Summer Gardening Tricks & Tips

This post is a nice follow-up to yesterday's post. 
I recently stumbled upon a great site for gardening and lawn care.

It's called Task Easy and they even have a blog offering tips on how to take care of your lawn and garden. Sweet!

This is great especially since we have been slowly working on our outdoor space.

Below are some great tips I copied from here. If you want to check them out, just click here.

 To prevent accumulating dirt under your fingernails while you work in the garden, draw your fingernails across a bar of soap and you’ll effectively seal the undersides of your nails so dirt can’t collect beneath them. Then, after you’ve finished in the garden, use a nailbrush to remove the soap and your nails will be sparkling clean. 

 To prevent the line on your string trimmer from jamming or breaking, treat with a spray vegetable oil before installing it in the trimmer.

 Little clay pots make great cloches for protecting young plants from sudden, overnight frosts and freezes.

 To create perfectly natural markers, write the names of plants (using a permanent marker) on the flat faces of stones of various sizes and place them at or near the base of your plants.

 Got aphids? You can control them with a strong blast of water from the hose or with insecticidal soap. But here’s another suggestion, one that’s a lot more fun; get some tape! Wrap a wide strip of tape around your hand, sticky side out, and pat the leaves of plants infested with aphids. Concentrate on the undersides of leaves, because that’s where the little buggers like to hide.

 The next time you boil or steam vegetables, don’t pour the water down the drain, use it to water potted patio plants, and you’ll be amazed at how the plants respond to the “vegetable soup.”

 Use leftover tea and coffee grounds to acidify the soil of acid-loving plants such as azaleas, rhododendrons, camellias, gardenias and even blueberries. A light sprinkling of about one-quarter of an inch applied once a month will keep the pH of the soil on the acidic side.

 Use chamomile tea to control damping-off fungus, which often attacks young seedlings quite suddenly. Just add a spot of tea to the soil around the base of seedlings once a week or use it as a foliage spray.

Some neat tips, right??

These will really come in handy as we continue our outdoor progress. :)

Do you like gardening and working outside?

Thanks for stopping by!