Inside: What happens when someone forgets to return the weed whacker? Writer and reluctant gardener Beverly Robertson explains in her guest post.

As I now gaze out my front window and enjoy the view of lilies, hostas, sedum, and other plants leaning against a white fence, I remember a time when this was only grass and weeds. A weed whacker kept things under control, but one day it disappeared. Someone borrowed it, I think, and I despaired of it returning home. The whole scene frustrated me to see this unwanted foliage grow taller.

In desperation, I dug up the ground and gradually planted a few hostas then later kept digging and planted lilies. Being the reluctant gardener that I was, I found things that almost grew by themselves, such as sedum. Someone said impatiens grew well in the shade, and because we have several large trees near the area, I planted these annuals between the shrubs surrounded by stone and the sidewalk. A ceramic frog and a few other ornaments accented the plants.

One day when my young grandchildren came to play, my grandson said to his sister, “Look, Zoey, a little garden.” Then I realized, yes, this is a pretty little garden, and I’m glad that weed whacker took so long to come home!

Are you a reluctant gardener? Tell us about it in the comments.

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Beverly Robertson is a retired elementary school instructional aide. She completed a course from the Institute of Children’s Literature and is a graduate of Delta College with an Associate Degree in literature and writing. She sings in her church choir and has presented her Bible Bride stories and other studies to her women’s group. She is married and lives in Michigan with two spoiled cats. She has finished a novella and is working on a sequel. Her latest project is publishing a book on Bible Brides that will be out soon.

Inside: Make cheap organic fertilizers from what you have around your house and yard and save money.

So maybe you’re new to gardening, and the whole prospect of “save money, grow your own food” lured you in to planting your own little plot on the good green Earth. Now those plants need to be fed, but a trip to the gardening center reveals lots of expensive ways to fertilize your garden, including the organic solutions. You scratch your head, thinking, I’m trying to save money.

What’s a gardener to do?

Enter cheap fertilizers. The kind of stuff you have around the house and your yard. Stuff you were going to throw out anyway. Let me demonstrate.

Weeds

As I hinted at in the previous post, weeds can be useful to the home garden. You can add them to your compost, provided they haven’t gone to seed. (Note: Some gardeners say that if your compost gets hot enough the seeds will be destroyed. I’d rather err on the side of caution. Besides, my compost pile doesn’t get that hot. I know. Call me unconventional.)

But my new favorite way to handle the weeds is to make a tea. Now, let me be the first to tell you it will smell bad and attract flies after a while. And when I say after a while, I mean about a week or so into the process. Interestingly for me, I kept waiting for this horrendous odor, and it ended up smelling like the milk barn used to on very hot days. So it was oddly comforting, as I miss milking cows and miss my milking partner. You’d understand if you ever worked the underside of a Holstein.

Back to the weed tea. Here is what you’ll need:

• A standard 5-gallon bucket
• Water
• Weeds
• A stick for stirring if you’re in it for the long haul

Fill the 5-gallon bucket with weeds–nettles, horsetail, chickweed, to name a few–and cover with water. Stir once a week for three to five weeks. When the fertilizer has thickened into a gooey substance, you can use it by mixing the liquid at a 1:10 ratio. Or, more simply, add some of the liquid fertilizer to water in your watering can until it looks like a weak tea.

Egg shells

I found this on Pinterest a couple of months ago. The idea comes from Tiffany McCauley’s website The Flavor of Healthy Living, and I love the story of her grandmother’s egg pitcher. Worth visiting for that alone. The long and the short of it is to simply put your egg shells in a pitcher of water whenever you make eggs—crush them down to fit more inside. This, too, will smell after a while, though for some reason mine didn’t have a strong odor. It could be because I didn’t add enough eggshells. As you use it up, she says you can keep adding water to the same shells, but when the water fails to stink, you’ll need to dump the old shells out and start over.

Kitchen scraps (aka compost)

If you are new to composting, it’s probably quicker to mention what not to include in the compost bucket—meat, dairy products, eggs (the part inside the shells, obviously). All your other food scraps are welcome in the bucket, including coffee grounds and tea bags—minus any staples on the bags. The tea bags and coffee filters go right into the mix, so you don’t have to sort those out.

