Gardening Archives - Our Heritage of Health

How to Start a Compost Pile for Your Garden

One of the best ways to help add nutrients back into your soil is to start a compost pile to create your own homemade fertilizer. This is simple to do, and it’s also a great way to be able to reduce waste while improving your soil at the same time.

Building your own compost pile is the cheapest way to add nutrients to your soil, but it does take time for materials in the pile to break down enough that you can use the compost in your garden. Depending on how late in the season you start creating your compost, you might not be able to use your own compost for your first planting season, but if you start building a compost pile now, you’ll have wonderful nutrient-rich compost to add to your garden for next year.

Growing Fruit in Containers

Today I’m happy to share with you a guest post from Cindy Keller of MyGardenGifts.com. Cindy will be sharing some tips for growing fruit in containers. Growing fruit in containers is something I’ve never tried before in my own garden, so I was excited to be able to learn more about some of the best tips for using containers to expand your gardening options!

The Versatility of Growing Fruits in Containers

Many gardeners have discovered the joy of growing fruit in containers. You can produce delicious crops in containers that are not only free of chemicals but are both rich in nutrients and absolutely fresh.

Most fruiting plants are also extremely decorative and are grown for the way they look. They adorn well when placed in niches in your garden such as the patio or front door entrances. As an example, apples are often grown in containers for their ornamental virtues as well as for their edible fruits while strawberries are suitable when planted in hanging baskets as well as in multi-holed terracotta pots.

10 Best Herbs for an Indoor Herb Garden

Growing an indoor herb garden is a great way to be able to enjoy having fresh herbs all year long even if you live in a climate with cold winters. Keeping herbs indoors also makes cooking with fresh herbs really convenient because you only need to step over to your windowsill to gather all the fresh herbs you need to flavor your meals.

I love being able to have fragrant green herbs growing inside even when it’s cold and snowy outside, and there’s nothing quite as good as being able to harvest some of my favorite kitchen herbs right from my windowsill.

Growing Herbs Indoors from Seeds

Today I’m happy to share with you a guest post from Darcy Brandt of medicinalherbals.net. Darcy is going to be sharing with us today some tips for growing herbs indoors from seeds. This is a topic that I was excited to learn more about because I’ve only ever planted herbs from seedlings and I’ve never tried growing herbs from seeds, and I also love the idea of being able to grow herbs inside during the times of the year when you can’t grow them outside. If you want to learn more about herbs, you can check out Darcy’s website!

Growing Herbs Indoors from Seeds

Starting from seeds can be a little tedious, but I love giving my annuals a jump on the growing season by starting them from either the seeds I collected the previous summer or from seeds I order online.

Not all herb plants do well from seeds, so read up on your herb plants before you invest in seeds, containers, dirt and the like.

How to Choose the Right Seeds for Your Garden

Before you start planting your garden, the first thing you need to decide is which type of seeds you want plant.

(Note: This post is talking specifically about seeds, but most of this information would still apply if you are planting seedlings, too.)

These are a few of the things that you’ll want to consider before deciding on which seeds to plant to make sure you choose the right seeds for your garden.

How to Keep Insects and Animals Out of Your Garden Naturally

One of the biggest problems that organic gardeners face is how to keep animals out of the garden and keep insects from destroying their plants without using any harmful chemicals.

This problem isn’t really a new one at all, though, because before the term “organic” even existed, farmers and gardeners have been facing this same dilemma for centuries.

On a recent visit to Old Sturbridge Village, my favorite living history museum, I learned about one of the old-fashioned methods that gardeners in previous centuries used to help keep animals and insects from destroying their garden.

4 Secrets for a Better Beginner Garden

A couple of years ago I wrote a post about 4 Beginner Gardening Mistakes to Avoid, so this year I wanted to write another gardening post about some of the things to do right if you want a successful beginner garden.

These are all things that I wish I had started doing the first year that I planted a garden because they would have made my life so much easier and I would have had a much better harvest than I did!

These four secrets for a better beginner garden are all really simple things, but they can dramatically improve your chances of having a successful garden your first year. Or, if you’re like me and you’ve been gardening for several years with just so-so results, they can improve your already existing garden, too.