vegetables from my geodesic dome and grow tunnel daily, a new problem appeared in February, just after the wet season had started. POWDERY MILDEW!! I really want to make the dome work, as it’s such an

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5 Self-Sufficient Gardening Projects for Beginners

A guest post authored by Lauren Schwartz of www.lawn.com.au There’s more to self-sufficient gardening than ornamental plants and decorative sculptures. A productive garden is a healthy garden, and one that can lead to an excellent life goal: self-sufficiency! By growing your own food and in the process caring for nature, you can make the land

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The Dynamic Gardening Method

Gardens never stay still, do they? They’re always changing-plants grow, die, and multiply. The seasons change, and with that, the weather. You could say they are dynamic. But did you know there’s an actual thing called dynamic gardening? Yes, really! And it’s more than just having a garden that changes naturally- it’s an authentic gardening

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Do These 5 Things to Grow More Veggies All season

At the start of any growing season, people plant like crazy with the excitement of growing vegetables. The excitement can quickly die down though, when those veggies start to pitter out before the season is fully finished, leaving gaps in your garden bed & a gap of time where you could still be growing, harvesting

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3 Easy Ways to Fix Clay Soil

It’s no secret that clay soil is far from the gardeners friend. Poor drainage is a problem, and when the soil is waterlogged your plant roots become starved of oxygen. If the soil is too dry, it can be hard to dig and plant roots can’t grow through it. So how do we fix clay

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Get Back to Nature: How Gardening Can Help Those With PTSD

The benefits of spending time in the great outdoors are widely recognized. Several studies have examined the effects of nature on our mental health and well-being, proving time and time again that our feelings of anxiety, depression, and stress can be lifted just by going outside for a bit. Anecdotally, many of us understand the

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Three Positive Mental and Physical Effects of Gardening

Gardening can lead to both functional and aesthetic results, and it’s a great hobby with a relatively low barrier to entry. Whether you’re working in a large yard or small plot of dirt, you can create something beautiful and harvest the results for food. It should come as no surprise that nearly one-third of American

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Best Tool for Raised Bed Gardening

Yesterday, I received an email asking what tool I recommend for high raised bed gardens and it just so happens there is a special tool I do use all the time for my raised beds gardens and it's called an entrenching tool (or ET). I tend to always misspeak and call it an ET tool,

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Best Place to Position Your Vegetable Garden/Patch

Where you position you vegetable garden, patch, allotment, or whatever you want to call it is very important for a few reasons. Firstly, most food crops need a good amount of sunlight to produce well and grow strong – food plants need a lot of energy to produce and it's the sun that provides most

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Rotary Hoe Job Lage Area

Tiller Or Rotary Hoe What To Get And How To Use

Introduction (This article was reviewed in July 2012) Tiller the Season to be Growing Trul-a-lul-a-la blah blah blah blah… I know the title is drawing a long bow for a Christmas theme but I've never been a very orthodox person and I guess if you have been following my articles over the past 6 months you'll

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Raspberries Home Grown

Save Time, Shop At Your “backyard-grocery”

Time-poor Many of us now live in a “time-poor” society and freeing up time or not wasting it is a business in itself these days with entrepreneurs cashing in on providing services and gadgets to save us a miserable minute. And, it isn't cheap either to free-up time but don't despair, because I've found a

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Butcher birds getting out of rain overlooking vegetable garden

Wet Weather Boggy Vegetable Garden Problem Solved

It's about time I wrote something on landscaping as it is the base of all gardens for crying out loud. And, without a good landscaping plan (even if it means just using the natural landscape itself) all the best intentions won't enable a garden to reach its full potential – no matter how hard we

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