I have a pile where I dump such things, but I’m also fond of another simple method. Dig a hole between plants that’s big enough to accommodate your compost from the kitchen bucket—leave a little room so that it’s buried under a layer of some of the dirt you removed. I’ve also heard this called “trench composting.” Same idea, just dig a trench and fill in with your garbage gold.

There is actually a simpler method, and that is tucking bits of scraps underneath your mulch, but I’ve not tried this. You do run the risk of pets or varmints retrieving the compost, whether digging up the hole or tearing up the mulch to get to the food.

What are the results?

Whenever I’ve used any of these homemade fertilizers, I’ve noticed the boost a week or two later, so patience is needed. I happened to use the contents of the egg fertilizer on a large planter filled with squash, and the leaves perked up and turned a darker shade of green with some noticeable growth on the plants. The weed tea worked well on my strawberry bed. Right after renovating I applied my weed tea fertilizer and, again, I noticed the darker, more vibrant green leaves and healthy growth.

Try one of these fertilizers on your little piece of the good green Earth, and be patient. You’ll reap the rewards of healthy plants and not spend an arm and a leg to do it!

How do you fertilize your garden? Tell us in the comments.

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Help! The Weeds Have Taken Over my Garden

Inside: Have the weeds taken over your garden? Here are some simple solutions for taming the jungle.

You meant to get to it. Weeding the garden, I mean. But your cousin Sally’s wedding took up one whole weekend, and Billy’s little league game used up a perfectly good Friday evening. Then you promised to bring chicken divan for the church potluck. So you pencil in Saturday for some much-needed weed pulling, and here come the rains–buckets and buckets of the stuff. When you finally do get out to the garden, you are overwhelmed, to say the least. How will you ever tame the jungle?

Well, my gardening compadre, I have a few ideas. Let me share.

Newspaper is your friend.

Newspaper is your friend, followed closely by mulch in the form of straw, grass clippings, leaves, or spent hay. You could even use the weeds (without seeds) as a mulch–though you’d have to pull them first, and I’m all about simple here.

The first thing I do is trample down the weeds by walking all over them. Then I apply a thick layer of newspaper–wetting it makes it easier to stay in place. Cover the paper with your mulch. Smothering the weeds is one of the easiest and quickest ways to get rid of them.

You could also use black plastic or some kind of landscaping material, but you’d need to pull it up in the fall. The good thing about the newspaper is that it’s biodegradable. And plentiful. Cardboard also works well.

Weed eaters, to help work through your aggression.

Call it therapy. Your weed eater at the ready, plow through a tall stand of weeds and you just feel better. But, please, use responsibly. Avoid killing your tomatoes. A plant is a terrible thing to waste!

For years I bugged Hubs for a weed eater, and he kept directing me to the tool shed where he kept this huge gas-powered monstrosity that, when he used it, gave him a backache for days. It was heavy and cumbersome, and I didn’t want any part of that. I wanted one of those simple kind I saw advertised on TV, to which he replied, “They don’t work on our kind of weeds.” So one approaching Mother’s Day I did my research and purchased a Black & Decker and haven’t looked back. While the weed eater cost a nice chunk of change, it helped tremendously in taking away the overwhelm–as well as the discouragement–from feeling like I’d never catch up on all the weeding. I’d even say it restored my joy of gardening.

The drawback for some will be having to repeat the process, but weeds will keep showing up, anyway. Or maybe I just like to work through my angst that way. You should see me wield a corn knife.

Old-fashioned weed pulling–with a plan.

I should mention here that I really don’t mind pulling weeds by hand. Really. I do this often. I’ve made my peace with weeds and tolerate them to a certain extent. I even view them as beneficial–in my compost pile and now in my homemade fertilizer weed tea. (More on the fertilizer next week.)The part I don’t like is when I’m faced with a jungle and feel like I’ll never get ahead of it. So I’ve got a method that I’m currently using in my strawberry bed. I find the most weedy place in the patch and work there for a few minutes. When I stand back and admire my work, I see progress.

But maybe that would overwhelm you. Then you could do the opposite–start with where the weeds are thinnest and quickly move from easy spot to easy spot. Either method, you’ll get there.

And if not, there’s always the weed eater!

How do you conquer your weed issues–or not? Tell us about it in the comments.

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