I love to make things with my hands. This section includes building, DIY, upcycling, and craft projects for your garden. It also covers using materials gleaned from the garden or the natural world at large.
Here’s the follow-up to last week’s Toasty Pot Coaster project. This windowsill warmer is easily crocheted much like coaster using double crochets and shell stitches as a decorative edge. Start by measuring the width and depth of your windowsill. Make chains until the width matches the width of your sill. Double crochet into each chain, …
Guest post by Amy Urquhart This morning on my blog I wrote about how we’re getting crowded out of our dining room by the sheer number of plants in there, so it seems only natural that the next thing I did this morning while drinking my coffee, and in my housecoat, no less, is root …
Like many apartments mine boasts poorly insulated windows and baseboard electric heating. Yep, it’s a keeper. With the weather being in the high My Ass is About to Fall Offs I’ve been scheming ingenious ways to keep the plants that are stuck enduring their fate on the cold windowsill warm and alive through these dark …
It’s really far too early to start getting supplies or thinking about tomatoes but with the weather outside being in the minus kill-me-nows I can’t help but start peaking at the Lee Valley catalog. I’ve already decided that I’m going to sacrifice a couple of my tomato plants to “research” and give red plastic mulch …
Living room gardeners needn’t be limited to corner-store variety orchids. Paphiopedilum, aka ‘slipper’ orchids (not to be confused with the cold hardy North American Lady’s Slipper) are an exotic tropical that produce a stunning, solo blossom sometime between late fall and spring. Each bloom lasts as long as 2-3 months and many varieties have dramatic, …
I was just thinking… seems like THE HOLIDAY SEASON is here, or something. I am very good at shutting out that which I would rather not see but with the powers that be pummeling us over the head with it earlier and earlier every year, it’s kinda hard to miss. Really, I don’t hate the …
While setting up my “Eggling Experience” I thought it would fall more into the spirit of the much loved but long forgotten “The Lab” section of this site if I were to make this into an Eggling versus Real Egg experiment. I made the claim in my introductory post that an Eggling could be closely …
Famous for candy-sweet cobalt blue blooms that resemble tidy clusters of pint-sized grapes, muscari is a versatile, carefree spring bloom. Pack a punch and plant bulbs in eye-catching “rivers” or clustered together in problem areas under trees and in rock gardens. This hardy bulb will even survive in the toxic soil beneath black walnut trees! …
Davin and I went on a dandelion picking mission at the community garden the other day, harvesting what we thought was enough to make the dandelion Hortopita recipe. As we picked, I repeatedly muttered that I didn’t think we had enough. I went to the garden without reviewing the recipe for amounts but I was …
Well it took a couple of weeks, but I think I have finally accepted Fall. Once the windows were closed, the houseplants brought indoors, and the knitting projects pulled out there was no turning back. Monday is Thanksgiving here in Canada. We are a non-traditional household who generally ignore most holidays, but we like Thanksgiving …
It’s mid September and sadly most of the container-grown tomato plants on my rooftop are on their last lap. A few green stragglers remain and the vines are starting to yellow and fade. Thankfully I’ve got another crop still running over at my community garden plot where the plants aren’t subjected to the intense sun …
Guest post by Renee Garner Now that the veggies are producing quite happily, I have a few weeks of down time before I start the cooler weather veggies. So my attention has turned to the birds. Birds are great to have around, they eat some grubby little insects I would rather just not deal with. …